Monthly Archives: May 2021

WHAT IS HEDONISM?

THE SEXIEST PLACE ON EARTH WHERE YOU CAN BE WICKED FOR A WEEK

Hedo, Hedo 2, Hedo II, H2, or HII. No matter what you call it, Hedonism II is the worlds most iconic adult playground. An all-inclusive paradise where you can turn your fantasies into reality! Experience what you only read about in erotic novels and let loose!

Be as mild or as wild as you like!

People travel to Hedonism II from all corners of the world to live out their fantasies, to escape their inhibitions, to play. Life is too short. Do it now, before later becomes never.

Your Pleasure Is Our Passion!

he.don.ism

noun

the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence.

synonyms: self-indulgence, pleasure-seeking, self-gratification the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life.

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HEDONISM II - Updated 2021 Prices & Resort (All-Inclusive ...

Every evening you will be invited to discover a sensual themed adventure, a seductive twist on reality, provocative, playful and an opportunity to experience the forbidden. Leave inhibitions behind you, let loose and live out your fantasies. Themes range from JAMAICA NIGHTA Jamaica themed party, BARE AS YOU DARE GLOW POOL PARTY all things glowing, blinking and flashing, FETISH NIGHT LEATHER & LINGERIE dress in leather & lingerie, TOGA & FOAM PARTY sexy togas followed by an 11pm foam party, ROCK STAR rock star fantasy attire, SEXY SPORTS NIGHT whatever sport that turns you on and of course HEDONISTIC SCHOOL GIRL wear your sexy short plaid skirts. Themes can change often so check the website for current themes so you can pack accordingly.

Hedonism II chefs and bartenders create a delectable array of dining and premium beverage options from Asian, to Italian to an American-style Chop House. Enjoy the Beach Grills (clothing and non), Flame which is outdoor and casual, the Dining Terrace used mostly for buffet breakfast and lunch, Pastafari dinner Italian food with a Jamaican flair, Harrysan where youll find Japanese Hibachi and finally on Fridays participate in food around the pool with the Grand Gala Extravaganza.

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Hedonism II @ Negril, Jamaica - Kelly and Greg

(Credit thebirthdayparty.com)

As the brilliance of the sixties and seventies finally began to wane into synth saturated sedation, The Birthday Party came slithering out of the Australian outback in a benevolent maelstrom of adrenalised chaos. They were as perfunctory an incendiary attack on the mainstream as a Molotov cocktail hurled at the riot police. Amid this melee was Mick Harvey desperately trying to finagle the unruly band of cultural outlaws into some sort of order.

Managing The Birthday Party? Mick Harvey humorously muses, What is it they say about training cats?Nick Caves first vehicle to stardom was a vehicle that was always headed towards a beautiful, flaming wreckage. Mick Harvey was the multi-instrumentalist tasked with harnessing the force of that head-slide without resulting in a write-off while also crafting the sound of the band. A truly impossible task that proved to be just that.

The Birthday Party was pretty out of control a lot of the time, but I kind of embraced a lot of those aspects. I kind of realised that was what made it exciting if you had the right kind of mix of particular things. That humble embracing in of itself is a herculean feat by Harvey. As many will agree, being around drunk people when youre sober is a rare circle of hell. Being in close quarters with a smorgasbord of hedonistic madmen high on a variety of substances while sober takes this to another level entirely, especially when you yourself are reliant upon them for success in one form or another.

As Mick Harvey states, The Birthday Party were simply too niche to establish enough of a following in Australia in that era to support a living, thus they moved to London in 1980, where they were greeted as junkie pariahs that only The Fall and The Pop Group were bold enough to mingle with. We were very isolated in London, Nick Cave tellsZDF, We were friends with The Fall, and we were friends with The Pop Group, and these were great English bands and particularly at that time they were the saviours of the music scene because there was so much shit that was happening at that time. Terrible, boring kind of stuff. And Mark Smiths lyric writing was just incredible, so they had a huge impact, but we werent involved in a scene we just knew them.

This musical isolation was a result of the bands penchant for heroin. Australias involvement in the Vietnam War and proximity to Asia meant the drug was more common back in Melbourne, but in London, it had a marginalising effect. People stayed away from us, Nick Cave explains, Record companies stayed away from us [] Plus we had these really violent shows. This cocktail of mainstream defiling characteristic crystalised the ethos of the band. They sported marginalisation as an emboldened stance. Naturally, this moseying up to madness only made things worse for Harvey.

In terms of managing the band that was an issue, Harvey told QMusic, It meant that I had to not really go there. If I wanted to go a party I had to take a step back from doing that, I suppose not even consciously. It just wouldve happened.

The impending car crash finally loomed on the horizon for the band when a fateful poster was produced declaring The Birthday Party: The most violent band in the world. Now, they were holding the Molotov cocktail against the mainstream and then couldnt let go of it. The result was an explosion of violence at their gigs, which a sober Harvey had to try to wrestle a lid on. Gigs were besieged by thugs and neo-Nazi who took the poster at face value and the profound artistry of The Birthday Party was sullied beneath a slew of stompings and riots. As Nick Cave said of the time, We had started to reject the initial in your face aggressive concept of The Birthday Party because we just had all these people coming along who were just there to fight. The bands visceral edge had turned in on themselves and despite Harveys best efforts to cool the tensions, they were hoisted by their own petard.

It was around this time that Mick Harvey jokes that he had to join the hedonism, however modestly, just as an escape from the hellfire of the imploding band. I didnt really start drinking until a bit later, Harvey joked regarding the initial debauched decadence that the band were known for, Probably because I was depressed from having put up with all that stuff. I was stone-cold sober through a lot of The Birthday, he concludes with a haunted look on his face, So, it was interesting observing a lot of that stuff, for sure.

While the horrors that Harvey faced as the sober head of a staggering assegai into unknown territory in every which way must have had some perturbing effects, it did not stop his passion for creating music. This ceaseless passion that shone through the dark end of The Birthday Party was essential in illuminating the crooked path ahead in the transition towards The Bad Seeds in the fallout of the mutiny. As Nick Cave explained, Mick Harvey rang me one day and said, I think The Birthday Party should split up and that was it for me as far as music went. I went back to Melbourne. Then I met Mick again and he said, well dont you think we should start another band? So, he was very important in keeping that aspect of things alive.

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Heroin, Hedonism and Mick Harvey: Managing The Birthday Party, the most violent band in the world - Far Out Magazine

Michael Scott | May 11, 2021

COLUMN

The point of racingentertainment and hedonism asidemust be to seek and find continual improvement, to further the development of motorcycle engineering.

To put it another way, to go faster.

An ambition that has, over the years, continued to be achieved, sometimes in leaps and bounds, sometimes with patient progress. But always forward. Mechanical, electronic and financial dumb downs notwithstanding, lap times continue to drop and top speeds to rise. For example, Zarcos and Ducatis record 225.2 mph set in March at Losail is likely to tumble in a couple of weeks at Mugello.

But when does it become too much?

The question is not entirely frivolous. Racing in 2021 has raised concerns in several diverse areas.

The first disquiet came in the opening rounds in Losail, with record-close top-15 in MotoGP (just over 8.9 seconds), and at least one lucky escape from high-speed disaster, when Jack Miller and Joan Mir twice clashed at speed. This peril was heavily underlined by Moto3s pack of 20 or more crawling over one another, after a rear-end collision at close to top speed. Rodrigos brake protector snapped off, but, mercifully, it narrowly did its job. Had he looped over the handlebars at the front of the jostle, the consequences would have been life-threatening for a number of teenagers yet to reach voting age.

There was more at the last round at Jerez.

One aspect was headlined by Marc Marquez barreling into the air-fence at turn seven. This is an unusual place for a crash. Last year, over two weekends of racing, there was just one fall recorded there. This year, there were five in a single weekend, and all were violent. One of them, in Moto2 warm-up, sent Viettis bike right over the air-fence.

They revealed a hitherto ignorable fact. The barrier may be air-fenced, but it is a lot too close for comfort, and this is a result of the faster speeds.

Jerez joined the calendar in 1987, and winner Wayne Gardners Honda NSR500s lap record was at 84.9 mph. In 2021 his son Remy set Moto2 pole at 98.2 mph. And that in just the intermediate class. In MotoGP, Vinaless new record was 102.4 mph. The bikes are going more than 20 percent faster. The run-off areas are the same.

Then Quartararorobbed of a dominant win by arm-pump. This was hardly a one-off. Most striking is just how common this complaint has become. Just this year, after the first races, Jack Miller and Jorge Martin had the opa slash of the enclosing fascia membrane. Scarred forearms from corrective surgery are everywhere in the paddocksomething of a badge of honor, or at least evidence of having passed an uncomfortable initiation ceremony.

Arm pump is a temporary problem: overworked muscles swell up within the enclosing fascia membrane, causing pain and enfeeblement, which subside after less than 30 minutes rest. It can be prevented by simple surgery cutting a lengthways slit in the fascia, though (as in Quartararos case) this can heal, requiring a repeat. Carpal tunnel syndrome, afflicting the tendons, is rather harder to deal with.

Both were once a rarity. The growing prevalence is easily explained. Tires that grip harder and brakes squeeze better (currently offering some 2G of deceleration). This imposes great strain on arm muscles which, with todays sophisticated advanced riding techniques, combine precise throttle use at the same time as heavy braking and steering effort.

These problems are all more or less solvable. Well, not so much the close racing. Social distancing is never going to catch on there.

But speeds can be reduced and tire grip cut. Its all a matter of regulation. Maximum permissible power outputs, and a control tire manufacturer sourced from the local budget tire shop, with a maximum allowable coefficient of friction.

Easier still, with wet racing slower and thus safer, permanent irrigation systems to be installed on all tracks. Be something of an extra expense in the desert of Doha, but then the Qataris have never minded spending money. Love doing so, actually.

Then theres always the possibility of adding chicanes. If not speed humps as well.

But this is getting silly. Even sillier than the spectacle of the MotoGP Stewards Panel trying to stop Moto3 riders from maneuvering for slipstreaming in qualifying. (Talk about herding cats.)

Better to accept the progress and exult in it. And to live with the frisson of fear that accompanies one on the sofa, watching a tooth-and-nail race.

Because in the end, using the body count as the ultimate criterion, racing is much safer now than back in the old days, when it was a whole lot slower, but you could count on at least a handful of riders not making it through the year. CN

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In The Paddock Column - Cycle News

Bill Maher scoffs at Republican claims the 2020 election was stolen, but he himself is leveling claims the Republicans are actually the thieves ... because he says they've stolen all the fun from Democrats.

The 'Real Time' maestro made it clear -- he's pissed off the drugs and sex that used to be associated with the Dems have somehow been co-opted by Trump's party. Matt Gaetz is someone who particularly sticks in Maher's craw. Frankly, Bill seems enraged.

But, as usual, Bill had a deeper point that goes beyond hedonism. He groused, "Once upon the time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go.

But, he says, the tables have turned ... "Well, now that's us. We're the fun-suckers now. We suck the fun out of everything: Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, Twitter, comedy. It's like woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist."

Then he called for party introspection ... "If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they'd be down a lot of heroes. No FDR, JFK, RFK, LBJ, Clinton, Martin Luther King. Democrats are now the party that can't tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken."

He zeroed in on former U.S. Rep. Katie Hill, who had a bright career but resigned when it came out she was in a throuple and someone leaked nude photos of her holding a bong. Bill says Dems couldn't handle it ... "That was too much for our puritanical Democratic Party."

His show is always great, but Friday night's was especially good, so watch if you can. Again, the best political show on TV.

Link:

Bill Maher Says the GOP Has Stolen Sex, Drugs and Partying from Democrats - TMZ

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Warren Buffett made headlines recently by declaring he is seeing substantial inflation. When Buffett talks about inflation, folks take note. All the more so because his modifier for inflationsubstantialdiffers sharply from Fed Chairman Jerome Powells preferred term, transitory. A war of adjectives has opened up between two of the most influential observers of economic and financial affairs.

So, who is right?

Probably neither of them.

Say what?

Lets begin with Buffett. When providing evidence for substantial inflation, he ticked off, among others, prices for lumber and special purpose acquisition companies. Yet he did not take note of broader measures of docile consumer prices and wages. Inflation is defined, at least by economists, as a broad-based increase in prices and wages. When some prices suddenly jump, that is not inflation. It is a shift in relative prices. Or, in the case of SPACs, it is the mania of crowds doing foolish things with their money.

The fact that Buffett is cherry-picking price changes, confusing relative prices for the price level, does not mean, however, that he will ultimately be wrong about inflation. He may just be early, shouting from the Nebraska rooftops about the impending storm based on the evidence of a few raindrops.

Yet Buffetts haste or selective use of facts do not make Powell correct. After decades of wrong inflation forecasts (typically overestimating future inflation), faith in the prognostication powers of economists and central bankers alike is deservedly low.

Still, Powell is right about one thing. Surging demand as spending-starved U.S. consumers flock back to their national pastime of hedonism, powered by fiscal and monetary largesse, will push many prices higher. Shortages in supply as product and labor markets struggle to meet the avalanche of spending will contribute to price and wage pressures, as evidenced in Fridays U.S. employment report by a large increase in average hourly earnings.

But Powell is making a big bet that those price and wage gains will moderate. The economics profession has largely lost the plot when it comes to understanding inflation. A quarter-century of next-to-no response in Japan to tsunamis of fiscal and monetary easing reinforce a consensus, to which Powell apparently belongs, that inflation is a beast that once tamed cannot be revived.

Yet the consensus of central bankers and economists should not lull us into complacency. Or have we so quickly forgotten the question posed by Queen Elizabeth II at the London School of Economics in 2009: Why did no one predict the great financial crisis? And all along, that howler was right under the Feds nose.

If there is one thing economists agree on regarding inflation, it is that expectations matter. Recently, long-term expected inflation, as measured by inflation-linked bonds, has risen quite significantly. Today, 5-year or 10-year ahead expected inflation rates are above their prepandemic peaks, in some instances at their highest readings in a decade.

If ordinary Americans, and residents of other countries, begin to feel that prices and wages are apt to rise at a faster clip, in part because, like Buffett, they see it happening in their everyday lives, they may begin to change their behavior. Consumers may not balk at sticker shock, workers might muster the courage to ask the boss for a raise or change jobs for better pay. And, before any of usPowell includedknows it, inflation becomes normal again.

Warren Buffett confuses changes in relative prices for inflation. Chairman Powell suffers from the hubris of central bankers and economists. It is easy to chide Buffett, but well be grateful if he is wrong. On the other hand, if Powell is wrong, not just the Queen will wonder whether he was blinded by hubris.

Larry Hatheway and Alex Friedman are the co-founders of Jackson Hole Economics, which originally published this commentary. They are the former chief economist and chief investment officer, respectively, of UBS.

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Warren Buffett and Jay Powell Are Both Wrong About Inflation - Barron's

IN THE early months of 2020 in certain newspapers there was a brief hyperbolic vogue predicting a decade of rampant prosperity and economic success by comparing the coming 2020s with the so-called Roaring Twenties of the last century.

This American-focused view of history was shot down by commentators who pointed out that for the UK, the 1920s was not an economic success. The US boomed with the Jazz Age and mass production of consumer goods, but the UK endured recession and stagnation across the decade, including the general strike of 1926.

But what if we move the focus from the economic to the social sphere? For some British people, particularly the wealthy, the early 1920s really was a time of freedom and fun which had never been seen before.

The Bright Young Things were a well-documented group of London socialites who typified this movement, and although few reached the heights of sybaritic hedonism they reputedly enjoyed, there was a new social liberation and mobility that permeated many parts of society.

This was partly a reaction against the horrors and privations of war; but also against another disaster that has become more significant to us today: the Spanish Flu.

The flu pandemic, often described as one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history, killed four times more people than the First World War itself. In pre-NHS Britain the response was uncoordinated and in many cases ineffective. Like Covid-19, all of society was affected. Social restrictions were imposed, as today. Many schools, theatres and cinemas were closed, shaking hands and kissing was discouraged, regular fumigation and disinfection took place. Just as Britain was celebrating the Armistice, this new threat on the home front had a huge effect on the lives of everyone.

The flu burnt itself out by late 1919 coincidentally 100 years before the first cases of Covid-19 arrived on our shores. But the social effects were long-lasting, with young people particularly reacting enthusiastically to the lifting of influenza restrictions as much as, if not more than, the end of the war.

So to today. In the last fortnight, like many others, Ive visited the mainland to see friends and relatives, Ive dined, with delight, at a restaurant outside and Ive supped a proper pint of draught ale at a pub. Around me, the towns and beaches are coming to life as we at first cautiously, then vigorously, and above all joyfully re-engage with the Isle of Wight. Like our ancestors in the 1920s we are rejoicing in the new freedoms which have been so hard won.

And we do, after all, live on a pleasure isle. Our heritage is to entertain and delight tourists, and we are good at it. With foreign travel still an unlikely luxury or ill-advised risk, post-pandemic Britain needs the Isle of Wight like never before, and were stepping up to the mark. I predict that this season, and quite a few to follow, will be for us Island folk our true Roaring Twenties.

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Post-Covid freedom: will we welcome back the spirit of the Roaring Twenties? - Isle of Wight County Press

A meditation on divine grace, a hymn to the splendours of the recent past this is how Evelyn Waugh described his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. The grace is more earthbound, the splendours more ravishing in Granada Televisions celebrated adaptation, which turns 40 this year. In the autumn of 1981, a gilt stratum of English life in the 1920s and 30s sauntered across British screens, its principals aching with desire and nostalgia. There is the melancholic narrator, Charles Ryder, quickly seduced and slowly disillusioned by aristocratic luxury and ease. His friend and seeming lover, Sebastian Flyte, who is ruined (or is it exalted?) by nostalgia, booze and God. Their louche, stuttering Oxford contemporary, Anthony Blanche, an exotic intimate of Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev and Marcel Proust. Sebastians sister, Julia, for whom the mature Charles eventually leaves his wife. Julias separated parents, Lord and Lady Marchmain: haunted, unhappy personifications, respectively, of pleasure and piety.

Filmed in Oxford, Venice and Castle Howard, Yorkshire, the eleven episodes of Brideshead Revisited were received in 1981 as a high point of heritage television. Also, to some, as a hymn to privilege, snobbery, repression, even union-busting Charles and pals volunteer to help put down the general strike of 1926 that perfectly suited the early years of acquisitive, prole-scorning Thatcherism. This equivalence has never quite made sense: Margaret Thatchers Conservative revolution of the 1980s was built on an ideology of petty-bourgeois advancement (and monetarist reality), not on worship of aristocratic lineage, let alone interwar aestheticism. Still, there was a certain rhyme, if only in their floppy hair and cravats, between the male stars of Brideshead Revisited and the Thatcherite young fogeys being celebrated or despised in the British press in 1981. Early the following year, the show aired in the US, and PBS hired the smoothly sinister conservative William F. Buckley to introduce each episode.

Brideshead Revisited, 1981. Courtesy: ITV / Rex Features

I was a 12-year-old child in Dublin when Brideshead Revisited was first shown on British television, and I knew nothing about its provenance or its politics. In fact, I didnt even watch the show in the autumn of 1981, though I knew it existed. Perhaps I had seen the spare, elegant advertisement that Granada placed in the Sunday newspapers on 11 October, without a single image of its cast but, instead, a sober illustration of Castle Howard and a quotation from Waugh: My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. Or maybe, at a time when, in Dublin, we had just two Irish and two British television channels to choose from, Brideshead Revisited was the subject of next-morning drollery at my new high school: Ive a distinct memory of a boy in my class announcing with a sneer: Charles is gay with Sebastian! This did not seem like the sort of thing my pious parents would allow me to see, and maybe they chose not to watch it themselves because they were unsure how much of the novels obvious, if euphemized, gay romance had been kept in, or made more explicit.

Brideshead Revisited was broadcast again two years later on Channel 4 then a new and adventurous addition to the sparsely populated but fertile landscape of British television. This time, I was eager to see the show; though I hadnt read the novel, it was already connected in my early-teen mind with my growing canon of modern dandyism: from George Sanderss interpretation of Lord Henry Wotton in the 1945 film adaptation of Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to David Bowie and the New Romantic poseurs of 1980s British pop. In our one-television household, on Sunday evenings, I watched Brideshead Revisited with my parents and my two younger brothers. All I remembered of it but vividly for years was the poised, febrile world of the first episode, which is almost all Sebastian and Charles at Oxford and in love. Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons, etiolated beauties, outlined against a backdrop of vast advantage and antique grandeur, attended by the lurid modernism of Blanche, who was played with a rouged, salacious Weimar-era gusto by Nickolas Grace.

There were occasional reminders of the series in the years following. Sometime in the mid- or late 1980s, my father bought Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), an autobiography by Harold Acton, an Oxford fop who lurks (among other originals) behind the exaggerated character of Blanche. I read bits of Actons book, which, like Brideshead Revisited, was a strange artefact for a lower-middle-class Irish teenager to have been distracted by, if not exactly obsessed. But I doubt I was alone in having Brideshead Revisited at the back of my mind, especially as the prospect of university approached aristocracy as a protective fantasy against academic and social anxiety. The cultural politics of this fantasy are complex, and only partly expressed in the phrase West Brit, then a common Irish slur against those with anglophile tendencies. My efforts to act the West Brit were, in any case, crudely embarrassing. In October 1988, I turned up on the Brutalist suburban campus of University College Dublin, to study English Literature, dressed in tweed and corduroy, as if, so I feebly imagined, for a weekend at some country estate, c.1925. More likely, I resembled a virginal clerk at mid-century, or looked simply like my own father.

Evelyn Waugh, 1931. Photograph: Getty Images and Hulton Archive

I cant pretend that Brideshead Revisited was culturally central for me or my friends in our late teens and early 20s. Intellectually, artistically, I was in thrall to French and American avant-gardes that Waugh, at least late in life, would have dismissed as gibberish (a word he pronounced in the old style, with a hard g). But, at some point during my degree, I got around to reading the novel, and there was even a period when a friend and I would privately mock any dull scene or person by rolling our eyes and reciting a phrase from Blanche: Le fatigue du nord! Later, as a grad student at the more venerable Trinity College Dublin, I met actually posh people, bright young things at their own estimation, who viewed the likes of me with much the same contempt, but expressed without irony.

As I write, Im halfway through what must be my seventh or eighth viewing of the series. When I first came back to it, about 15 years ago, I was dismayed by how little is really about the halcyon days of Charles and Sebastian at Oxford and how much is about the importunate demands of Catholicism: on Sebastian, on Julia, on Charles the atheist, and the apostate Marchmain. Then I recalled that this is what put me off the novel the first time round: its descent into scolding piety. So, I tried watching again a few years later, and started to notice both the comedy and the sadness. John Gielgud in a luscious comic turn as Charless delicately tormenting father, and Laurence Olivier as the Byronic runaway, Lord Marchmain. (Olivier, who spends much of his onscreen time dying, realized too late that Gielgud had the better role.) Endearing details drew me in certain joyous bits of business by Gielgud, or just how bad Irons is sometimes at acting fey but I also began to discern a long, slow disquisition on lost youth and lost time, on the heaviness and the lightness of middle age.

Some of this is inflated in the novel: Waugh himself dithered, in a later edition, over retaining a wracked monologue in which Julia torments herself about living in sin. (In the television series, the scene is a sort of test: can we believe that this woman in her 30s, brilliantly played by Diana Quick, is still ruled by nursery visions of sin and redemption?) Equally overstated, perhaps, is the strictured persona of Lady Marchmain, who kills with icy charm the idyll Charles and Sebastian have made. Even Waugh seems to have thought her a monster and, when I first read the novel, I could only agree. In the television series, her devout conceit is all intact, but Claire Bloom, who plays the part, also radiates intolerable grief: husband fled, brothers killed in the war, children turned against her and against the only consolation she knows, the Church. At 51 (the age Bloom was when she played Lady Marchmain), Im more firmly an atheist than I was at the end of my teens, but now I think Blooms baffled composure might be the most moving performance in Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead Revisited, 1981. Courtesy: ITV / Rex Features

The most outrageous is Graces rendition of Blanche, who is also the most self-evidently gay character so obvious, in fact, that his task seems to be to cast Sebastian and Charles as somehow gay and not-gay at the same time. The novel is both blatant and coy about their relationship; Charles describes his enchantment by Sebastians epicene beauty, and mentions their naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins. At a nightclub, they are taken for a pair of fairies but, beside Blanche, with his penchant for policemen and aptitude for enraging the sporty set at Oxford, Charles and Sebastian are distinctly, if elegantly, closeted. In the television series, their love consists largely in a kind of meaningful languor: Irons and Andrews stretched out, a little drunk, under dappling foliage, or filmed together in dreamy profile against a wall in Venice like a couple of male models, in pale flannel and linen.

Languor is an essential word in the novel; it is, says Charles, the one quality of youth that does not last. It is common now to talk about the slowness of serious television in the 1970s or 80s as coming to us from another age of attention spans and narrative expectations. But, even in 1981, some viewers found the rapt, lingering pace of Brideshead Revisited a touch too stately. Its partly a matter of visual style: long static shots of delicious interiors, the camera lurking at leisure around hushed and painful dinners, waiting in closeup for a childish pout from Andrews or a scandalizing stare from Grace. These all have their pleasures, or longueurs: both of which are more pronounced, for sure, on the seventh or eighth viewing. But there is also a slightly numbing structural solemnity the sense, over eleven episodes, that a short novel whose Proustian themes are quite compacted or crystallized has become, instead, an indolent universe of desire, memory and regret that you could drift around in forever.

As Clive James pointed out in the Observer on 1 November 1981, the texture of the show was also to do with language. Brideshead Revisited repurposed large tracts of Waughs dialogue and narration: the last added as a perfectly pitched voice-over by Irons, who, already in his early 30s, had the vocal nuance for the weariness and rue of Charless middle age. The screenplay was credited to the writer-lawyer John Mortimer he even wrote a puff piece for The New York Times in 1982 about his approach to adapting Waugh but, in fact, his script was never used by the directors, Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Instead, producer Derek Granger and associate producer Martin Thompson laboured nightly, during production, revising almost every scene in the novel. They toned down or excised a lot of snobbery, prejudice and outright racism. Charless wartime adjutant, Hooper, is no longer quite the portrait of grasping bourgeois vulgarity; Lady Marchmain no longer frets that Julias fianc, Rex, may have Black blood. Most of the anti-Semitic aspersions are gone too, along with Charless horror of Americans.

Brideshead Revisited, 1981. Courtesy: ITV / Rex Features

What remains? The aspect of Brideshead Revisited that fascinates me now, once Ive got past the adolescent utopia of the first episode, is how much time and attention is given to those long monologues: Julia by the fountain at night, hysterical over her sins; Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, mind speeding back in time to medieval forebears; Marchmains mistress, Cara, talking regretfully of Sebastians bouts of nostalgia and drinking. And Blanche, diagnosing in the whole set, including Charles, a cosseting addiction to simple, creamy English charm. Except perhaps for Blanche, each speaker, framed in closeup, is in his or her own fashion trapped by the past. But they see what Charles cannot: that there is no escaping the past, with its illusions, demands and repetitions.

My theme is memory Brideshead Revisited owes a lot to Proust. Waugh is clear about the debt, even if also a little contemptuous: its the odious Oxford don Mr. Samgrass, enlisted by Lady Marchmain to keep a watchful eye on Sebastian, who spends an afternoon with the incomparable Charlus. Brideshead Revisited is a short novel, however, stretched in the television series to become something else: a museum of images and memories charming, sentimental and tragic. The series is frequently spoken of as a comforting, reactionary view of a class and country long gone. Maybe, but its also this: a beautifully lit prison in which the summer of youth is always drawing to a close, nobody can look directly at the present, everything is drenched with the horror of wars ended and to come, and charm (which is another word for fear) has ruined everything. Bless you, Charles. There arent many evenings left to us.

Hope, fear, resignation, regret how very middle aged, how very mundane. What happened to grace, whether divine or bodily, inherent or bestowed? It is there, of course, in the hedonism of early episodes and the holiness of the last. But its shadowed by the life in between. So that I wonder now if Brideshead Revisited the series first, and then the novel was always a lesson for me, frustrating and revealing, in how riven and contradictory a work of art could be. I had to read against its grain, turn a story of aristocratic interwar English life into a model for escaping ordinary Irish expectations in the 1980s. Ignore the Catholicism to learn about aestheticism, bundle away Waughs bigotries Modern art is all bosh, isnt it? to focus on Blanche reciting T.S. Eliots 1922 poem The Waste Land through a megaphone at a crowd of homophobic Oxford louts.

Brideshead Revisited, 1981. Courtesy: ITV / Rex Features

I live in London now, have spent half my life in England, was long ago disabused of any lingering notions about an aristocracy of wealth, heritage or taste. You will sometimes hear the more outlandishly retro members of the current Conservative government described as plausible, or merely aspirant, figures from Brideshead Revisited. Two Prime Ministers of the last three have been former members of the Bullingdon Club, the boisterous and scornful Oxford dining society that is the scourge of Blanche, and to which (in the television series) Sebastian seems to belong. But, instead of sorrowed aesthetes, its the minor scolds and boors of Brideshead Revisited who seem reborn among contemporary Tories: the toady Samgrass, Charless stuffy cousin Jasper, the eager dimwit Mulcaster. Turn back to the 1981 series, or discover it for the first time, and you find instead a world of blazing innocence and exhausted experience, wracked with violent nostalgia, touched by kitsch. And populated by characters whose grace, or lack of it, is beside the point but whose longing, for the future, for the past, for the present, is everything.

Main image: Castle Howard, Yorkshire. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

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Forty Years of ITV's 'Brideshead Revisited' Charming, Sentimental and Tragic - frieze.com