No Champagne...

No Champagne...big mistake

Monday 27th of October

I “revisited” Brideshead during the weekend, 11 hours of the wonderful drama. It is so beautiful and such fantastic ornamental language but… it’s too long and totally uninteresting for about 4 hours in the middle, we all agreed that it varied too much in quality. 5 stars out of 10 possible and those stars were all for the first episodes until poor Sebastians finds solace in alcohol and recklessly destroys himself…and the biggest disappointment disappears from the whole serie, very odd indeed.
We, the girls and I had a great weekend with lovely food and drinks. Unfortunatly we didn’t have any Champagne at home which was a great dissappointment because we got awfully thirsty watching them drinking sparkling Champagne all the time.

Time Magazine included Brideshead Revisited in its list of "All-time 100 Novels." In various letters, Waugh himself refers to the novel a number of times as his "magnum opus"; however, in 1950 he wrote to Graham Greene saying "I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled." In Waugh's preface to the 1959 revised edition of Brideshead the author explains the circumstances in which the novel was written, in the six months between December 1944 and June 1945 following a minor parachute accident. He is mildly disparaging of the novel, saying;

"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful." Evelyn Waugh

Tyra