Drudgemanship

This morning, while bumbling through notes for an article I've got to complete in a couple of weeks time, I found myself thinking 'Ho hum. Suppose I'll have to go and watch School for Scoundrels again, then.' Then I froze, having realised I'd just passed one of the tests commonly used in institutions to identify insanity.

I don't really hate the prospect of watching Terry-Thomas and co again. That's not physically possible. But that moment of madness made me wonder about the problems of making a vocation out of a hobby. The upsides are many and obvious: you get paid for having fun, you can justify spending that essential little bit more on stuff you'd otherwise have a hard time rationalising, and friends and family start to lay off the shouts of 'you're wasting your time!' A bit.

But there can be a downside, which is that you're in danger of exhausting the subject, exhausting your own patience and generally boring yourself rigid with the whole thing. As Patrick Moore used to say about the sun collapsing, 'Don't worry, that's not likely to happen for a good few billion years yet.' But occasionally you do start to wonder...