Wodehouse on Wodehouse: Tough love.

[Hanging in the hammock between a Sunday shift at the retail job and hours of copywriting that needed to happen before Monday am. Don’t let my gaze fool you. In: Silence + Noise knit sweater, again + Eloise scalloped shorts + Miu Miu platforms + Vanessa Mooney choker.]

From The Inimitable Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse, on Jeeves’ first morning with his new employer, the butler whips up a vile little concoction to kick Bertie’s hangover out the door:

“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. “It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they find it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

I won’t go on about how hard work’s been on me lately. Mostly because it’s my own fault. But sometimes, when it’s feeling a little too good to feel sorry for yourself. a little tough love does the trick.

I was pulling myself together on a Saturday morning (or was it Sunday morning? I can’t remember; I worked all weekend) to go to my once-relevant part-time retail gig, texting my mother about all the “real job” demands I really needed the weekend to accomplish. Life was taking a dump on me, it’s true. Buried in her response were the words:

“Stop being a victim.”

It is the brevity that gives it its color. The raw impatience makes it nutritious. The swift kick in the ass gives it its bite. Whiners have told me they find it extremely invigorating after a late evening at the Pity Party.

-C. C. Wodehouse