Tomorrow

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. I'm much more inclined to celebrate this than any of the religious stuff. The only trouble is that midnight is well past my bedtime, so I usually fall asleep by the time the new year comes round. What I'd really like is if the new year could start at 9pm instead of at midnight, and then I could be sure of seeing it in.
A miscellaneous thought; yesterday I had a look at the Walford book about the vicinity of Fleet Street in London. There was a section on Doctors Commons, which was a sort of court of justice. I was shocked to read that it was still trying cases of apostasy (a propos Christianity) in the middle of the nineteenth century. I hadn't realized that apostasy was still a crime in this country as recently as that. Then I remembered that an interminable and rambling Doctors Commons case is one of the main themes of Dickens' Bleak House. The court case becomes so expensive that the plaintiff's entire inheritance is spent on the cost of the court fees.