study." There was no urgent reason for putting on my boots. I was not going
out, and my slippers were much more comfortable. But something had to be
done. I wanted a subject for an article. Now if you are accustomed to
writing articles for a living, you will know that sometimes the difficulty
is not writing the article, but choosing a subject. It is not that subjects
are few: it is that they are so many. It is not poverty you suffer from,
but an embarrassment of riches. You are like Buridan's ass. That wretched
creature starved between two bundles of hay, because he could not make up
his mind which bundle to turn to first. And in that he was not unlike many
human beings. There was an eighteenth-century statesman, for example, who
used to find it so difficult to make a choice that he would stand at his
door looking up the street and down the street, and finally go inside
again, because he couldn't decide whether to go up or down. He would stay
indoors all the morning considering whether he should ride out or walk out,
and he would spend all the afternoon regretting that he had done neither
one nor the other.

I have always had a great deal of sympathy with that personage, for I share
his temperamental indecision. I hate making up my mind. If I go into a shop
to choose a pair of trousers my infirmity of purpose grows with every new
sample that is shown me, and finally I choose the wrong thing in a fit of
desperation. If the question is a place for a holiday, all the artifices of
my family cannot extract from me a decided preference for any place in
particular. Bournemouth? Certainly. How jolly that walk along the sands by
Poole Harbour to Studland and over the hills to Swanage. But think of the
Lake District ... and North Wales ... and Devon ... and Cornwall ... and
... I do not so much make decisions as drift into them or fall into them. I
am what you might call an Eleventh Hour Man. I take a header just as the
clock is about to strike for the last time.