Can it really be so long?  Just a shade over four years ago.  We sat, amid candles, wine and cheese, on that disreputable velour sofa of mine, framed by (I can think of no better term) the squalor of my old house.  We watched Julianne, Anthony and Giancarlo in their beautiful, dark wonderful gavotte.  I cried (of course).

It's been four years since I last watched it.  Incredible.  Why did I leave it so long?  How did I leave it so long?  It was bad enough that I waited three years to see it in the first place, but to wait a further four to see it again?  Awful.

Silly thing is, it was an act of desperation.  After a day of increasing dark, I needed something to occupy the evening.  Something safe.  Two crates of borrowable choice in the lockup (including this, of course - how daft is that!), but it was closed for the day, so Tesco was my rescuer.  There on the shelf. £5.  Odd that such a thing should be "safe", but there it is, I never could explain how these things work... but of course, it's perfect. The perfect, exact-fitting, cockinthehole antidote to all that ails me tonight.

Vide cor meum still rips me to pieces, of course, but that's unlikely to change.