Sweet treats and trashy reality TV: Why guilty pleasures are so important
Stop beating yourself up - we all need guilty pleasures in life, and these are my mine, Phil Brown says.
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This year the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville had a program strand entitled Guilty Pleasures. It featured musicians indulging themselves. I loved that idea. I was thinking about my own guilty pleasures the other day when I was indulging in one. Or a couple actually.
I was on my way home from work and I stopped to get some milk but I also bought a custard tart at the bakery. I know I shouldn’t have but I just couldn’t help myself.
That was guilty pleasure number one that day.
It was followed by another. When I got home, by myself, just me … and the dog … I lay down on the bed munching on my custard tart and watched an episode of Seinfeld.
It was bliss. A pretty simple and harmless guilty pleasure, I think you’ll agree, one of those little moments of escapism.
Like that time in Fawlty Towers when Basil Fawlty, trying to dodge work and his dragon of a wife, makes some toast and hides in the office behind the front desk to eat it and listen to some classical music. Of course Sybil doesn’t let that guilty pleasure last very long. But whenever I watch that episode I can relate to it. Basil’s guilty pleasure is as simple as mine, I think.
Mind you I have a few.
Another of my guilty pleasures, one that I share with my wife, is watching the Below Deck series on Foxtel. It’s gratuitous escapism, a reality TV program set on luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, and it’s not edifying at all but we can’t help ourselves. It’s often the last thing we watch at night before we turn the telly off to read our books.
One of my guilty pleasures when we were first married and living at New Farm was that, on a Friday night, we would get a B-grade video (yes from the video store!), order a pizza, scoff that and then I would eat a huge dish of Homer Hudson ice cream.
I’m not silly enough to do that now because I’m watching my cholesterol levels but, hell, I used to enjoy that!
And I probably shouldn’t eat custard tarts but sometimes I can’t help myself. I feel guilty but it’s a pleasure. A guilty pleasure. You have them too, right?
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Anyway, on the “not doing something ever again” front, do you know what I’m never doing again? Reading letters from Alison, obviously, but apart from that? Housework. No, that’s not it either.