These things always make me wish I'd been born an upper-class avant-garde artist in the 1920s. I suppose the closest I shall ever come to that was the year after I graduated university, when I and a friend paid a nominal rent to live in her late grandparents' sprawling, slightly ramshackle house (her family needed the place occupied while they decided what to do with it), which had been built in the 1920s by a British architect who never really resigned to the Canadian climate. In winter we used the sun porch as a walk-in refrigerator. There was a WC separate from the bathroom. Computers could only be plugged in the east wing of the place, where the wiring was modern enough to accommodate three-pronged plugs. There were a lot of books, including a textbooks by Havelock Ellis; a book "about" Joyce's Ulysses which contained lengthy extracts and had evidently been published so people living in countries where the original was banned could at least read parts of it; and an account by some people who called themselves the Three Hours for Lunch Club of their experiences renovating a 19th-century theatre in Hoboken and staging Victorian shows for the ironic enjoyment of Jazz-age audiences.