Augusted

It's August and the place feels empty. Ten thousand students have left the city: people who have children and/or regular jobs have gone away on holiday for a "well-earned" break. Those of us who are not students, parents or employees are now experiencing the peculiar side-effects of their exodus: traffic is calm; the place feels more casual; "out of office" is the default response to emails and no one calls you back.

Whether holidays are well-earned or not is a subjective judgement, although back in the days when the concept was invented - when holy days were celebrated by granting the peasants a few hours respite from their otherwise ceaseless toil in the fields - they surely were deserved. Maybe it's time for our vocabulary to move on and to reflect modern circumstances more accurately. I'm in favour of dropping the word 'holiday', on the grounds that holiness is no longer part of the equation, and adopting in its place the American 'vacation', which seems nicely to evoke just the kind of evacuation we are currently experiencing.

Those of us who remain at home can enjoy the novelty of an un-crowded city - an opportunity not to be squandered. Yet there is also a sense of having been left behind, waiting for postcards from foreign parts. As a precaution against the onset of ennui it is best to keep oneself busy: and so I have indulged in an orgy of films, books, DIY and museums.

Watching four films in one week has put me in danger of overdose but it has also been a useful exercise in critical comparison. Here's what I saw: Only God Forgives,  a big name, big budget Hollywood production with a rich, painterly quality to the photography and a squalid little plot full of nasty, selfish, violent characters; Frances Ha, a low-cost, monochrome American indie, with a wittily scripted story of credible, likeable characters of the 'everyday' kind; Beyond the Hills, a sub-titled, Romanian production sensitively depicting the bleak lives of its characters set in a suitably bleak environment; and 13 Assassins (seen on TV), a sub-titled Japanese example of the trashy, Hollywood action genre which tells the story, one more time, of the good guy prevailing against evil by means of spectacularly gratuitous carnage.

I have also engaged with two novels: Infinite Jest, a modern classic so long and so dense that I can only bear to read it for 30 minutes at a time; and Lexicon, a nonsensical story written so obviously with a view to selling the film rights to Hollywood that I can see Carey Mulligan playing the main character even as I read. I would put it to one side but I have been trapped into finishing it by the authorial device of creating a mystery which will only be revealed on the last page. And I cannot cheat.

DIY, derided by cynics (and the cack-handed) as Damage It Yourself or, as a particular friend of mine prefers, Don't Involve Yourself, is actually something I enjoy. It affords me the satisfying pleasures of skilled manual labour which, once completed, really does entitle you to that "well-earned" reward - not necessarily a holiday, but perhaps a satisfying flagon of cider with which to wash down your ploughman's lunch. And so I tackled, with relish, the laying of a floor in a small bathroom, taking special pleasure in the skill with which I executed the curved cut around the base of the W.C.

And finally, a visit to the local Jewish Museum with a friend: we were keen to see their modest but promising exhibition of the Paris School of émigré painters - Chagall, Soutine et al. We decided to go on Friday afternoon but had to change our plan. Friday afternoon, it seems, is still regarded by some as a holy day.