My mother, quite wisely, drilled it into me from an early age that Life is a Vale of Tears. Life is all about loss; the loss of innocence, lost dreams, lost opportunities and lost loved ones. Our time here is played out against a gloomy, shabby backdrop of disappointment, adversity, misfortune, humiliation, misadventure and regret, occasionally punctuated by an uplifting moment, a glimpse of the sunlit uplands, a fleeting moment when your heart lifts and, albeit briefly, there is a certain purpose to all this nonsense.
I had one of those life-enhancing moments this week after a visit to London. Wednesday involved a meandering, compass-free pub crawl from Clerkenwell to Hammersmith that lasted some twelve hours and involved the consumption of an amount of alcohol that would have had Harriet Harman tutting loudly, shaking her head, and trotting out all sorts of NuLabour bollocks. I was lucky enough to be accompanied for the duration of the trip by Fred Fibonacci who provided me with my glimpse of higher things. He told me on the telephone that on the next day he had his worst hangover in 30 years.
