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.
7 comments:
HOPE ! You mean there really is hope ? As I read this post ( very eloquent) I can here Matt Munroe's Impossible Dream urging me on to the sort of pinnacle of achievement you have reached with your laying low of Fred. Congratulations, your mother was quite right, by the way.
It was an absolute pleasure to meet yourself and Fred during your pub crawl. Cheers!
Yes, yes, yes. Laugh while you still can. 'Mr Combo Comes To Town', available on cd and audio-cassette at all good bookshops now. An object lesson in cross-capital boozing. Now hurry up and turn off all those bright lights, I still haven't recovered.
As a feeble attempt to reduce my intake of spirits, I am forcing myself to finish off a seven year old bottle of Cherry Brandy, covered in dust at the back of a shelf at the Country Residence. She will have bought it to make some exotic pudding in another life and only needed a desertspoon full.
Sounds like an entertaining way to spend a Tuesday morning.
Now you can see why I declined a place on Combo's Tour. The last thing I needed was to wake up at three o'clock in the morning in a Wardour Street gutter half wearing a polka dot frock. Again.
We are one nation. A secret nation. A secret Combo nation.
Snarf.
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