It was somewhere about 4pm when the weariness and the ennui washed
over me in a great grey dreary wave that nearly had me retreating off to my bed. As bank holiday weekends go it hadn’t been a
bad one up until that point. No one had
forced me to attend a rock festival, the garden was looking presentable enough
for me to justifiably neglect it for another week and a major European war hadn’t
broken out.
The best way to see London is from riding on the top deck of
a bus and, as there was little point in getting to Holland Park before 10am on
Saturday morning and every point in
setting off out early, before the cheap-ticket buying families filled up the
trains, I caught the No.10 from outside St Pancras and relaxed as it bore me across
Bloomsbury, along Oxford Street and Park Lane, through Knightsbridge and on
into the easy affluence of W14.
Leighton House, former home of the artist Lord Leighton RA
and now a National Trust property, is well worth a fiver and an hour or so of
your time, most of all for the Arab Hall, festooned in the plundered tiles of
Syria and Mesopotamia. The rest of the
house is interesting enough, as an exhibit of late-Victorian taste, a theme
which was sustained as I detoured off from my walk back through The Park towards
the West End to admire once more the unashamed garishness of the Albert
Memorial. The sun had emerged from
behind the clouds by this point and was beating down so fiercely by the time
that I got to Hyde Park Corner that I boarded a bus again rather than face the
slight but steady slope all the way back up Piccadilly and Shaftsbury Avenue to the cinema.
Take This Waltz, by
the Canadian director Sarah Polley, is hard to categorise. Perhaps it’s an anti rom-com, being about infidelity
and dissatisfaction and with an (implied) unhappy ending. It is almost very good. There are some wonderful scenes of the intimacy
of the marriage between Michelle Williams and Seth Rogan and of the burgeoning attraction
between Williams and neighbour Luke Kirby but these are let down by some unsatisfactorily
slip-shod plotting.
I had intended to meet up with an old pal but he was
otherwise occupied with an outbreak of, literal, madness in the family and it
seemed as though I may as well head off back home when I bumped into a friend
of a friend outside the British Museum and we adjourned to a nearby hostelry
where one pint turned to two, then three, then four…
All the same, I got myself into a reasonable gear on the
Sunday morning, read the newspaper over coffee, went around the shops, had a
light lunch, came home and baked a lemon cake and did sufficient housework to
make the place vaguely presentable in advance of my visitors.
Absinthe has got something of a bad reputation, not least
for tasting like a particularly unpleasant medicine. “This is the real stuff, with wormwood in it,”
said A, as he gleefully burned a mixture of spirit and sugar in a spoon. It looked like the preparation of Crack to me
and I did voice a mild objection that maybe it was a little early in the
evening to be getting quite so hard-core.
In retrospect he was right and I was wrong. I wouldn’t have cared to have anyone trying
to go through that performance of flame and spoon later on, after all the brandy
and vodka and beer and limoncello of this ‘Gentleman’s evening’: bits of the
house would have quite likely caught fire and I wouldn’t have cared for that at
all.
It was a fine night of conversation and intoxication, of tall
tales and a setting of the world to rights through to the wee small hours of
the morning and me kicking the Dorian-Grey-portrait-in-the-attic (i.e. haggard)
D’s feet and telling him to “Wake up and fuck off. I want to go bed.”
The next morning wasn’t half as bad as it might have been. I was hardly full of beans but I didn’t feel
as dreadful as I righteously ought to have done. It was only when a sudden rain shower sent me
scurrying back inside from the presentable enough garden, where I’d breakfasted
on strong tea and muffins in my dressing gown, that I realised that this was
because I was still mildly pissed. This
is a state of affairs that I usually try to avoid getting into when I have to
go to work the next day: last night’s still-active alcohol can, I think, act as
a terrible truth serum and there are very few workplaces that thrive upon the expression
of unvarnished truth, least of all mine.
As it was, a wet Bank Holiday Monday allowed the re-entry procedure back
to sobriety to take its own unforced course and it was just a matter of trying
to cushion the landing as much as possible, through showering and snacks and
small but somehow pleasing chores easily broken down into chunks such as
washing up and drying and putting the bins out and the one (absolutely singular
and wholly medicinal) beer to ease the pain.
Kingsley Amis memorably described the early stages of the hangover
in Lucky Jim:
‘Dixon was alive
again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not
for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary,
forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a
broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him
harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it
once, never to move his eye-balls again. A dusty thudding in his head
made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a
latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been
expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.’
Amis also philosophised, in his collected On Drinking, on the Metaphysical Hangover
and on hangover reading and listening:
‘I suggest Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. Its picture of life in a
Russian labour camp will tell you that there are plenty of people who have a
bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who
put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity’.
As I happened, I turned to a recent purchase: Roger Lewis’s splendidly
curmudgeonly What Am I Still Doing Here
and chuckled my way through the day, and even through the 4pm crisis of faith, with
this to the accompaniment of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, recordings that it are simply impossible to
be unhappy to. Curmudgeoning apart,
Lewis’s manifesto, Now here’s what I call poetry, from when he stood as candidate for Professor of Poetry at Oxford,
is featured in the book, though he erred seriously in omitting Armstrong.
Dr Lewis is also the author of biographies of Peter Sellers
(1000 pages of what a completely maniacal shit he was), the immortal Charles
Hawtrey, and Anthony Burgess. I gave up
on the Sellers half way though, confounded by the unrelenting shitty-ness of
the man, but the Burgess biography (again, a madman) is a laugh-a-minute
favourite that I’ve returned to again and again, each time an utter joy.
And so the long day waned…
