The Hangover

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…

Anthony Powell - excerpts from A Writer's Notebook

For sixty years, Anthony Powell kept a working notebook, a collection of quotations, phrases, observations and ideas for book titles that he thought worth preserving and that he wanted to record and on occasion return to.  It has been a bedside book of mine for a while and what follows is a selection of particular favourites:

Assignations in the London Library.

She wrote in a large untidy hand, like that of a vicious child.

They discuss mineral waters as people do wine.

There was an elderly man who looked as if he might have held a commission in the Romanian Army Service Corps.

A is having an affair with B’s wife, and tries to teach her habits of punctuality, so that B too shall profit in some way from the situation.

He likes flogging dead horses and live women.

A man explaining yachts to a tart.

A young man has a romantic night with his mistress, but in the morning a workman arrives at a very early hour.

A hunchback being sick.

Some women seem to imagine that one has nothing better to do than to sit up all night listening to anecdotes about their first husband.

I envy you your height, you could wear very loud checks.

‘Shall I sing “Frankie and Johnny”?’  ‘No, anything but that.’

The snobbery of loving fat women.

He was killed playing croquet.

He was with a woman who looked old enough, but by no means ugly enough, to be his mother.

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.

Gore Vidal

I was sad to hear that Gore Vidal had died.  Although his declining years were marred by increasingly crackpot pronouncements on 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and the rest, I always retained an affection for the Great American Iconoclast.

It must have been the late lamented South Bank Show that brought him to my attention, sometime in the early 80s, and I was enthralled by this elegantly waspish, seemingly effortlessly learned man who had known everybody.  A friend and I once joked that Vidal was actually the Comte de St Germain. 

 

While bracketing him with that post-war literary flowering of Mailer et al, most of the obits I’ve read seem to conclude that his legacy lies in his essays.  It’s difficult to argue with this, as my much thumbed copy of United States testifies.  His memoir Palimpsest will endure too, I think, as an artefact of the American Century but there are at least three novels that I have paid the compliment of repeated re-reading.

 Julian is probably his best.  Quite apart from the intriguing what-if scenario of a Roman emperor endeavouring to turn back the clock and rescue the classical world from the self-righteous death-cult of Christianity, the first-person narrative approach of letters and extracts from Julian’s memoirs obscures the second-rate characterisation and prose that are all too evident in other novels. 

Burr is often unjustly overlooked, I think, if only for its jaundiced view of the American Revolution and the curiosity of the early years of the unsteady Republic under the Virginian Junta.  I had the novel very much in mind this spring, as I paused en-route to the Staten Island Ferry and took a moment to find Hamilton’s memorial in Trinity Churchyard.

Lincoln succeeds after a fashion, in as far as it humanises, and humourises, the great man but there is a good deal of deadly-dull padding on the home life of the Chase family and the secessionist intriguers fail to be much more than puppets. That said, anyone trying to get a sense of the Civil War could do a lot worse than to read this alongside Doris Kearns’ Team of Rivals and Shelby Foote’s epic trilogy, which I have only recently (finally) got around to.

As for the rest, I never felt tempted by any of his more whimsical entertainments, I put Creation down half-finished and the other one or two Narratives of Empire novels that I picked up left so little impression that I never stirred myself to complete the series.  But he will be missed and Presidential elections will never be quite the same again.

Spare Change

I knew a Californian once, one who had settled in England, who I fell to discussing drinking habits with.  In addition to his incredulity that the products of Messrs Gallo should be treated as fine-wines rather than the brown-bag juice that they really were, it was clear that by his San Fran lights pretty much everyone in Britain was, at the very least, a borderline alcoholic whereas I maintained that the bulk of them were pure and simple Drinkers and that there was a difference.

Similarly, I have been pondering the difference between a bibliophile and a biblioholic.  It comes down, I think, to the number of ‘units’ in the To-Read pile.  While a Bibliophile might have the occasional binge, the average size of their To-Read pile remains at a sensible and decent level. Say a dozen books or so.   A biblioholic, on the other hand, is a compulsive purchaser and has an ever growing To-Read tower, one that they will never, can never, get to the foundation of.

I prefer to count myself among the former.  Very occasionally I do actually get to the bottom of the pile and there are times when I really don’t have anything new and unread in the house.  Admittedly this doesn’t happen that often but the fact that it does and that I can consider myself a maintaining ‘phile is in large part due to avoiding impulse purchasing on Amazon.

It is far far too easy to get caught up in a flurry of enthusiasm after reading a review, or whatever, to begin clicking away and thus stir drones-unknown in some far-flung warehouse to picking and packing and despatching.  Indulge in these high-jinks as often as twice a week and, boy, that pile is going to grow.  So, unless there is a rare and genuinely compelling reason as to why a book must be bought right now, I tend to restrict myself to the vicarious thrills of adding items to my wish-lists, which do grow to inordinate length, and just have two or three binges, benders, or sprees of bulk buying per year. 

Which isn’t to say that I don’t buy books between times – I certainly do – but I don’t tend to buy them by the barrow load.  It’s like this:

I don’t tend, when I prepare to go out on a morning, to bother with too much small change about my person and at the end of the day, when I get back home, I generally dispose of what shrapnel I have accumulated into a couple of pots: one for 1,2,5p pieces and another for 10and 20ps.  When the former builds up to sufficient bulk I usually give it over to a local hospice, thus salving my charitable conscience.  The latter, on the other hand is my binge-fodder. 

 

Getting from pot to letter-box used to involve bagging the coins up into £10 worth of 20ps and £5 worth of 10ps, lugging them off down to the bank and handing them over the counter to the cashier who would dutifully weight them and credit my account accordingly.  Over the least tow or three years, however, I have experienced an increasing degree of resistance from the cashiers themselves and the general-factotum staff loitering about in the bank’s lobby to performing this service.  Rather, they have been very insistent that I should take myself off over to a machine that you tip the coins into and which weighs them and credits them and provides a receipt without any need for all that nasty inefficient human  intervention business.

At a mechanical level this all sounds sensible enough, especially if it offers an escape from ten minutes tedium in a queue.  In practice, I find that it takes the machine two or three times as long to do the work as it would a human cashier since said machine will only process so many coins at once and obliges you to navigate back down through four levels of the menu hierarchy for each batch.  It’s a minor irritation that the machine also has something of a penchant for always rejecting a handful of perfectly sound coins, seemingly at random.  The major issue, of course, is that I cant actually rely upon the machine being in ready and working order when I get there so I still have to bag the flaming coins up in case the cashier, reluctantly admits that I have no alternative but to take them to the counter.

This might all sound like the grumblings of a grumpy old early middle-aged man but there is a moral aspect too.  ATMs apart, I do have a prejudice against self-service in banks and, more specially, supermarkets.  Firstly, because the burden of the labour is shifted to me without any benefit that I can see apart from fractional time-saving.  Secondly, because I don’t feel that it is much of a great leap forward to further the profits of the banks’ and supermarkets’ share-holders by doing away with what are effectively entry-level jobs done, in the main, by women.

I should confess that this prejudice is reinforced in supermarkets by the fact that, on the evidence of the few occasions that I have allowed myself to be cajoled or bullied down the self-service route, the machines have a personal animosity towards me and my shopping that ends up with me getting red-faced, sweaty and cross and humiliatingly seeking assistance.

 

But, though I do still resolutely queue in Tesco or Sainsbury for the remaining manned check-outs, I have all but given up in the bank.  The last straw was when I refused to allow the cashier to usher me off – on the basis that she could do the work faster – and she, very reluctantly and as slowly as possible, got the scales out and weighed the coins and then tried to keep me at the counter by trying to bully me – I use the b-word deliberately – to take the time to compare my current insurance products with those that the bank was keen to offer.  I felt rather less committed to job-retentention after that encounter and now, invariably and dutifully, head straight for the machine, though I do feel dirty and diminished for giving in to corporate diktat.

Anyway, I got up bright and early a few weekends ago, did the bagging up (just in case), hauled the whole load off down the hill into town and to the bank, where the machine took three goes to process £74.20 (80p being humorously rejected) and after a visit to the barber and a stop for a coffee, came back home and got busy frivoling*, the last fruits of which have dropped through my letterbox today and built my To-Read pile back high.

*Frivoling (verb)- to spend money frivolously.

The Eastcastle Street Job

I caught a staged production of The Ladykillers a few months ago¹.  It wasn’t at all bad, diverging enough from slavish adherence to the screenplay to be interesting and taking sufficient advantage of the relaxation in public morals since the 1950s to be wickedly funny.

Whether this line made it onto the stage or not I can’t recall but aficionados of the film will recall that there is a scene in which the villains try to intimidate the indestructible Mrs Wilberforce by threatening to implicate her as an underworld mastermind:  “I’ll tell ’em she planned the big one, the  Eastcastle Street job.” (Referencing a real 1952 robbery of a Post Office van which resulted in a haul of £287,000.)

Sunday, and I headed off into the West End to the early showing of Your Sister’s Sister, a smart, funny, indie chamber-piece and emerged at about 2pm blinking into broad daylight².  I walked up through Soho to Ramillies Street, popped into the newly relocated Photographers’ Gallery for a browse about an exhibition of Japanese photo-books³, before cutting across the crowded pavements of Oxford Street  and heading off along the parallel, and much quieter, aforementioned Eastcastle Street.

It was at this point that the small Fiat pulled up alongside me and the besuited and beshaded Italian gentleman asked me for directions towards Heathrow Airport in heavily accented English.  Easy enough, I thought, and I obliged by giving him the right bearing for the Marble Arch and points west.  Then the scam began.

He explained that he was employed by Emporio Armani and had been running a fashion show at Harrods⁴.  And, by good fortune, he turned out to have a number of suits and jackets on the back seat of the car and wanted to thank me for my kindness.  Before I knew it I was being offered a feel of the quality of the materials while he explained that I would be doing him a favour by taking them off his hands as he would be charged to take them onto the ‘plane since they exceeded his luggage allowance.   

Two things struck me at this point.  Firstly, that it seemed a little odd that Armani couldn’t stretch to a few extra Euros in travel costs.  Secondly, that the very professional business card that he handed me bore a webmail address. 

 

“How much?” I asked as he made to start putting the things into a bag for me.  “Very little,” was the response, indicated with a Latin shrug and thumb and forefinger pressed closely together.  I shook my head.  “No.”  He took the card back and began rearranging his wears as I stepped off, checking my pockets to see that my wallet and my ‘phone were still present and correct.

I’d assumed that that was the last that I would see of him but a little while later, as I was sitting outside the Marquis of Granby enjoying a pale ale and a sandwich, the Fiat swung slowly around the sharp corner from Rathbone Street, still cruising in search of marks.  I gave him a cheery wave, which he didn’t return.

¹The Ladykillers offers a remarkable view of what Kings Cross and environs looked like in the 50’s and  Martin Underwood’s website provides a thorough analysis of where the scenes were shot.

²There’s something deliciously delinquent about lunchtime showings.  For one thing, they tend to be nearly empty, for another it just doesn’t ever feel right and proper to leave a cinema in bright daylight.

³I like Japan.  Or the idea of it, anyway, since I’ve never yet been there.  To my mind it is possibly the most alien place on the planet with proper plumbing. 

⁴In retrospect, I think that mentioning Armani and Harrods was layering the luxury on with a rather large trowel.

Radio Londres

Something has been bothering me about the London 2012 Olympics.

It’s not just the saturation media coverage that’s been counting down seemingly for ever and the lauding of male and female contenders in sports that neither I nor anyone I know takes anything like a regular interest in.  Nor is it the forthcoming transport disruption in London, Zil Lanes and all.

It’s only come to me tonight, as I surf Facebook and see the whooping comments and photographs posted by friends and acquaintances as they track the inexorably inane progress of the torch, that this is another Diana Moment.

Remember that?  The week of public mortification between the smash and the state funeral; the ad-hoc shrines and the breakdown in common-sense; and, above all else, the suppression of dissent.  It’s like that again now.  It’s back to being a member of the French Resistance, where you daren’t give voice to private misgivings, save to close and trusted fellows, for fear of being denounced.

There is a very heavy and very palpable social pressure to toe the line and not to moan in public about the (costly) fatuity of it all.  To do so is to risk being impugned as a misery guts.   Which, if you think about it, isn’t all too far removed from the post-Gulag tactics of the late and unlamented rulers of the USSR, who charged the dissidents of the worker’s paradise with being mentally ill.

Thankfully, it will all be over in a few weeks but for now:

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon cœur

D’une langueur

Monotone.