Dodging a bullet


I was quite surprised today to wake up without a hangover. Quite how I dodged that bullet, when I’d been mixing drinks like a madman all last night, was beyond me. Or maybe I hadn’t sobered up.

Still, it was a hard morning. We went up to Ronin for breakfast, and their usually superlative scrambled eggs tasted just … normal today. Walking back, I was desperate for the toilet, so we went into the Chinatown Point shopping mall. Where at ten a.m., every toilet cubicle is occupied. Nobody is in any of the shops, they’re all in the toilets. In total silence.

I stood for ten minutes in the outer chamber of the bogs, waiting for a stall to become free, wracked with the minor sufferings that my overloaded bowel inflicted upon me. And not a sound came from within any of the toilet cubicles, and not a single person came out. I tried each floor with no success, eventually returned to the place I started to find one door slightly ajar. Inside, somebody had left the seat up, which implied they could have just used a urinal. Instead, they left me to hop from foot to foot, gurning as the booze and the eggs worked against me. Bitter, I went home and went to sleep.

This afternoon, walking around in a panic of Christmas shopping, my left calf kept threatening to cramp up. This is quite normal after a big session for me, when the alcohol has rinsed all the salts from my body, but it still wasn’t pleasant. We trudged around and I waited for my body to fail, and I ate lunch after lunch without regaining my jlie de vivre. Clearly by that time I had sobered up.

This evening we put La Serpiente Aquatica Negra down at 7:30, and I went out for a run, trying to salvage something from the weekend. I wasn’t going to make MacRitchie buy at least I put in a solid hour around the river. I got back at nine and then our daughter awoke, and howled and screamed until about five minutes ago. This was such a transformation from her sweet-natured daytime self that I felt like a changeling had been substituted for my daughter: I was in some terrible horror movie, where the angry beast would literally throw toys from her cot, as if my attempts to calm her with her teddy bear were the stupidest, most patronizing things she’d ever heard of.

So that made for a nice evening. At least when I was at my most tender this morning, she had been docile and kind.


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