I’d overdid things yesterday, ot perhaps my hangover was harder to overcome than I had expected. For the whole day, I was a limp mess of a man, stumbling around the office, three espressos down on normal operating parameters. But at least the sun was out.
This was bad, because as soon as I left the office to go run errands, the heavens opened and I got soaked. Because after almost three years here, I still don’t remember to carry an umbrella everywhere I go.
Partly that’s from growing up in Britain, where it’s unmanly to use an umbrella. And perhaps partly it’s giving in to the inevitable: even when I’d purchased an umbrella from a Seven-Eleven, I continued to get soaked, from the bottom up. My trousers were wet through all the way to my knees, my shoes were twice the weight they’d started out today, and I was still behind on Christmas shopping.
The good thing about leaving Christmas shopping late is that just as you panic, so do all the retailers here, and I walked through a forest of slashed prices. As long as my wife doesn’t read this, she’ll never know about my accidental miserliness. So in the space of half an hour, I sorted that out, then looked for dinner.
I could have had a burger, but I thought I’d hold off until I got back to Chinatown and buy some tacos from Pistola on Club Street. I was aghast, after trudging with my soaked feet for an eternity, to find Pistola gone, vanished, replaced without any sign of its existence by a French bistro with no apparent customers. But then it is a rainy Monday night just before Christmas.
I sauntered home, broken, and made my wife bring me soup, while I read out loud from Madame Bovary. Don’t assume I was getting too cultural though – I also watched a terrible teen sex comedy with my wife. Talk about getting in the festive spirit.