Will I Ever Learn?

What a ridiculously crazy weekend! There really isn’t another way to describe it. Try as I should to find a more erudite phrase to depict the antics of the last three days, I can’t. Ridiculously crazy says it all. Hideous kinky even.

I finished work (well, what I laughingly call work) on Friday evening and immediately (although not deliberately) plunged into a smudged blur of social excesses that hasn’t been rivalled for a long time. It all began with a gala atmosphere outside the Broadway on Friday evening – like the massing herds of wildebeest on the dusty grasslands of Africa, the world and his creative mother seemed to be gathering round the watering hole; there was restlessness and anticipation sizzling in the air. It became difficult to tear ourselves away because just when we thought we’d finished our final drinks, someone else would wash up, pull up a chair, and begin the process all over again. From thereon in, the vortex swirled and pulled with all its energy until any sensible efforts to resist were nugatory. The weekend had begun.

Along the carousel ride of the next forty-eight hours we ate great feasts of dripping meat and roasted vegetables; we cavorted with Danger Mouse & Penfold; we danced on high balconies; we sang with Peggy Lee and we sang with sweet-voiced Jay in a garden of delight in Sherwood. Yesterday afternoon’s bacchanalian revelries were of such gigantic proportions that they left me feeling – as I lay on a sun-soaked litter being pampered by oil-coated Nubians – slightly as if I were fiddling while Rome burned. We all had enormous fun but I fear that we were laughing so much that nobody managed to notice the tears I was inwardly shedding.

And now, as I sit amidst the glowing embers, surveying the charred and smoking ruin that was once my life, I need to wake up. The reveille has sounded and I have to take immediate action if I want any kind of phoenix to rise from these ashes at all.

The trouble is, I feel slightly dazed in the head and heart (particularly the heart), and this makes decision-making decidedly difficult. And potentially dangerous. As I said - a ridiculously crazy weekend.