Am recovering from either food poisoning or gastric flu.
Spend my first hours of 2007 sleeping on the floor of Mr Hughes’s boat moored on the canal in Oxford, but in utter agony. I am kept awake with stomach pains and having to make frequent visits to the toilet. My host Mr Hughes is enormously tolerant, even when I break the tap in his bathroom through turning it the wrong way.
I am tortured twice during this first night of the year: once with the stomach cramps, and twofold with the guilty knowledge that getting up for the toilet will probably awaken my host. I am the mercy of my condition, and therefore so is he.
The journey back to Highgate the next day is equally fraught – I find even sitting down makes my predicament worse, even though the train and tube have plenty of seats. I’m all for not being able to sit down after a night of debauchery, but in my case the reasons are more Joe Pasquale than Joe Orton.
The previous afternoon and evening – Dec 30th – is spent with Anna S and David B, drinking happily and steadily at The Flask pub and then in their Archway flat. This puts me in a state of severe hangover for the 31st itself. My plan was to escape London for New Year’s Eve, and take it easy with my boat-bound friend. I hadn’t banked on being first fragile and ill from overdoing it the night before, and then fragile and ill from contracting some stomach-related ailment. What a guest.
The pains are still ongoing, so I’ve cancelled all social functions till I recover fully. Shame, as this week I’ve been invited to TWO birthday gatherings, a book launch, a magazine launch and a concert. I’m behind with a couple of writing commissions, and I really should get those done as it is.
Back to Oxford, and for midnight we eschew the pubs. Walking through George St, the streets are like Anytown, UK. Loud young people – and the not-young people acting young – with the hint of violence about them, marching in packs from bar to bar. Screaming in shop doorways at each other to hurry up, and it’s barely 9pm.
Once we cross Cornmarket into Broad Street and the university part of town, it’s like crossing into Narnia. The streets are comparatively deserted, the neon hue of the High Street signs replaced by ancient college walls, and the noise dies down. Thank God. We spend a few minutes in The Turf Tavern, a pub which is so civilised it closes at 11pm on New Year’s Eve. The King’s Arms, another studenty haunt with lots of places to hide, is open, but is full of young men pretending to be Stephen Fry. Quite frankly I get enough of that at home.
Actually, that’s a good way of describing the difference between London and Oxford in 2007. In Oxford, all the young men think they’re Stephen Fry. In London, all the young men think they’re Pete Doherty or Russell Brand.
It’s battering down with rain. Mr Hughes has lent me a folding umbrella, and as soon as I get hold of it, the thing naturally turns inside out in the wind and falls apart, spokes akimbo. So we sit in the King’s Arms for a while. In a corner of the pub, the worse pub band in the world is attempting to play Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. An unkind passer-by adds ‘Perhaps it’s Radiohead.’
As soon as the rain clears, we stand by the dome of Radcliffe Camera to listen for the various city bells ringing in the New Year under a star-swept sky. Mr Hughes recites Yeats:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
I retort by saying I’m feeling ‘old and tired and full of sleep…’.
On the stroke of 12, we exchange manly English handshakes and make our way back to the boat, taking a diversion to avoid the George St revellers. Or anyone else.
Happy New Year. He said, still feeling like someone has punched him in the stomach. It can only get better from here.
