The downside of drinking tons of wine and eating scallops is that you feel pretty bleary the next day. There was definitely more than one empty bottle on the table this afternoon when I finally pulled myself out of the little single bed in the Richmond spare room and bumped downstairs in quest of coffee.
Facebook must have been listening to us last night as the Saturday morning doomscroll begun with an advert: Clinical trials for unhealthy drinkers. Then the same old hamster wheel of people talking about politics or war or the selected issues of the epoch. I dropped Facebook for ages. Not really sure how I got swept back in. It’s a ridiculous platform and the way they do EVERYTHING is just smug and unethical. They were the pioneers of the shameless datagrab that has really now caused most of us to sign every inch of our identity over to the likes of that jugeared automaton. They’re trying to pioneer a changed language about how we view all the things we do online. “Metaverse”. To try and bring everything together under one platform so we can buy more things that don’t exist. It’s a clever trick by the malevolent alien that wants to turn us into batteries that he looks and sounds so ridiculous and unthreatening. I’ll keep playing computer games. They aren’t Metaverse. Even if my parrot in Sea of Thieves is called NFT.
Despite hangover though I haven’t been playing games today. It’s just been too much of a lovely day. I went to the barber for a luxury £10 shave. The beard was long and wiry and I didn’t want hairs all over my bathroom. Tomorrow I will need to be “immaculate” for a self-tape so I thought I’d get the hardest bit done early. Everything else is just preening. I took my fresh face up to Camden and wandered around by the lock.
It’s lively up there again. London really is packed. All the bars and pubs on the high street were swollen with drunk people. New punks were on the bridge where old punks hung out in my childhood. I took in the noise and the crowd and the memories. I looked into the garden of The Oxford Arms and thought of all the things I did at The Etcetera Theatre when I was naïve enough to think they might help my career, but committed enough to know that any experience is useful experience. And I stopped at Mildred’s for dinner with a close friend. Yummy vegan food, a bit twee in the way they sell their pretend meat. “chick’n*” I had a sweet potato curry because it wasn’t pretending to be anything other than a sweet potato curry.
Now I’m home, happy and full, and almost certainly in a position to crash between clean sheets and sleep the sleep I didn’t have last night.
AlBarclay 