Alcohol

‘How’s your day going?’ said the taxi driver as he snapped his knob into drive. If I caught the plane it would be a miracle. Angry with myself for failing once again adequately to plan a simple journey to Bristol airport, I decided to tell him. ‘Well, my mother is dying of cancer, my brother’s cancer has spread to his hip, and mine is showing signs of waking up. I’ve just had a tax bill for 30 grand, I’ve had three hours’ sleep in the last 36, and unless you get me to the airport in 40 minutes I’m going to miss a plane. Otherwise everything is tickety-boo.’ ‘So where

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly

At three o’clock I took half a bottle of Glenmorangie with me to Jimmy’s. That it was Burns Night, and Jimmy happens to be a proud Scot, was mere coincidence. When I walked in, Jimmy was putting finishing surgical touches to the back of a bullet-head. ‘Do you drink whisky, Jimmy?’ I said. ‘Oh aye,’ he said sadly, snipping at a single hair. But before I could take my coat off, he ordered me out again to the corner shop to buy lager to go with it. ‘What sort of lager?’ I said. He said: ‘You know that new lager called 13? Brewed by Guinness?’ ‘Never heard of it,’ I

We ascended the gangplank and were smartly directed to the ship’s library, where the seated purser swiped my debit card and took our passports. This purser’s face was prematurely aged, disfigured by misfortune, implacably hostile. Would she be keeping our passports until the voyage end, we asked humbly? We would get them back at the end of the cruise and not before, she barked, furious at our ignorance of the ship’s rules. Cabin 302 was one deck down, next to the dining room. Catriona’s suitcase was already placed outside the cabin door. Mine perhaps had yet to complete its journey through the cruise-terminal security machinery. The cabin was roomier than

‘Jeremy, I want you to sit here next to me — unless you’re frightened of me?’ We were briefly introduced at her father’s funeral party; otherwise our hostess and I hadn’t met before. We were about to sit down in her recently deceased father’s house, which she has inherited, and this, she said, was her first dinner party. Her father and I became friends two years before he died, aged 82. Everyone told me he was a terrible snob with a vile temper but I only ever found him entirely jovial and an erudite and witty conversationalist. ‘Should I be frightened of you?’ I said. ‘I am who I am,’

Six Storeys on Soho is in a slender grey townhouse on Soho Square: a bar, restaurant and club. It is technically art deco, but it feels much older; it grasps back for 18th-century Soho without the typhoid epidemic and the corpses. It used to be a gay bar called the Edge, but the gay bars are closing in London, victims of a new epidemic called Grindr. Now it feels like Mary Poppins’s house after she lost hope. I came to the Edge with my friend the artist Sebastian Horsley, who wore purple suits and a top hat, and made A.A. Gill look slovenly. He kept a gun by his bedside