HANGOVER TUESDAY

It’s been a long time since I had a brutal hangover, but I’ve been nursing one all day. Hence the late start. Drinking is, of course, another integral feature of British life. It was in a good cause, I hasten to add. Last night, a whole bevy of my old college friends were kind enough to throw a dinner party for me. It was a blast. Funny how some people seem not to physically change at all, while others (like yours truly) look physically unrecognizable from eighteen years ago. It was an eclectic cast of characters – journalists, economists, writers, academics, civil servants, bankers, etc. We realized that, in ancient British tradition, almost all of us had spent many years abroad. Between us, there were years spent in Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, New York, Paris. And, in some weird echo of our debates in college twenty years ago, we got embroiled in the debate of the day. Back then, it was the Cold War. At the height of my college experience there was the arrival of cruise missiles in England and the final stand-off with the Soviet Union. I was the most strident anti-peacenik even back then. When the missiles arrived on English soil, I held a champagne party in my dorm room in celebration. In the English student culture of the time, I might as well have put a Pinochet poster on my wall. Day after day, we’d have near shouting matches about the whole matter (these were also the days in which Margaret Thatcher was regarded by almost every student as a combination of Tina Brown and Muammar Ghaddaffi.)