Pining for the dim expanses (I cannot dance, drink or pull anymore)

I am tired today and I ache; almost, although not quite, too tired to add these few lines and update the blog. Do I hear a sound as of a clapping of many hands in a spontaneous round of applause somewhere far away? No, I thought not. I remain a martyr for my public to the last though, like a well-loved Hollywood veteran with a terminal disease who stops to sign an autograph for a small child... Well, almost...

As I no longer drink to any level worth recording, it seems somehow absurd to report that I have spent most of the day recovering from a hangover. Well, they are the symptoms of a hangover at any rate: head-ache, fatigue and general disillusionment. On the evidence, I am inclined to believe that, after however many years of hard hedonism, my body shuts down on instinct after a night out; consumption of intoxicating liquor no longer an essential ingredient in the process.

My suitably melodramtic conclusion: the best years of my life are already over!

When I was eighteen: young, free and living in Killarney, I had some truly epic nights, a golden haze of beer, foreign tourists and soft-rock covers. Although they still play some of those songs here in Kingston, it is not the same...

In England, it seems, everybody has got something to prove: from the muscle-men with their tight T-Shirts, to the girls who make every conceivable effort to trip over your feet while you wait in line just so they can accost you, to the dancers, the drinkers, even the dj. Over in Ireland it was not like that and I miss it.

More importantly, I miss myself back then: fewer inhibitions, considerations, more spontaneity. On the other hand, I did suffer some of the most immense, immobilising and all-encompassing hangovers I have ever known and, casting my mind back, they make this headache shrink to the level of a tender head massage... Out there, I would literally roll into work half-drunk and then sleep it off by the lake, later in the afternoon!

One of my favourite poems of all time gets to the heart of such sentiments much sooner than I do and with a total absence of the self-indulgent moaning that is prevalent here. It is taken from the chorus of a longer piece, The Bacchae by Euripides and I first saw it cited in a book by Bertrand Russell (a book I have been reading since I first came to Kingston in 2005 and still am nowhere near finishing, to the point where I have been forced to adopt a radical new skimming technique known by the technical term of Missing-every-chapter-that-you-can't-understand-immediately ...)

Anyway, to paraphrase Larkin, here be the verse:

Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat, and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?

Well, possibly! Not in the dim expanses of Kingston-upon-Thames, at any rate...