Pain

Yesterday morning I had the worst hangover of my adult life. It was mostly caused by drinking Pimms celebrating the historic whitewash of New Zealand in the Test Series, then beer to aid and abet the England team in the Euro 2004 France football game. History will record that we suffered a huge and dramatic reversal of fortune and lost in the last 3 mins. Too much has been said about this already. Let me just confess that I fell hard and hurt my head. I was not alone; and the people with me also suffered. By which I mean the entire nation. I am not proud of it and it wasn't clever. At one point near to the end, I wondered whether I was seeing double, or whether I was in fact two people seeing single. The level of suffering would have been increased by the cognac which I remembered and produced when the beer was insufficient consolation. By 3am horizontal seemed less like a concept and more like the inevitable and then I woke up 6 hours later flat on my back in the same position I had crashed out in.

9am. I got up, reeled, put on my trousers and lay down again. Then I got up again and drank water. Instantly felt much worse. Then I lay down again. I tried to work out whether I was hungover or was technically still drunk. The room was spinning, of course it was. Then I tried again to get dressed and only succeeded in making the room spin so much I ran to the bathroom and puked. I felt totally morose, tried to tell myself that disgust self-loathing and shame were quite normal in these circumstances and fell back on the bed. I pulled the sheet around my head and clutched at the straws that the bed was made of. Then I really had to get up - it was already 11am - I'm normally up by 7am. I didn't think I would be able to stand, let alone go and work, and the thought of the Tube filled me with dread.

The pain was enormous. Yesterday was a bright and cheerful morning and everyone went about their daily Monday tasks as usual, but the whole mood of London was strangely flat. It might as well have been pissing down. Nobody was quite meeting anyone's eye. No banter. No chirpy whistling.

Keeping carefully vertical and speech to a minimum, I went to Tottenham Court Road and spent money on behalf of one of my best clients. God how I missed my girlfriend. I wanted to marry her when she sent me a text message asking how I was. Somehow I struggled through the day and the pain lessened. But the real pain is still there, in my poor tribal heart, writhing at the injustice of the result, trying not to blame Emile or Sven or Steven. And trying to avoid French alchohol products from now on.