It was freezing in London, a night when the air grew sullen and felt almost solid. New Year’s Eve, that time for reminiscing. How he’d grown to hate it. A tune kept running through his head, one he’d picked up shortly before his Finals at Cambridge more than twenty years earlier. It was like a sea shanty, one he’d heard sung in mournful Irish tones as he was wandering along the Backs one stifling night in June, and it had stuck. ‘So I called to the barman to pour me another, Me soul was fair bleeding for want of a wet, And the good resolutions I made to my mother, Are the good resolutions I drink to forget . . .’ He knew it was a nonsense, of course, he could never forget. Yet some memories didn’t even have the decency to fade, so there were nights when he took himself back to that riverbank in Cambridge and drank to a simpler life, trying to soak away the confusion that had crept in between the cracks. He hadn’t planned that this should be one of those nights, but things weren’t going much to plan any more.
