Happy 2009 - and already what a mess...

It was a beautiful sunny day in Hong Kong on the 1st of January. Blue skies and everything. I missed out on this, because I couldn't get out of bed until 6pm. Drat that going out to Gecko and taking advantage of a proffered bottle of absinthe. Double drat that staying up until 7am rather than going home at 1 in the morning like you meant to. Treble drat the state the apartment is in, and the general mortifying feeling that you've done some Terrible Things. I guess that's the start of a New Year - appropriate to begin it with feelings of woe, self-disgust and general opprobrium - a good base to build from.
On the 31st, read my exercise schedule wrong, and ran 10km rather than 13. Meant to make up for it yesterday, but being ruined from drinking precluded that. Would sort that out today, but my friend Beth is visiting from Macau so I'll be going out and doing the drinking thing again, and then tomorrow it's a birthday party - oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Positives: did 10k in 51 minutes and 25 seconds. That's a pretty rubbish time for being in competition, but I'm trying to run slower than pace at the moment, and thus I'm sort of ok about that.
Read Bad Vibes - Luke Haines' scabrous account of the Britpop years. Was amazed that I'd forgotten about - and could remember when prompted - both Northern Uproar and S*M*A*S*H (although I can't remember a single thing about them - but then who can?). Does that mean that Luke Haines is the indie music revenant of Peter Kay (cf Richard Herring and "a man who's job is to remember things from the 1970s that we thought we'd forgotten")? Or am I now vanishing in a overly-1990s-referential frame of mind? Who knows? I'm too busy rereading the Fist of Fun annual to ponder on that one...