Early start

Sometimes it's good to get an early start to the day. Up and awake before everyone else, the world is yours to stamp your identity on, say 'this is the day that I really achieve some positive change in my life.'

And sometimes you get up early because your stomach starts making emergency calls at 4am, and you then spend the next six hours chundering into the well-appointed toilet in your luxury suite. It's perhaps a shame that when you're vomitting, the experience isn't enhanced by the quality of the receptacle.

Perhaps if it was, there would be some sort of business opportunity to exploit. The five-star hangover experience could involve fresh damp towels being place on the back of your neck, while your sick could be flushed through a 24-carat gold basin. Or possibly something organic, involving hemp, or flax, or a sick-bag knitted by Kalahari Bushmen.

Are Kalahari Bushmen famed for their knitting prowess? I suppose that's something that would require research before taking the business plan to suitable investors.

Of course, as a general rule you don't expect to get sick in a five-star hotel, so it's unclear this is an idea with a well defined market niche. The only two things that I had different to my fiancee was a glass of rum and ginger beer, and a fried egg. If I'd been pounding the rum all evening, then I would expect some consequences, but for an apparently innocent egg, a little circle of gold and white, how could it turn on me so?

Perhaps it's revenge for all the unborn yolks, denied fertilisation in order to provide me with a high-cholesterol breakfast through the years. I'm truly sorry. I commit never to eat eggs again, or at least not eggs where I'm not abundantly sure how well they've been cooked. I hope that saves me from further ovine retribution.

I stopped vomitting about ten, and then struggled to the ferry, not capable of lifting my head up, which made the Macau customs official look a little more askance at me than usual. And Hong Kong side, the thumbprint reader was more obstreperous than usual: even machinery wasn't making any accomodation for my state.

Later, I dragged myself to the comedy club for a two-hour pep talk from Butch Bradley, which in the moments when I didn't think my head was going to fall off I got a lot out of. Still wobbly afterwards, my fiancee and I wandered up the hill, past a man with a camera who was trying to impress a lady with two dogs by showing her his photographic equipment.

Maybe he'd get lucky and she'd let him fiddle with her aperture settings later.