Hungover

Inexplicably hungover from half a glass of red wine, today was a struggle for me. Even after cramming fried food into my mouth at The Flying Pan in Wan Chai, and then looking for the World's Perfect Laptop Bag, I felt like death.

What I needed was sleep, lovely, kind, delicious sleep, but this was going to be at the other end of twelve flights of stairs, so I put this off as long as possible. I tried to teach my wife Cockney rhyming slang, but she became enraged when I told her what a 'syrup' was, so I should have stopped. It was clear that a helpful cultural exchange was not on the cards tonight, but instead I blundered on, arguing the toss between pans and pots.

For future reference, any British person marrying a Canadian, (unless at least one of you never has anything to do with kitchens) will have to broker some accord about how you refer to those metal utensils with a long handle and vertical sides that one uses to heat food on a stove. For those on the east side of the Atlantic, they're saucepans. For those on the west, they're pots. May this knowledge protect you from conflict.

I can't have made her too mad, because she didn't bust my head in with a saucepot (the secret of successful marriage lies in the art of compromise) while I was passed out, drooling into a pillow at 6pm. I woke up feeling slightly better, won a game of Scrabble by playing as negatively as possible, then went to the comedy club where I was hosting.

It was a good night. Nobody would sit in the front two rows but there were four boisterous English lads (one a Ricky Gervais lookalike), a Cornish man and about twenty-five other fairly vocal people. It wasn't easy to get the laughs tonight, but I strangely enjoyed grinding them out - a bit more time to work on crowd work this evening. And then home to bed...