A litany of mistakes

Today I made several mistakes. The first two were to drink two glasses of Stella Artois.

It's strange. Sometimes it feels like the UK is the only bastion of normalcy and common sense in the world. When you have that feeling, it's clear something is wrong, but the UK is the only place where it's commonly understood that Stella Artois is fuel for fighting and shouting at three in the morning, not a tipple enjoyed by cultured Continentals. I'd been away from the mother country too long, I'd forgotten those harsh lessons learned from many cruel hangovers, I had a couple of Stellas and I was a ruined man, angry, dyspeptic, confused by a world beyond reason and hope.

Or perhaps it was the swine who'd parked his car at the intersection and set his main beams to focus on my retinas. I'm not paranoid. Much. But when a car halts and is pointed to beam its headlamps right into a restaurant, just to the point you're sitting in, you can grow a little bothered. I was ready to go out and remonstrate (there's nothing like a shaven head for awakening your inner thug - well, nothing apart from some more Stella) when the car finally drove off, but by then I was baffled and bamboozled.

We stopped drinking; possibly a mistake too - when in a hole, why not carry on drinking? - and then committed another certain mistake by going for a foot massage.

Foot massages are painful at the best of times. When you're half-cut, half-recovered from a marathon and half-dead from spending the last two nights at fighting practise, you don't really want a man grinding his forearms between your meta-tarsals. Or trying to pull your toes off your feet. Or (for variety, I suppose) trying to separate your shoulders from your arms, spine, and anything else they might be attached to.

I'm still very much attached to my body parts, but I'm also very much British and reserved, so all I did to complain was make muffled whimpers. Another mistake.

We left the massage joint, and encountered the final mistake of the evening. Not mine, though. I think it was an oversight of the massage company to situate their shop down a filthy alleyway, right next to a pub, so after an hour of forcible 'relaxation' and calm smells and noises, the first thing that hits you is the stench of fried chicken and unwashed bodies.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's not perfect.