I felt a tad under the weather one morning earlier this week. I put it down to a rare tropical disease I might have caught in Singapore in ’89, or possibly a merry dinner in Parsons Green the night before. (Parsons Green lost its apostrophe just before World War I.)
This is not strictly relevant, but allow me to digress. In Brideshead Revisited, an inebriated Oxford student explains himself. “The wines were too various, it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.”
The wines in Parsons Green were rather delicious and if they were to blame for my matutinal indisposition it was entirely because of quantity and had nothing to do with quality. I thought that a few moments lolling with a cup of coffee would help me recuperate. I steered sofawards and refined my plan by picking a PG Wodehouse to read. PGW is recommended as an all-purpose cheerer-upper and a mild, semi-addictive, stimulant; never fails.
I chose Blandings Castle and a story called Company for Gertrude. It did not do the trick. It set me back a bit. I read that I am three years older than Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth. I knew that I’d long since outstripped Bertie Wooster and Psmith but I thought Lord Emsworth was at least a decade older than me. In a subsequent story (The Go-Getter) PGW describes him as senile. Then it struck me that I must be at least four years older than Gally Threepwood.
Intimations of mortality are not cheering when in a delicate condition. Kingsley Amis, as so often, put his finger on it when he describes the metaphysical hangover in his scholarly treatise, On Drink. Fortunately there is a sure-fire cure. I cannot claim to have discovered it. Samuel Pepys wrote this in his diary.
Wednesday 3 April 1661
Up among my workmen, my head akeing all day from last night’s debauch. To the office all the morning, and at noon dined with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who would needs have me drink two drafts of sack to-day to cure me of last night’s disease, which I thought strange but I think find it true.
Then home with my workmen all the afternoon, at night into the garden to play on my flageolette, it being moonshine, where I staid a good while, and so home and to bed.
http://youtu.be/46EXY4oP1Do
Hope you eventually found something that made the blues fade away? Perhaps the girl friend story? The sheer magnanimity of the host lifts up one’s spirits. Also, the Lord standing up to McAllister on the yew covered alley is something one can feel cheery about!
You are right, there is plenty of cheering up to be had from Wodehouse. His style is often imitated but this falls well short of his inimitable mastery of the English language.