Drink?

I’m bored of travel. Firstly because my mother was ill from last summer to this Easter, when she finally died having run out of all other options. I can very thoroughly unrecommend the death of a mother and the toing and froing between Germany and the UK added nothing to the experience. As I got on the plane back to Berlin the day after her funeral, I resolved to have no truck with any public transport journey that cost more than €2.80 for at least the next eternity.

And secondly because travel means leaving Berlin and I am obsessively in love with the city at the moment. I’m still not sure what home and place should mean as I fumble towards forty, but I’m very grateful to Berlin for opening its arms, perhaps originally a little reluctantly, to me and the Russian. Russia couldn’t give us a home. And the UK would have been awkwarder than Germany. And as neither of us had even heard of any of the other countries either of us had ever visited, Germany it had to be. And now that Berlin has let me into its embrace, I’ve got as clingy as a drunken lover.

We headed for the Hauptbahnhof and the night train to Budapest. Czech, it turned out. And we had our own little hotel room. Bathroom. Room service. Bunk beds… And within about eleven nanoseconds of the train chugging out of the station, the realisation that this was the first journey in a year that had nothing to do with my mother lowered the mood, which wasn’t that much in need of lowering, quite considerably.

I drifted off on the top bunk and let the Russian compose poetry about his terrible fate in peace.

“Room service,” chirruped Pavel the train person. He showed us how everything worked. Told us which button we could press if we needed anything. Explained he’d wake us up half an hour before Budapest with breakfast. All in perfectly good German. Then he paused. And stepped right inside our little compartment and closed the door behind him. He then switched into Czech, which the Russian and I were preparing to work out how to make the basis for an argument, but as he spoke, subtitles dripped out of his mouth and floated along the bottom of both the Russian’s and my field of vision. “And have you seen the shower?” he said/we read. And began loosening his tie.

I juddered awake. Slapped myself about a bit for equating anything Czech with porn. And swigged at a bottle of beer to help me drift back off to the soothing accompaniment of the Russian tapping furiously on his typewriter and suppressing anguished sobs.

The literature lying around in our little compartment had explained we might be awoken in the night as we crossed national borders but easily might not be. So I thought nothing of it when a Slovak – Lukas – and Hungarian border guard – Árpád – came to check our passports together. And I love having my passport checked vaguely far from home, and then it’s even more fun seeing officials checking a Russian passport, fingers flicking fervidly through every page to make sure a foreigner they might quite enjoy hassling had obeyed all the rules. They began in German and then switched into English when they saw a UK passport.

“Thank you, Mr. Inberlin,” said Lukas the Slovak.

“Full name?” Árpád the Hungarian asked the Russian having got a sniff of Cyrillic. “Russian Russianovich Russianov,” answered the Russian, for that is his full name. The two border guards looked at each other and seemed to establish a tacit solidarity at one of the old enemy who seemed to have incomplete documentation. They closed the door behind them and began to speak in Slovak and Hungarian, again subtitles dripping out of their lips and floating along the bottom of our fields of vision although, vexatious neighbours as they are, the Slovak insisted his subtitles be placed before the Hungarian’s. Lukas took off his peaked cap. Árpád began undoing his belt. “This is very serious transgression of legislation of Hungarian Republic,” he said/we read, and the Russian and I agreed that we could probably both have done a better translation. “You very bad boy.”

I juddered awake in Budapest.

Now not that everything is about sex, of course, but I thought if we were to compare Prague and Budapest, as I couldn’t help doing with every porn-free step I took there, then they would make very different lovers. Prague had smothered me in kisses, sent me flowers and bought me huge boxes of chocolates. Budapest had stood in a club with its arms folded, refused my ever more desperate advances and then relented with a huff, taken me home, shagged the living daylights out of me and left without a word the next morning. I loved the city.

But Budapest’s downside is that it isn’t in Berlin and the time for the return journey came round with a pleasing speed. And again the journey became very motherful and the map of my internal world felt piercingly more shapeless and sparse than ever. I’m not sure I know what grieving and mourning are. Unless missing and being sad. But perhaps there is a method to them, one which I haven’t discovered, unless to think of her and remember her and wave to her photograph and wish that she’d never got sick in the first place.

The Russian and I discussed the pros and cons of bunk beds on the way home from the Hauptbahnhof.

“Darling, I’m meeting N_ for a surreptitious and spontaneous late queer beer,” I explained, thinking it would mean I was officially an alcoholic or having an affair with a 19-year-old if I went out without saying anything. Not that he would necessarily have noticed if he’d got up for a midnight snack and found the flat empty but for his own good self. I once walked around the world and only on streets with an x in their name and all he said when I got back, bearded, suntanned and riddled with disease and bullet-holes, was, “Porridge cold.”

I arrived at the appointed venue a tad before N_. Ordered myself an indecently large beer and chose a perch in a corner affording a good view and got down to some serious people-watching. Wondered if people might think I was a rent-boy. Or rent-man. I tried to look slovenly and wanton. Not that I really fancied having sex for money. And there was no way of knowing what time N_ might arrive. It’d be embarrassing if he arrived at any point in the proceedings, to be honest. And he might worry that the innocent suggestion of a surreptitious and spontaneous late queer beer had careered morally downhill with such speed.

A familiar face appeared at a satisfactorily distant part of the bar. I felt reassured that there was a suitable gaggle of encumbering drinkers between me and him for us to be troubled by starting conversation. And then the familiar face belongs to someone I’ve probably seen 117 times on and off over the last however many years and not on a single one of those occasions has conversation flourished beyond the preliminary unless circumstances have, to our mutual horror, obliged us to be so geographically close that to peremptorily truncate our words after how are you would seem wilfully uncivilised. Our eyes met and we contorted them to signify hellos, making sure, even though we were both alone, that the hello didn’t look so inviting as to imply him making his way through the throng of poofs between him and me to make me look less like a prostitute.

That social duty exacted, I surveyed the more perfect strangers. And, darlings, do you know, there was not a proper, old-style cissy amongst them! Indeed, if I hadn’t known I was in an establishment frequented by the fairer orientation, I might have been quite scared of many of the younger men. (I was anyway, but only really of the conversation I might have to have with them if the occasion had arisen, which, of course, it didn’t, rather than of violence.) A good many had decided that hair was an unnecessary and unduly prissy adornment. Many more had spent time changing the shape of their bodies with either sport or beer. Almost all of them brayed. Some smoked with an inelegance that would have shocked Karen Matthews.

Some of the older poofs suited my stereotyping mood better but still not a good old John Inman or Larry Grayson for love nor money. There’d been plenty of those when I first started going to gay bars in London in the late 80s. Men who would twirl their hands above their heads as they popped to the loo. Men with admirably ridiculous hair-cuts. Men who wore pink and whose linked cuffs flowed generously from beneath their sleeves. Men who, if you were lucky, drank spirits and cried by evening’s end as they told you of loves lived and lost.

N_ arrived wearing an I Barbara t-shirt and we set about wondering what the world had come to when you couldn’t find a single cissy in a gay bar on a wintry Monday night when you’d snuck out for a surreptitious and spontaneous late queer beer.

We trooped into the house from an outing to buy booze or food, or perhaps both. I shuddered as I walked past the newly-erected map of the house, showing who lives where with full names. “Darling, now they’ll all know we’re two men,” when I think the disguise the Russian had been using had had everyone convinced all along. But he showed no interest. He was already polishing his surgical enhancements and peering at a new note that had been put up by a neighbour.

There, in mousey handwriting, was an apology-cum-invitation for/to a party. A new neighbour, she explained. And the move coincided with her birthday, she explained. How couldn’t she have a party, she wrote, as if trying to convince herself it was a good idea. So she apologised in advance if there was going to be any noise and added that if any of us should like to attend her party, we were more than welcome. Please bring your own eye-glasses.

The Russian and I concluded in speed and silence that we would stay at home. We would tut as strains of Livin’ La Vida Loca reached our ears but resist calling the police just this once. Let the girl have some fun. Her birthday AND a new flat. Live and let live a little. But our trains of thought were interrupted by a clamour at the front door. The flash of cameras almost blinded us – the Russian’s magnifying glasses have their downsides too – and we were nearly flattened by a throng of men wearing corduroy and carrying clipboards.

“Guinness Book of Records,” they explained once we’d recovered our footing and hidden our surprise/disgust at the presence of other humans in our house.

“Are we down for ‘dullest house in the world for a record number of consecutive years’?” we inquired as one in different languages to the thankfully multilingual team.

“No, ‘speediest decision not to attend a party’,” replied one of the corduroy-wearing men as he pinned badges to our lapels and gave us each a plastic-bag’s worth of freebie Guinness paraphernalia. The Russian apologised for stabbing him in the face with the handles of his magnifying glasses and I suggested once more he have them sawn off. We smiled for the cameras and made our way up the stairs, chastened that we had been rewarded for our unwillingness to extend the hand of friendship to a newcomer in our midst.

The day of the party arrived. The Russian and I were redoubledly thrilled both at the thought of flagrantly missing an opportunity to make a social effort and out of curiosity at what a party in this house might sound like. I mean, it’s all very well hearing Ricky Martin a mile or so down the road but people have been known to call the police at a post-watershed sneeze up here. I made any excuse to venture into the communal bits of the house. Recycled coffee grains one by one. Quickly got a job delivering flyers for pizza parlours so I could spend time loitering by the post-box. Checked the electricity metre. Went to the cellar to see if any of the rat-poison had gone.

Silence.

“Darling, the party’s very quiet, isn’t it?”

“She not write time on eenvityayshn. Maybe voz dyaytime party. Zey khev ze koffyee and ze kyake and go.”

Which could easily have been the case and the noise she was pre-apologising for might well have been the furious tinkling of forks on plates and coffee cups being replaced deafeningly on acoustic saucers.

The Russian and I got on with some communal silence. But curiosity got the better of me and I went for one last peek from behind the curtains, dislodging a fly we thought we’d made a deal with as I did so. The Russian and I looked at each other in panic.

Three seconds later the doorbell rang. The Russian slipped back into his disguise just in case it was the landlord double-checking. We checked our hair in the hallway mirror in case it was the photographer from the Guinness Book or Records back for one last stunning shot.

The neighbours had formed a human pyramid so that no-one’s view of the spectacle would be hindered. Every woman wore a hair-net. Every man wore a dressing-gown over pyjamas and held an unlit pipe. The Russian recoiled slightly to cancel out the effect of his magnifying glasses. The spokeswoman for the group, who explained this was unusually inconvenient because she was still sweeping up crumbs from the very successful party she’d just hosted – the neighbours concurred with nods – and that she hoped this wasn’t how it was always going to be, looked demonstratively at her watch.

It was 10pm.

She handed me a fly-swat and gave wordless instructions for the human pyramid to disassemble.

I have three default occupations: working, drinking and nothing. Which normally might not matter – lots of us bumble along thinking no further ahead than making it to the end of the cup of coffee we’ve got on the go (though I’m rarely that ambitious) – but the difficulty and futility of the nothing occupation magnifies itself exponentially when I have periods of solitude and independent living.

My beloved is sojourning in the former Soviet Union – this just in from Crimea. Gents hotter in Ukraine. In Russia, everyone looks a bit gay – and I am left to ponder the present alone.

And in a bout of not boozing or working, of nothinging, in other words, I got to worrying about a future. All brought on by marzipan, of course.

Darlings, you know that fear I’m sure we all get where there is some freakish disaster and, wouldn’t you just know it, you’re the only person to survive it and then, wouldn’t you just know it again, human beings go and replicate themselves almost immediately and arrive on the planet that had briefly only been populated by you at exactly the same distance along the evolutionary ladder and – would you credit it! – speaking English but without knowledge of the past and these arriviste new folk somehow realise you’re the only survivor from the old days and therefore think you are the very embodiment of omniscience, Wikipedia made man, and you have to impart history’s secrets and teach them how to farm and form societies and invent the wheel and the spinning jenny and the internal combustion engine and aeroplanes and the internet and space travel and France and Christmas, well I just wouldn’t have a clue how to do any of it. I’d have to just go and hide in a cave, hoping the freakish disaster which had left me all alone in the first place hadn’t made the planet perfectly even and free of hiding places, and hope the new re-humans were too thick to come and find me.

Because I wouldn’t even be able to tell them how to make marzipan.

I consoled myself that I could justify my ignorance by comparing myself to all those unlucky solo-survivors of freakish disasters of previous generations who would have had far less to impart to their new re-co-humans. Oh yes. So much less not to know back then. Huh! Shakespeare! Think you’d be any better at the job than me? Teaching them to write purty ain’t gonna help. They’ll all be dead of the plague by the end of their first couplets. Oh well bloody done, Joseph of Arimathea. So now they know about altruism and you happened to know how to make sandals. But how are they going to make red wine? Or invent music? Is a planet without Pump up the Jam even worth trying to recreate?

But slapped myself down. What arrogance! Easy for us – or me, seeing as the rest of you have been momentarily obliterated – to think that life was less complicated in the past. That we’re all specialists now. That they were all generalists back then. No doubt the medical profession seemed just as impenetrable to us non-people of science a squillion years ago as it does today, even if the most advanced remedy was to go and pick a leaf off three neighbouring bushes and put two of them in your hair and the other under your pillow.

And then I worried if, by some freakish PS to the original freakish disaster which had left me alone and in sole possession of knowledge in the first place, a wormhole was created whereby I regained access to Wikipedia – yes, to all knowledge – that I would just set it up on a big screen for all the new re-cos to watch – hopefully a sheep-dog would have survived the disaster with me – and just play it to them over and over again at high-speed in the same way that Milla Jovovich watched history in The Fifth Element. I might not try to resculpt humanity at all. Just let them become and recreate all that we had been and all that we had had.

It is terrible not to have an imagination beyond marzipan.

My name is BiB, and my beloved is on holiday.

Darlings, I hate music, naturally. If we take hate, for the sake of fun, to mean like less than something else. And I think I probably prefer silence to music. But I have found last.fm bordering on the enjoyable. I mean, it’s got ELO and everything. But I probably wouldn’t have paid it much attention if the itinerant, who’s decided to beat the credit crunch by robbing a bank and swanning off to Mexico – at least I think that’s why he’s there – hadn’t got me more addicted and introduced me to all sorts of new folk. I’ve discovered all sorts of lovely German stuff, a fun Argentinian song that I torment my beloved with, as well as trawling through to find songs that might evoke particularly intense moments of happiness from the past.

So the itinerant or the programme itself led me to Fink. “Ooh, that sounds rather nice.” Though I wondered if he was trying to pretend to be American. And then bollocked myself for daring to wonder when who am I to know what any musician from Brighton sounds like in this day and age when the last time I went there all one did was eat rock and perhaps stumble, amid much guffawing, onto the nudist beach and wrap your feet in bandages from all the blood-letting wrought by the stones and contemplate that the sea as viewed from England’s southern coast looked almost nothing like the sea one saw on the travel catalogues I used to order as a teenager to try to broaden my parents’ horizons. And then the site cleverly tells you if the musician is on tour or not. And, blow me, Fink was. Playing in Berlin too, if you don’t mind.

“BiB, this could make you young,” I thought to myself. I could go along to a concert. I could perhaps wear make-up other than the stuff I put on my nose to hide the alcoholic’s veins I’ve got there. If I get the application wrong, I look almost exactly like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. I could take narcotics. I could binge-drink alcopops. And snog folk. And vomit and hold my lighter in the air. And then cry because Mark from Geography got off with Stacey and not me. Wanker. Bitch. And then ring my mum and say I’d spent my bus fare home on Diamond White and would she pick me up from Harrow Weald.

I got this close. I’d composed an e-mail to everyone I know in Berlin – an unholy alliance of foreign faggots and foreign bloggers, adding a couple of made-up German-sounding e-mail addresses to pretend I was integrated – to suggest we all go together. See how young I am? Yes, let’s go to a concert. We’ll dance and take drugs. Oh yes, a week-night of course.

“Darling, I’m inviting everyone I know in Berlin to a concert on Thursday so you have to put a temporary tattoo on my neck and spray my hair blue on Wednesday,” I warned the Russian so he had time to get accustomed to the idea of the new, young me.

“Syurzday?”

“Yes, darling, Thursday. It’s not as if I’ve got a job to go to. And it’s Fink’s… Fink. Don’t you know him? Oh, he’s incredible. Amaaazing. I’ve, like, got a lot of respect for him actually… it’s his only night.”

“But Syurzday ven you go beenge-dreenkink veez ze fyeggots and ze bloggyers.”

“Darling, you’re right. Thank fuck you remembered.”

I deleted the e-mail and cried from relief that I hadn’t forced myself to listen to noise live. I kissed the Russian goodbye – he was going skateboarding – and poured myself a sherry.

The trouble being, of course, his fellow students. The Russian had the misfortune to meet me at a tender age. Though perhaps any age would have been a misfortune, though naturally I tell him on an almost daily basis that I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to him. And the trouble with youthfulness, and my being older, is that he must have, at some unhealthy level, held me in some sort of esteem. Not my words or opinions, necessarily. But in the early days of our courtship, shortly before emancipation of the serfs and just as Avdotya Potapovna was about lo leave our service, I suppose I was, technically, the grown-up. The one with a job and some qualifications behind me. And, fatefully/fatally, for the Russian’s future happiness, translation was the profession this exotic grown-up, whom he also happened to be in love with, was beholden to.

When it came to emigrating from St. Petersburg and the Russian deciding what to study in Berlin, the only way of him staying here or, indeed, getting here in the first place if we wanted to play Germany by the book, which we did, neither of us having an imagination, call me strict, but I don’t think the Russian took the procedure all that seriously. There was a couple of minutes of fingering through the university prospectus. “Mongolian Studies?” “Darling, don’t be ridiculous.” “Scandinavian Studies?” “Darling, do you even like foreign languages especially? Why not something computery? You love computers. Or proper cooky-cheffy training. You’re a whizz in the kitchen.” “Translation?”

Without hesitation or explanation, I went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral to throw myself off the dome but was thwarted by the entry price, which was 400 times more expensive for foreigners than for Russians, and then counted my blessings that poverty had prolonged my life on this occasion and made my way home to reason with the Russian. “If you study translation in Germany, you’ll go blind from the glint off all the translatrices’ glasses within the first term,” I prepared internally as my killer punchline, deciding against throwing myself in a canal as a plan B as I remembered Rasputin’s ignominious end. Anyway, I can swim.

“Darling, if you study translation in Germany, you’ll go blind from the glint off all the translatrices’ glasses within the first term,” I remonstrated, the padded inner front door barely closed behind me. Silence. I was pleased that the Russian was stunned so by my excellent reasoning. Only to find a note tucked between the samovar and the collected works of Vladimir Ilyich.

“Gone post-office. I choose tryenslayshn for staady. I syend off epplikayshn.”

Forty years later and here we are, the Russian allegedly nearing the end of his studies. And thank heavens, for the world needs as many translators as it can get.

“All going well down there?” I wrote to inquire, assuming this translation outing must be taking place as close to hell as geographically feasible. “Or have you been blinded by the glint off translatrices’ glasses?”

“Almost blind,” came his immediate reply, only to be followed by a stream of incomprehensible typos, a translatrix with particularly dazzling eye-wear having presumably loomed into view.

While alone, I have worried my inability to be a grown-up might have terrible consequences. In a chaos-theory, butterfly-effect way. That, say, I might wobble my body along in an attempt at rhythm to Good Shoes and that the current of air created by my flapping double chins might make the curtains billow and catch light off a candle and before you know it the whole castle house would have burnt down.

I’ll probably be all right though.

Whereas I, like any sane person, of course have to have a radiator on a setting. They go from 0 to 5. Obviously, strikingly so, a radiator can only be switched on to a whole number. Or, if I’m feeling very, very devil-may-care, a radiator could just about conceivably be switched on to 2 and a half. 3 and a half. But the Russian will happily – happily, I tell you. He even laughs maniacally after he’s done it and puts on an eye-patch – and nonchalantly turn the knob without even looking and walk away and get on with something else like ironing the bills or filing the tea. Once he is safely out of sight, I will approach the radiator with trepidation, as if approaching a ticking bomb.

2 and a quarter! 4 and a seventh! Not even on a notch. The arrow might not even be aligned to anything at all. Just looking blankly at a bit of white plastic, between black lines crying out to be aligned against to save the world from instant chaos. I take a few deep breaths and gingerly adjust the dial to a world-saving setting. No doubt, on each and every occasion, getting there in the nick of time.

I rush to the bathroom to get a cloth to apply to my forehead. The veins in my temples will be throbbing. I will cry from relief at having saved the world again. Suppress narcissistic thoughts along the lines of, “…and what thanks do I get, eh?” And try to regain my composure. I turn the hot water on but instantly sense that all is not right with the world. Bracing myself for the worst, I turn my head slowly to the right.

“Oh god, no!” the water-heater will be on 3 and a bit. “Jesus H….” but there’s so little time left to save the world that I don’t even get to finish the exclamation. I hurl the dial to 3 or 4, depending on whether I’ve been paid or not, and dread to open the bathroom door. The chances are, after all, that the whole world will have collapsed. Descended to a pile of dusty rubble. The bathroom will stand, the only man-made structure surviving, in recognition of my attempts at good-deedery, on a spindly pinnacle of rock… Yet I must have just got there in the nick of time once again. The bathroom doesn’t open out onto a scene of devastation and lifelessness. The dingy corridor is just where it’s always been.

I dash to find the Russian. This has gone on long enough. I plan to have it out with him.

He is busy filing the tea.

“Darling, you switched a radiator on to 2 and a seventh. And the water-heater was on 3 and twelve seventeenths. How can you be so disrespectful of human life? Don’t you care about humanity’s fate? This is probably why Russia’s history is so troubled. Democracy won’t just flourish with irregular settings left willy-nilly in flats everywhere.”

“ByeeB, I no khev time diskaas zis now. I filink ze tea.” And he cackles a cackly laugh and puts an eye-patch over his second eye.

I repair to my quarters, close the door for the peace and quiet I need to mull over the fact that fate has thrown me together with the world’s most dangerous man, and ponder the future. I begin to give in to self-pity. What bad luck. To be thrown into the maleficent arms of the world’s most recklessly uncaring man. But I glean a sliver of bright light. It may be my bad fortune to have to adjust dials for all eternity, but then, aren’t I fortunate to feel the glow of good-deedery that saving the world so god-damned often brings? And then, if we’re counting our blessings, I have to be grateful that the Russian is the only person on the planet who has the disorder of not turning radiators and water-heaters to numerically succinct settings!

The quandary solved, I switch on the TV to clear my head. To let worries be driven out by images and noises of vapid, empty nothingness. I go to adjust the volume. With only minor dread. I mean, surely he couldn’t have… Surely he wouldn’t be so evil as to… To not have the volume on a setting divisible by 5. I press the volume button. 17!

“Oh, god, no!”

Keep your fingers crossed that I keep making it on time.

Still, the Russian has an iPhone. And I can quite see the point of it now that I’ve worked out how to win the tennis game. And then it has that clever Shazam music-recognising programme which Herr Engelsk alerted me to last summer which I then thought – and might still, at a push – was the best technological invention since the fax. But now we’ve discovered the even funner midomi, which is a programme that lets you sing into the phone and then it tries to tell you what it is you’ve sung. Unfortunately, it almost always tries to tell you you’ve sung something by Avril Lavigne, when I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song by her (except I do know Complicated, having just looked at a list of her songs) (I’ve got a feeling I might have gone head-to-head in karaoke against my niece in that one) (I bet I won) (though not via iPhone), but we have managed to make it recognise us singing something by Abba, Eternal Flame (on the Russian’s recommendation, as he said, belittling his singing abilities, the programme had even recognised his rendition) (though he thought it was originally by Atomic Kitten) and Hava Nagila.

But anyway, apart from improving our tennis and singing skills, the iPhone is even refreshing our education. I think it’s just as well I’m a whoopsy as I’d be much too thick to help my children with their homework but we did have cause to resort to mathematics the other day. Technology can make even the utterly mundane interesting for half a second and the Russian and I whooped with wide-eyed amazement when the device told us that it was 360m to our nearest tram-stop and 460m to our nearest U-Bahnhof whereas, I must admit, trudging those unquantified distances in real life has never aroused my excitement once.

“Hm, so it’s 100m from the tram-stop to the Underground,” I said to the Russian as we were bored of discussing the essence of being yet again.

“Da, I sink so… Oi, nyet, ze distance maast be as ze byurd fly.”

“Oh, well maybe I’d better go and stand at the tram-stop and ask the phone how far it is to the Underground then, otherwise we’ll only have to move on to, ‘Whither the Russian soul?’ or, ‘Something happened on the way to the smetana queue/chip-shop’.”

“No, use myeths,” suggested the Russian, as if I was 14.

Anyway, thinking it was good for my personal redevelopment, I’ve been out to buy a set-square, a protractor, a compass, an exercise book with squares in it, logarithm tables and a slide-rule and got down to business. But to spread the fun, I’d like your help or, rather, I’d like to test your skills too and see whom, based on IQ, to foster and whom to delete from my circle of acquaintance.

“Hmm, but which maths to use? Well, I’ve got two distances and one unknown distance. Two known lines and an unknown line. Ooh, a triangle. Oh bugger. Is this trigonometry? I don’t know my sin from my cotan. Or is that something else? Oh, hang on, it’s a perfectly straight line from here to the tram-stop. And then a 90° turn from there to the Underground. Oh my god. It’s a right-angled triangle!”

Darlings, Pythagoras it is.

Frau Schmidt has a gammy hip. Frau Schmidt has an appointment with a specialist to see about getting a hip replacement. Frau Schmidt needs to get to the U-Bahnhof which she knows is 460m as the crow flies, because every time she needs to get to the station, she waits for an obliging flock – or is it parliament? – of crows to sweep her off her balcony and deposit her there and they announce the distance like a taxi-driver might announce his fare. But today the crows refused to deposit Frau Schmidt at the U-Bahn as they were on the go-slow and said they wouldn’t fly a flap further than the tram-stop. “360m, that’s our limit today, Frau Schmidt,” they squawked. Frau Schmidt says it hurts if she has to walk more than about 200m. Will Frau Schmidt make it to the U-Bahnhof without too much trouble or will it be effing and blinding all the way?

Right, we’ve got the hypotenuse, i.e. the distance from here to the U-Bahnhof. 460m. And we know that from here to the tram-stop is 360m. So, how far is it from the tram-stop to the U-Bahnhof? Please show your workings.

All correct(ish) answers will receive a one-man standing ovation.

Not that, as a wicked old nullifidian – darlings, I all of a sudden got worried by the word atheist and wondered if it made me be a wanker to come out as one. That what’s-his-face Hitchens – not the one in America whom I can’t help having a crush on even though I’m probably meant to disagree with quite a lot of what he says – I might even do, possibly, but he always says it so alluringly – although he looks much worse now that he’s had all those makeovers and his teeth done. No, the sour-puss brother – is right that atheism is a belief-system in itself. I mean, I don’t think it is, but then I want my unbelief to be un- rather than actively non-, I think, and worried that if atheism is active belief in there not being a god, which I’d probably be happy to throw my lot in with, actually, then I’d still rather be labelled, when the machine in the people-labelling factory gets to that stage in its workings, just in case, say, by some, admittedly, extremely queer twist of fate, we had to be labelled according to our beliefs, with a label that meant, ‘doesn’t-much-go-in-for-that-religion-lark,’ which perhaps nullifidian suits better – I should be equating attendance of a service in a village church with the height of virtuousness. And, as tolerant and respectful of others’ belief systems as I am, sometimes, I must say my faith in a certain type of Christian wearing t-shirts with verses from the Bible was cruelly dented when I saw a walking billboard quoting Jeremiah 30:17 – King James Bible version: For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD; because they called thee an Outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after – trying to barge into a hot-dog queue.

But I do do that equation a bit. Which is an odd virtue to have at the top of my virtue Christmas tree. That the personified height of virtue should be the type that turns up at a village church religiously – boom, boom – of a Sunday morning. This moral nirvana is located, in my head, in some corner of England I don’t know but can ascribe all the attributes of a virtuous idyll to. Probably in Lincolnshire. Near Spalding somewhere. And the church would be full of kind Lib-Dem-voting types who popped in on their old neighbours and bird-watched and wore greens and browns and whose wickedest ever misdeed was failing to enter a cake in the village fête. The men would all look like this and take The Telegraph – or would Lib-Dem-voters take something else? – and like cricket and obviously prefer rugby to football and drink real ale – but not to excess, although perhaps they’d allow themselves one half-squiffy evening three times a year – and be active in local politics and drop in on new residents of the village to make them feel welcome – probably taking along the cake they’d forgotten to enter in the village fête and a bottle of surprisingly good white wine that they’d bought when staying at their house in Brittany – and speak less-than-execrable French and be thinking of learning Spanish or Italian and think Britons’ lack of knowledge of foreign languages was worthy of despair and that knowing a few words of the local language can really open up the culture and the locals react so differently (as they are packing their goods into the removal van from the house you’ve just bought off them) and know how to use a gun, though would approve of Britain’s gun laws and would drive within the speed limit but cycle where possible and support local businesses and certainly never inhale and be an accomplished, considerate lover. (Too depressed to describe his wife now. Lucky bitch.)

But a half-logical moral idyll to create because it’s as far-removed a life from my own as I can imagine within the same cultural boundaries. And I can’t think what the perfect moral man from my other two worlds – Russia and Germany – would quite be like. Except that the Russian moral paragon would ruin things, for me, culturally, by lecturing folk on how this was moral perfection and everyone else should live like this too and the German would be proud of his beer consumption and probably like to do things in the bedroom that my Lib-Dem-voter would have to wrinkle his brow at.

Because the time of year has made me feel particularly unvirtuous. Not that I feel guilt – oh gosh. I did one of those word-cloud things for this site and, apart from me, me, me, narcissistic drivel, public masturbation, me, me, me again, the word ‘guilt’ came up. Bugger – at calendric hedonism, really, but I do see the picture of the boys from Swing Out Sister, which I carry around with me as something to aspire to at all times, slowly erasing itself like Marty’s family photo in Back to the Future. Day upon day of wanton drinking. And not doing anything virtuous, i.e. work, which would nudge my moral compass closer to Lincolnshire before you knew it.

But that’s the festivities done. No time for any more fun till the vernal equinox at the very earliest. The weekend can just jolly well skip straight past my hard-nosed threshold and hand over my fun-ration to the wonderful couple next door. (Yes, they did complain on Christmas Day, since you ask.) It’s working my fingers to the bone from now till 2017.

Though I’m not sure if it’s the current alignment of the planets or the global economic crisis meaning we have to make cuts where we can, but my 2009 virtue-gap from marauding, self-destructive, bawdy, loud-mouthed, braying arse-hole to sedate, glasses-wearing (and my vision is perfect), Schubert-listening, moralising, tutting tosser with the demeanour and sartorial acumen of a Latin teacher is now down to a single DWB*.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I make the 2010 New Year’s honours list.

*days-without-booze