How you drink a ‘nose-dive’ is as follows – you ought to know because it is the only way of gagging down the nastier forms of alcohol, like tequila, pulque, Polish vodka at 149° proof, paraldehyde and aircraft de-icing fluid. You fill the shot-glass with the desired but normally undrinkable fluid and place the shot-glass inside a highball glass, which you then fill, to the level of the shot-glass, with iced orange-juice or some other sharply nourishing fluid. Then you drink it all down as one. The juice, unpolluted with whatever lunatic-soup happens to be in the shot-glass, nevertheless marks its horrors during the progress over your palate. As a bonus, at the end, the adhesion of the inner glass fails and it slides down and bumps you gently on the nose – hence the name of the game. The nose-bumping, I may say, in my experience compels you irresistibly to repeat the process. I have no knowledge of other mixtures but I don’t mind telling you that, practised with Pastis and pineapple-juice, you soon find yourself sitting on the carpet, singing songs you didn’t think you knew the words of.

It seems to me, but I cannot be sure, that Jock entered the room in the small hours and, with many a kindly word, showed Eric where his room was; returning later to take me out to the shrubbery and hold my head, then to the shower-bath. And so, I dare say, to bed.

Anyone will tell you that there’s nothing like Pastis to take one’s mind off the things tape-recorders say to you.

11

Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,

Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,

Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet

Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,

Such as thy vision here solicited,

Under the shadow of her fair vast head,

The deep division of prodigious breasts,

The solemn dope of mighty limbs asleep,

The weight of awful tresses that still keep

The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests

Where the wet hill-winds weep?

Ave Atque Vale

For years I had believed that these lines:

‘Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?

Oh that was right, lad, that was brave;

Yours was not an ill for mending,

’Twas best to take it to the grave’

were about a horrified young Edwardian who had discovered that he was homosexual. I am in a position to correct literary history in this matter. The lines are about a horrified chap in early middle age who has discovered, one morning, that he has no head for Pastis. This, you see, was not the common hangover of commerce, it was a Plague of Egypt with a top-dressing of the Black Death. Quite clearly incurable. I touched the bell.