Like an increasing number of niminy-piminy Europeans, Americans bracket drinking with gambling and whoring, as deeds to be done in the dark. For myself, I have no shame and don't have to steal off to Tuscany or the Caribbean to be able to drink guiltlessly in the sunlight. This casts me as a freak in a lunch-time world where the fires of anything vinous are extinguished by spritzing sprays of mineral water and the blaze of anything hearty is drizzled in balsamic vinegar or damped down with blanketing weeds of radiccio, lollo rosso and rocket. Christ, we live in arse-paralysingly drear times. [..] It's one thing for a man to find, as he ages, that the generations below him are trashier, more promiscuous, less disciplined and a whole continent more pig-ignorant and shit-stupid than his own - every generation makes that discovery - but to sense all around you a creeping puritanism, to see noses wrinkle as you stumble by, to absorb the sympathetic disgust of the pink-lunged, clean-livered, clear-eyed young, to be made to feel as if you have missed a bus no one ever told you about that's going to a place you've never heard of, that can come a bit hard. All those pi, priggish Malvolios going about the place with 'do you mind, some of us have got exams tomorrow, actually' expressions on their pale prefector-ial little faces. Vomworthy.