When your decent opinions war within your breast so that - to another - you appear to lack all conviction, do you hold onto a turning center by saying to yourself, "well then, I must be among the best"? Or do you instead, like myself, drink until all internal contradictions are drowned in the rough tides of bestial pleasure, until the ape rises in the man and I can forget for a little while the problems to which men are heir?

Last night, at least two people turned off the twenty-first century and did their level best to return briefly to the garden, secure - if also perhaps unhappy - in the knowledge that the world would very likely still be there in the morning.

Or, to put it another way, sometimes you just have to get drunk