The Frankathon

This week is looking set to be a week of lurking at home, slobbing on the sofa working through a pile of recently purchased DVDs, having long middle-of-the-day dozes on The Infamous Man-Eating Sofa..... and just generally recovering......

Last week was a week of wild excess.

Big Frank, lynchpin of The Three Amigos (the triumvirate of 'intellectual' drinkers who were the main focus of my life for my first couple of years in China), was back in town.

He was here for 8 days, staying with me in my apartment.

I think I only barely survived the experience because I was out of town on the day he arrived (had to arrange for a Chinese friend to pick him up from the airport and let him in here), and because I wimpily wrote myself a 'sick note' excusing myself from his final night of debauch. For the 6 days in between, I was staying out until 1am, 2am, 3am every night. On 3 of those days, I had to get up early for work the next day (a particularly fraught last week at the office: end of financial quarter and approach of week-long Chinese national holiday!). On each of those days, drinking - heavy drinking - began in the early evening and continued until late. On the days when I didn't have to work, the drinking began by late afternoon. On at least a couple of occasions I got very heavily stoned as well.

Frank himself stayed out even later. He's fond of sport on TV (apparently there's some big rugby event going on in Europe at the moment; it's of absolutely no interest to me, but it was keeping Frank diverted throughout the night in various sports bars around town). He's also fond of Russian 'ladies of the night', many of whom he is (he claims) sufficiently friendly with to merit freebies (he has a strong ethical objection to paying prostitutes for sex - he's a curious man altogether!). He was, in general, not getting back here until 6am or 7am, and I didn't like to enquire too closely what he'd been up to in the interim since I last saw him.

Luckily, this meant I didn't have to worry about trying to keep him entertained during the day, because he would usually be sleeping in until at least 3pm or 4pm. Unluckily, this meant that by the time I got back knackered from a 9 or 10-hour stint at the office, he was raring to go again.

I hadn't realised he would expect - nay, demand - that I accompany him out on the lash every single bloody night. I hadn't realised that every one of these nocturnal excursions would extend so far beyond midnight. It was naive of me, I suppose. But there we are: I had supposed that, but for one or two token "good old days" sessions on nights when I didn't have to work the next day, we'd just have dinner or an early evening drink in my 'hood, and then I'd be able to despatch him off to wreak his mayhem around Sanlitun on his own. How foolish I was! (And it certainly didn't help that on the heaviest and latest of these evenings, on Friday, I developed a ferocious dose of indigestion which inhibited my drinking and fun that night, and contrived to wake me up the next morning - quite irretrievably, despite my best efforts to hide under the bedclothes denying the daylight creeping around the edges of my blackout curtain - after barely 3 hours' rest. As a consequence of which, I felt like complete SHIT all weekend - exhausted, depressed, cranky, and unsociable. Not to mention hypochondriac about whether my liver is finally packing up!!!)

It's looking set to become an annual event, too - since the Big Man works in South Korea these days, but doesn't particularly enjoy it; and particularly loathes their national holiday, Chuseok (which apparently sucks even more mightily than the Chinese National Day holiday we are suffering here this week); thus he's threatening to come and visit during this holiday every year from now on. Oh dear.....

In the words of Danny Glover: "I'm getting too old for this shit."