I check in with Udgewink about once a week. He was my first friend in Blogland. He lives in Stuttgart and we started reading each other’s blogs in October 2004. I feel like I know him even though I wouldn’t recognize him in a line-up. He took this gorgeous picture on a recent trip home to Canada. Here is a recent post that I enjoyed.

Drunk Blogging

Hello and welcome, my dears.

It’s
2:13 am Saturday morning / Friday night and I’ve just got home from an
impromptu party-type event, my hands smell of perfume and cocoanut oil.
Ageing Yuppie
called me up three hours ago to ask whether I wanted to drop in for a
drink. I said no (too tired, too late) so he handed the phone to Jana,
the young (very) woman who is subrenting his apartment while he is at
the college Oop Noorth. She said that it’s her birthday, I should
please come by for a glass to celebrate. Such an invitation is of
course compulsory, one may not refuse a birthday drink. Three hours and
far too many glasses later, I’m home again drinking water and cooking
hot chocolate (the party continues without me).

Jana is Russian,
studying something that I can never remember, pretty and sweet and very
high-maintenance. She requires constant attention: not just that she
dances on the table but that we must all watch and applaud. It’s at
moments like this that I realize that I am indeed getting older: the
young have so much energy, and they waste it on such futile things!
Pascal famously said that our miseries derive from being unable to sit
alone in a quiet room, and this is something that one can hope to
acquire with age. (AY hasn’t got there yet, he is if anything even more
frenetic than when we met twenty years ago.)

Still, a happy and
pleasant event. It’s nice to associate with the young once in a while,
strenuous as they are. I got into a long discussion with a marketing
type from a Quite Well-Known Automobile Company about the meaning of
life, and why he is unhappy in a job that contradicts all of his
ideals, values, hopes and ambitions. Well. I tried as politely as
possible to suggest that maybe his unhappiness is a thing worth
noticing, and that the discrepancy between his job and his ideals etc
might just worth considering. What benefit it a man that he gain the
whole world but lose his soul? to coin a phrase.

Actually it’s
not about age as such. (Stop reading, please! The drunkenness has
turned from merriment to pontificating (an interesting word, actually:
"to speak like a Pope." Before the Reformation, when the whole of
Christianity was Catholic, it must have been the highest of
compliments).) Jana is probably no younger than Noorster who said
"Given a choice, I’d rather watch an interesting biopic on TV than go
out to drink alcohol and rub up against strangers" and "if I fall
asleep after midnight, I’m knackered the next day." N has already
figured it out, while J and AY are still worrying about the
externalities.

Enough. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.