One drink too many

The smell of Scotch makes me want to puke. That’s an astonishing thing for a Scot to say. Let’s call it a physical memory; traces of a bender with no recollections to go with the nauseating smell. Our State of Origin friends gathered on Wednesday for food, wine, conviviality and (as it turned out), a fairly subdued evening as our team was soundly beaten. I’d forgotten to get some sparking mineral water or what we…

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A white Christmas for some

Composer Irving Berlin had a habit of staying up all night, writing songs. According to Mark Steyn’s A Song for the Season, Berlin summonsed his secretary one morning in 1940 saying: ‘Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written — heck, I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!’ That tune was White Christmas, which if you think about it, must have been a challenging…

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