I’m renouncing my faith in sobriety

I am doing my bit to curb the nation's binge-drinking culture: I have been on the wagon for six weeks now. The reason I initially gave up was that I had a drunken altercation with my wife in the back of a black cab. As I couldn't remember anything about the episode, I clearly had to mend my ways. I have a sneaking suspicion that my wife made the whole story up and I just fell asleep but how could I disprove her?

There are many upsides to renouncing alcohol: improved memory, improved sleep and you don't overstay your welcome at parties. The downsides are alas equally numerous: you have to endure boring conversations and I drink so much water that I am up half the night. As one wag said, something has to be said for sobriety but very little.

I now face another insurmountable hurdle. I am due to attend a stag night in May. I went for a "dry" run last week with the groom and survived despite sitting in a restaurant all night next to a wine rack laden with bottles. Oh, what exquisite torture.

I know I shouldn't be too self-satisfied, as it's only a matter of time before I fall off the wagon. My relationship to booze is that described in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: "Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why/Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where." One can drink too much from time to time but one never drinks enough. In fact, Omar got it only half right. I would still drink even if I knew where I was going.

* Werner Herzog is famous for taking artistic licence to its extremes: he prefaces documentaries with invented epigrams from Pascal and so on. But his latest Oscar-nominated documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, takes the biscuit. After a screening I attended the other day at the Renoir, there was a Q&A session with one of the subjects of the film, British vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer. "He says on screen that I am wearing a tweed jacket, but I am not," protested Oppenheimer. "It's complete nonsense." As any viewer will testify, Herzog never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

* I am enjoying the Notting Hill bus wars. Supermodel Elle Macpherson, below, is among those campaigning against the re-routing of the number 23 bus along Ladbroke Gardens. Did Elle acquire her nickame "the Body" by running for buses? It is hard to imagine her on any form of public transport. There is a popular adage, attributed to Loeila, Duchess of Westminster, that any man who finds himself on a bus after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life. In Notting Hill, it seems that you are a failure in life if you live anywhere near a bus stop.