Tick-Tock...

...If there were to be a greater pleasure in life than drinking absinthe, it would have to be drinking absinthe whilst arm-wrestling.

This I can affirm having combined the two on an otherwise dull and blameless evening last week at the hotel. The drinking of the absinthe - the modern, safe if yet still highly potent variety - can of course be a solitary pastime, though logic dictates that it takes two to wrestle arms.

There is a natural sequence as well as a pairing here, for one cannot imagine a group of arm-wrestlers suddenly saying "Hey chaps, let's wreck our minds as well as our bodies with a spot of serious sauce."

That, though, a group of absinthe drinkers might take it into their befuddled heads to decide, after the third glass of the jolly green stuff, that a dash of arm-wrestling was just the ticket is entirely plausible if not totally rational. ('Post-absinthe rationality' of course being something not even the most tortured of French philosophers could invent. Existentialism, why not especially if you are French? Post-structuralist modernism - or minimalism - I forget which - one might at a pinch. But P-AR, not a hope.)

Though you would be forgiven for not noting it from the external frame, the Rev. Palladas - my own good self even - is a nifty wrestler of the upper limb. Certainly not in muscle strength do I claim to excel, though perhaps in technique not a dullard. It is simple, sheer bloody-minded determination not to lose that sees me through on most if not all occasions.

Show me an arm-wrestling table and watch a beserker appear - especially of course when fueled with said absinthe, the veritable 'angel dust' of the alcohols. Eyes will pop, bones even will snap before I concede defeat. Odd perhaps, but there you have it. A 'Red Line' I cannot cross - unlike of course that craven-to-the-last T. Blair, who will swear red is green if it helps the cause of the moment!

Concentration is key. Let slip for a moment one's focus on the job - quite literally - in hand and one is doomed. Being distracted is most definitely not the thing. And yet that night, though winning hands down (you see how rich in arm-wrestling imagery is our language) I could not be but seriously thrown off course by the most peculiar sight imaginable: that of dear Graham Norton, the charming Alice Cooper and the much-admired [See several previous] Miss Sandi Toksvig seated together on a sofa, having what was clearly a darn good friendly chat.

Was I mad? Had the absinthe - though not of the wormwood type - mashed my mind utterly? No, not as such. For it was on the hotel bar television that one saw this happy trio. As the sound was turned off one could not say what was their merry subject of conversation, though clearly all three were having a hoot. You can see why even: in their respective ways they have cornered much of any market of human whimsy you might care to conjure.

So although technically their presence was a potentially fatal distraction, the very surreality of it was such as to add yet further fuel to the already blazing fighting fire. World gone mad indeed, but precisely as I would wish it to be: a most happy and gracious insanity that if adopted as a world programme would restore peace, harmony and good nonsense to suffering humanity in a trice.

One, though, must keep a balanced view here as with so much. I am, as said previously [See indeed several previous] among the foremost of Miss Toksvig's admirers. Today, however, I do find myself a little let down by the lady - though it must be said in a way that has me the more chortling. For she writes in the column of the day - the Sunday Telegraph - of a certain stressful situation that has left her with an involuntary tick [sic] in her eye.

I have had even to write in person to admonish this particular and peculiar error - probably occasioned by the modern illiterate sub-editor rather than by the author herself one imagines. For the notion of something akin to a captive flea - for how else might one interpret an 'involuntary tick'? - trapped in the Toksvig line of vision is just too, too bizarre to countenance.

Almost as daft a supposition even as absinthe drinking arm-wrestlers, I am sure you will agree.