There’s nothing worse – except injustice, poverty and gallstones – than ruining ones New Years Eve celebrations by getting horribly drunk on the evening of the 30th December. I didn’t do that, but I did the next worst thing; I got up at 6.30am this morning to accompany Jenny to the Indian Embassy on the Aldwych so she could get her working visa for her imminent trip. “Why did you do that, you fool, why didn’t you just stay in bed,” I asked myself as I blearily staggered out of the house while it was still dark and slipped on a discarded crisp packet. When we eventually got there, we discovered 250 people who were slightly better at getting up early in the morning than we were, and the line snaked around the corner and eastwards for some distance, offering the disgruntled and impatient queuers the chance to watch people tucking into a sumptuous breakfast at the Waldorf Hotel opposite.

We joined the queue, but were too tired, annoyed, annoyed and tired to bother “keeping each other company”, and we stood there in silence, shuffling a bit. Eventually I got bored – it wasn’t my passport that was going to get spruced up, after all – and I wandered off to buy a newspaper and a coffee. On returning, I found that the line was finally moving, and we eventually stood scant metres from the side door of India House, looking at a memorial stone which read “Here fell Jim Morrison”, and had a small bunch of flowers sitting on top. “Obviously not THE Jim Morrison,” I said. “Obviously,” said Jenny. But I like the idea of a splinter-group of Doors fans who can’t be arsed to make the annual pilgrimage to the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and they just stick a pot plant outside the Indian Embassy every July 3rd. (It turns out that this Jim was an off-duty detective constable who was stabbed to death in 1991, although I had to use all my Google-based off-duty detective constable skills to find out this information.)

She got her visa at midday, so we hit the sales. I bought an egg sandwich in Pret A Manger that the bastards hadn’t even seen fit to discount.