And so to bed, but clearly not to sleep, not in the company of Commander Ruth, the world’s most dangerous submissive, and anyway, who needs to dream of white ghosts and rows and rows of teeth every night? That will not leave you rested. Perhaps excess will, if you give it time and money. I try it on for size: more and more of everything. The good doctors of Athens will happily prescribe for a well-to-do patient the very latest in mood management and sleeping pills, of course, but recently I’ve come to believe that the best defences are still the natural ones. Over the next week I drink Armagnac from the sacroiliac crest of an heiress and Yquem from the suprasternal notch of a heptathlete. I hire in as many plasma screens as will fit in my party space and obtain pre-release copies of Bekele’s must-have video game—it’s called Witnessed , a sort of Orwellian Lara Croft tunnel-trawler with bleak, hypnotic landscapes that seem to watch you right back—and host the all-Greece launch party, with hot tubs. We play a marathon—the idea is to reach the level cap, be the first in the world. I have no idea if we actually achieve this in the end, but it’s a huge deal, with press, because this kind of thing makes money like cows make shit. Drunk and button-mashing as if this work of ludic art was a Missile Command coin-op from the eighties, I accidentally unlock an Easter egg in the game: the figure representing me slips through a hidden door into a kind of insane control centre, a room full of secrets. Apparently this demonstrates that I have mad skillz, because someone writes the words on my stomach in purple lipstick and sambuca.