On December 23rd<\/sup> my sister and I went for drinks at the Park Hyatt bar. It was a festive atmosphere, the people within kind of drunk and excitable. Sitting there I had the feeling of being a child at an adult Christmas party, a place where authority figures whom had always seemed predictable and contained were now wild-eyed and touchy, their laughter and perfume mysteriously amplified.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Over at the bar sat an older man, his hand inside the dress of a young, very drunk woman. Her body was bending and curving into his, grinding and pressing, the bare flesh of her back exposed like a wound. Careful and still as a predator, he was looking past her incoherent eyes to another point in the evening, waiting.<\/p>\n Another man, probably near 60, had a mop of charismatic grey hair and carried with him the manner that suggested a confident expectation that things were going to work out in his favour. He\u2019d talk to anybody, fully expecting that they\u2019d be happy, even flattered, to chat and then move tables to accommodate him. Familiar in an indistinct way and able to immediately establish a hierarchy within the place, he had the aura of celebrity.<\/p>\n He turned out to be John McDermott, a Scottish-Canadian tenor and sort of middle of the road performer that your parents might really like.<\/p>\n