A year before Katrina was Catarina – a tropical cyclone that tore across Brazil in late March 2004, demolishing 1,500 homes and damaging tens of thousands of others. A fortnight earlier, in the run-up to the Spanish elections, a series of improvised bombs was detonated on four commuter trains in Madrid. The ten explosions – which the Spanish judiciary blamed on al-Qaeda – killed 191 people and injured another 1,800.
In an underground bar in Soho, London, the talk touched upon such horrors, brushed against them, but not for long enough to feel their heat. The poet Charles Bukowski once wrote: “When you drank, the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” There was no better place to escape the world than the New Evaristo Club, known to its regulars as Trisha’s, or the Hideout.
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