The Book of Sifty

One big mama 5:03AM

Right report since the weekend?. Well Friday night was Eric's birthday. He's the ripe old age of 26. There were beers and party poppers outside Henrys bar. Then a taxi up to yet another pub in the burbs that I've never been to. There seem to be a lot of local bars out in the middle of the suburbs around here. (Although these are never suburbs NZ style, think more Coronation Street). Every few streets there will be some little pub that is more like stepping into somebody's living room, than a bar. Kicking out time rolled around and it was off to the 'Curry Queen'. (For some reason we didn't get there till 12, so what happened to the hour since closing time I'll never know, since geographically the pub was pretty close) Curry Queen isn't anything near as dire as it sounds, and provided fine food, well okay I don't know how much the beer intake had helped, but it tasted very fine at the time.. and they had steamed towels which I always rate.

Saturday I was planning to head into London early and do some window shopping, before a leaving thing for my friend Mike. But for some reason the day didn't kick off till about 12. By the time everything fell into place, and I'd recovered my commuting bike form the center of town it was 3pm, and it wasn't worth racing into London. I wandered to the place I'd been staying previously, where most of my stuff is still, and grabbed my CD player for the train ride. The train takes about 50 minutes, if you catch the express one to Kings Cross. Then you have to deal with the tube, which can take a lot longer, depending on precisely where you want to go.

My friend Mike doesn't think he's leaving the country, he claims its just a holiday. He's off to France then Spain, then Portugal. So most of us think it unlikely he'll come back. Anyway Mike (another one) and Jane came down from Oxford, and myself from Cambridge to spend Saturday and Sunday hanging out with Mike before he left. From Mikes flat we all piled back onto the tube to head off to some party. Joined by Craig, a mate from NZ, who is sleeping on Mikes couch (and paying '20 per week!). Mikes friend Katy, who came extreme punting with us in Cambridge, and Marcus who is a flatmate of Mikes.

Rather bizarrely this was a party full of people from Wellington, mostly the Hutt, and a couple from my secondary school. Scary.

Much more fun than the party was making it back through London. As I'm sure everybody knows London is big. For a smallish town boy like me, incomprehensibly massively stupidly big!!. We managed the last tube from the place we were staying, but about halfway back in to central London that train stops and you have to change trains. So the train stopped, everybody else on the train got out and ran off into the station. About 2 minutes later we realised they were probably running to the last train out of that station. Dang!. So up onto the street and into a night bus. This was about 1am by now. Katy decided she had to go pee and went on to the lower floor of the bus to find out how far till we had to change, mike followed her down. The bus stops, then moves away again. We see Katy and mike standing on the footpath. Whoops!. 15 minutes later the bus stops at a terminal and we get off. After some time we find the next bus, one that should take us closer to home, when that shows up it contains Mike and Katy. Excellent. After yet another bus later, about 2:30am we show up at Mikes flat. A mere two and half hours after leaving the party!

Sorry I missed your party Ash, especially the smoke free aspect. Good call!. Could have come up with a wicked mask too. Hope you're feeling better!