In the true spirit of the holiday period there has been a fair bit of drinking within the past week.

Tuesday was Lil’s birthday and as such we went for our traditional Lil’s birthday celebration steak. She wasn’t there or anything because she was busy having a meal at some other restaurant but it was still excellent steak.

Wednesday afternoon Mike went on some kind of mission to get everyone to the pub for a few pints as it was the final time we would be in before New Year. I still had things to do however so I ended up going out for a drink and then back to work!

Finally Kieran arrived in the evening and we headed out for drinks on Call Lane with Rich and Tim. Fun times.

On Tuesday Rich delivered an updated version of his talk to A-Soc (not that he bothered to update the title slide lol). This was a rather good lead in to the night’s social at Vodka Revolution in which several people managed to work their way through several sticks of shots (a stick being a variety pack of 6 shots)! A messy, messy evening.

On Thursday evening I headed round to Rich’s along with George and Jonni for a Question Time pizza party. Between us we got through about five pizzas, as well as several bottles of win and half of Rich’s carton . This was of course to watch British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the programme.

It was at least an entertaining show if nothing else though was mostly just BNP bashing. Not that we should have expected any less of course but I’m not sure it was the most productive thing to do. As Bill points out, it was half way though the show before someone managed to fit an intelligent comment in – that perhaps the failure of the major parties had led to a rise in BNP support.

In the end though it was essentially a witch hunt which didn’t produce the desired result. If a better course of action as Rich pointed out would have been to ask the panel what their policies on health, education and the economy were so they could be compared side by side.

This would have likely done far more damage than the constant barrage of insults that were thrown at Nick and his party which no doubt made us Guardian readers feel good but actually won him a lot of sympathy and support in other social groups. Will the appearance be a good or bad thing for the BNP? I guess we’ll find out soon.

I was feeling ill on Monday but with work to be done I headed round to Rich’s flat with George to get editing away on Something Good ‘09.

I had already spent three hours the day before on pre-editing and Rich had spent the morning doing some too so luckily we were able to dive straight in and get things done. Even with this big head start it was still 1am by the time we were finished as well as being several bottles of wine later.

The result however was well worth it.

A-Soc social rolled around on Tuesday though despite it being steak night the Cuthbert Brodrick had, somehow, managed to run out of rump and sirloin steak! Luckily we were all ordering mixed grills so it worked out alright in the end.

What followed was a night of long debate and drinking – Rich getting through two bottles of wine by himself! Probably suggested to him by Kate who then proceeded to try and molest him.

As I’ve long maintained, Kate and Rich would make a great couple, they would be just like Will & Grace out of the self-title show. If any further proof were needed just like at what a cute couple they look like when taking faux-wedding photos.

Saturday saw Skeptics in the Pub roll round again with this month’s talk being delivered by Rich on evolution and homosexuality – the talk which he gave on the Thursday of Rationalist Week 2009. As always the talk was excellent and turn out was quite reasonable given it was summer. Good times.

Thursday was an evening of problems. Having left work at a reasonable time to run home and get a shower I phoned Nicola to sort out times for the evening. Which didn’t work because her phone is broken. And her backup phone is lost. That is like a double RAID array failure. I did say that girl was trouble.

Anyway I Facebooked her all the details but she didn’t reply. Running late I decided to run by Parkinson building anyway just to see if she had got the message and turned up but she hadn’t. So I headed off towards Rich’s when I got a phone call from her asking where I was as she was about to get to Parkinson .

Minor problems compared to when we got down to Rich’s and realised that we didn’t actually have a flask for the coffee lol. Rich had left his at Rationalist Week and mine was packed away somewhere but apparently not in my HAG bag so we ended up having to make a short trip to Tesco for some cold drink alternatives as well as some food.

In the end it all worked out rather nicely though as we made it back just in time for Question Time.

After the AGM on Tuesday we headed down to The Victoria for a few drinks before going over to D-Fusion for a bit of karaoke. The usual suspects opened the set and Jonni also did a few numbers plus twenty minutes after I commented to Jonni “I’m just waiting for Rich to get drunk before he opens his set with It’s a Sin” it kicked off with a rendition of a certain Pet Shop Boys number which I’m sure you can guess .

The Thursday before Rationalist Week myself and Rich headed out for our usual Humanist Action Group antics.

Turns out, we’ve solved the problem in like a month . There was hardly anyone out that night which we decided must be down to our excellent work even though we don’t really help to get people off the streets in any way. Go HAG!