I for one will be very disappointed if Monique doesn’t change her profile picture to this.
With Michelle back in town, we headed down to 51% Bourbon for some drinks.
After 13 months, the drought is over. What better way to celebrate, with some champagne (pronounced sham-pag-en I believe).
I couldn’t be bothered to take my camera to last month’s Wendy House. But we did enjoy a few drinks beforehand under threat of extermination.
That’s life on a planet in a binary star system.
Having pushed back my leaving do at Buzz Sports to accommodate the other four people who were leaving, it turned out it handed directly on top of the first social event of the new organisation I’m now consulting with.
I know what you’re thinking – the obvious thing to do would have been to constantly make excuses about going to the bathroom and then rapidly running between venues pretending I was simultaneously attending both events in some kind of sitcom setup.
Unfortunately, I eventually opted for something far more pedestrian. Having worked round Sandinista, The Lounge, Mojo’s, Fibre, Revolution and Call Lane Social with Gooroo, I headed over to Maven to find the Buzz crew. By this point (11pm) there were only two of them left standing – Simundo and Ian.
As it turns out, Maven is quite a find (and number two in the best kept secrets in the UK, according to Ian). They don’t seem to have cocktail menus – I just went up to the bar and told them what ingredients I liked and two minutes later I was sipping on a very nice raspberry based long drink. Delicious. Further investigation is definitely required.
That’s right, I have a photo of Elettra – with a drink!
Last weekend we held our house warming party for our new place. Despite the continued and so far unstoppable process of ageing which continues to haunt us, we managed to keep going until gone 5am and managed to polish off around twenty bottles of various spirits – not to mention George getting through two vase-size snakebites.
Alcohol is an interesting creature. As Gijsbert points out, it makes us feel really ill every Saturday morning and yet we all go out and drink it again next Friday night. That is in large part due to how addictive alcohol is, and leads it to be classified as a more dangerous drug than cannabis, LSD, ecstasy and many others.
Some groups are so afraid that their members will go off the rails if they drink the Devil’s Nectar that they are banned completely. Some groups are even so intolerant that they refuse to enter buildings which serve alcohol, even if they aren’t participating themselves.
A few months ago, I started to wonder if my life would actually be better without alcohol. I don’t really get hangovers because I always take a lot of time to sober up before going to bed, but that none the less brings its own problems with sleep deprivation on school nights.
I hadn’t wondered enough to actually give it a go, but as a result of recent events I ended up giving up alcohol as a side effect of some health issues. I also have up caffeine and have made a few other small changes to my diet and lifestyle as well.
However, having been trying all this for a few months now, it turns out that it isn’t any better.
Actually, your life is much better with alcohol. Alcohol is something which can bring real, measurable benefit to our lives. Of course, if you abuse it there are consequences, much like chocolate, credit cards, gambling, vitamins and basically everything in life ever. But enjoyed responsibly, drinking alcohol is really a pleasurable experience.
So learn from my experience. Alcohol is great and there is little to be gained from this clean living nonsense. As with everything else in life, the best path is responsible usage.
This month’s Wendy House happened to fall on Viv’s birthday, so following some pre-drinking where we finally got to use the shots roulette wheel, we headed to The Old Bar for some birthday cake, before heading into Wendy House.
Never being one to conform, Josh decided to throw a house party, but not at his house where you would expect, but rather on Call Lane.
He was joined by Rebecca who was also throwing a house party of her own at the time but decided to leave that to come into town as well.
So we hit SoBe, which is apparently short for South Beach and despite the fact that you can see it from the window of my apartment, I’ve never actually been to. Or heard of. But apparently it has just renamed, and I had heard of its old name.
It was an OK place, your standard small trendy bar in the Call Lane area type place, drinks were what you would expect in the area and service was surprisingly snappy for a busy Saturday night bar – if only that could be said for so many of the other bars in the area.