I was down in London at the weekend for a double-header of nights out with Josh and Doug.

With a few hours to kill before meeting Josh on Friday evening, and no particular destination in mind before then, a random stroll of the few miles from Kings Cross to the City turned into an unexpectedly enjoyable tourist odyssey. I pottered through the Oxbridge-esque surroundings of Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn and visited their shared ward, the Temple Church; I ate a juicy steak bap bought from Borough Market in the sun-trap gardens of Southwark Cathedral, then trod on the graves of the great and good in the cathedral itself before finally turning north over Tower Bridge and passing the Tower of London. All in all, it was an edifying and pleasant afternoon’s walk.

Then I met up with Josh and we got drunk as lords. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Josh was in expansive form post-work. We grabbed a couple of Coronas and chatted in Exchange Square in the last of the afternoon sun, along with the masters of a once-diminished but now resurgent universe, all of whom looked disturbingly young. Standing there among the City’s suited and booted finest, it felt a bit like the financial apocalypse must have been precipitated largely by a bunch of newly minted undergraduates.

After the sun had dropped behind the buildings we ate prawns, dolmades and kebabs in a Greek restaurant on the edge of the City, sinking a couple of drinks as we did so; we went on to a bar near Brick Lane for a couple more, then back to another bar in the City for chasers. Our ultimate destination was Abacus, a club back in the City. Josh had been texting a particular female acquaintance of his all night, and his entreaties had met with success: he had arranged to meet her and some of her friends in this particular club. Off we trotted to the club, then, fairly well lubricated.

The queue for Abacus looked rather imposing. To put things in perspective, someone asked me later in the weekend: “Abacus? Isn’t that where PAs and secretaries go to pull rich bankers?” The bouncer sized us up when we reached the front of the queue. I think the fact that I wasn’t wearing a business suit or a slutty dress had given him pause for thought.

“How many have you had?” he asked me bluntly.

“What?” I spluttered in amused (and inebriated) indignation.

“I think you’ve had about three,” he mused.

Josh agreed with him, I agreed with him. We all agreed a lot. Frankly, I was having trouble adding up just how many we’d actually had. ‘Three’ was a convenient fiction, and I wasn’t about to disabuse the doorman of his notion.

“Okay then. In you go.”

Sweet. Our hands were stamped and we made our way downstairs. Into the bowels of hell.

I suppose it wasn’t all that bad, but drunk though I was, I still was not drunk enough to dance to the Ultimate NRG 4 mix of Lady Gaga’s Just Dance and its ilk. I got us a couple of beers and tequila chasers, and then, sadly, I became drunk enough. Josh’s lady arrived with her friends and we alternately danced to this dreadful, dreadful music and tried to chat over the thumping bass. At the end of the night the music switched from yoof to cheese, and at the last we made our way back upstairs and out into the chilly evening to catch the night bus home, whereupon we took it upon ourselves to warn new passengers of the pool of sick that one of our fellow travellers had deposited on the wipe-clean floor.

A good night, then.

* * *

I awoke only moderately hungover. It was, though, a sort of bell-curve hangover that escalated when Josh’s downstairs neighbour started to play some fairly serious dance music at a level that was clearly audible through my camping mattress. It peaked when I had to lever myself upright to take a shower and finally subsided when a can of Irn Bru kindly provided by Josh took hold. Mostly intact by lunchtime or so, we took the tube into town where we went our separate ways: Josh was off to catch the mighty Leyton Orient en famille and I had a few more hours to spend milling around central London before meeting Doug.

I got off the tube at Embankment and emerged blinking into the sun. It was a bright, hot afternoon, and after checking out the noisy, diesel-choked Strand I decided to just kick back in Embankment Gardens for a while. I grabbed a newspaper and some sushi for lunch, stopping at a kiosk in the gardens for a coffee and a brownie to go with them.

“A cappuccino and a brownie, please,” I asked, pointing to a tray of them under the glass counter. The lady behind it reached for one, then hesitated.

“A…brownie?”

What seems to be the problem? I wondered. “Yes. Just there. A brownie.”

“A brownie?” She seemed genuinely mystified as to what I wanted.

“Yes. Right there.” I pointed again.

“Oh!” Her face lit up, and in her East London accent she explained, “You mean a braaahnie!” She put on a hoots-mon Scottish accent. “A brrrownie! A brrrownie! Sorry, sorry,” she chuckled.

Eh.

My coffee, sushi and brahnie kept me going for another afternoon of gentle pottering around and as the heat started to go out of the day I got the tube* over to Whitechapel to meet Doug.

We headed out for a couple of drinks in Stepney then took the train up to London Fields/Hackney, halfway between Doug’s flat and a house party in Stoke Newington we were aiming for. Strolling through the park and down Broadway, it became apparent that ‘Ackney was a full-on hipster breeding ground, with skinny jeans, jaunty pork pie hats and fixed-gear bikes much in evidence.

Oh, the fixed-gear bikes. I had thought that Vancouver was the prototypical fixie playground, but London Fields changed my mind. Every second bike was an artfully distressed steel road bike denuded of its derailleurs, its tattooed fakenger owner lounging nearby with right leg of his skinny jeans rolled up, sucking on a rollie, and chatting up a beautiful Godzilla with her own rusty Dutch city bike leaned carelessly against a nearby wall.

But I digress. We ate massive steaks in an Argentinian restaurany on Broadway before staggering back to the train station, belching and farting all the while, and lolled in a food coma all the way to Stoke Newington.

We found the party, and it was populated entirely by teachers and IT consultants. Happily, this was not as grim as it sounds; we drank beer and were plied with sundry chasers in the form of port & vimto punch and tequila, and the chat was, for the most part, only tangentially related to IT or teaching. There was a trampoline in the back garden — a massive, Olympic-sized (or whatever the accepted unit of trampoline sizing happens to be) beast apparently left there by an old housemate — and as the night wore on, and the booze wore on the partygoers, some of them thought it would be a great idea to have a go on this monster. I declined, and so, I thought did Doug.

Deep in conversation with one of the teachers, my eye was drawn to the sudden arc described by a body hurtling through the air. Oh dear, I thought. Some fool has had a few too many and taken a header off the trampoline.

“Doug!” someone shouted, “are you okay?”

We all rushed over to find Doug in a crumpled, winded and laughing heap on the ground. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said after dusting himself off.

It’s quite possible that the first thing I said in response was, “I’m blogging this.”

* I bought myself an Oyster card on Saturday morning so as to spend less money on otherwise exorbitant tube journeys — now all I have to do is get mugged by a gang of teenagers and complain incessantly about going south of the river and I’ll be indistinguishable from a native Londoner. Apart from the accent.