All Night Long

On Saturday I headed up to London to celebrate an old school friend's birthday. As I only had a few pages left of The Code Book, I decided to make a start on not the end of the world, a Christopher Brookmyre book given to me on permanent loan while I was up in Scotland for last Christmas. The book seems to contain many references to religion, illustrated by the Bill Hicks quote before the prologue:

Christianity's such a weird religion.
The image you're brought up with is that
eternal suffering awaits anyone who
questions God's infinite love.

I certainly managed to get into the book easily and it made the one and a half hour, 3-change journey by train pass very quickly. After dumping my stuff at a friend's house in East Dulwich we set off to get a taxi over to Fulham Broadway. While we waited, we stopped in at The Green which seemed to be a cool little place serving food aswel as drinks.

It made a refreshing change travelling over-ground through London since I usually travel underground without giving it much thought. Although at times we were stuck in traffic it was great to go racing alongside the Thames and see a bit more of the city.

On arrival we headed up to zimzun, a rather quirky Thai restaurant where we were going to be eating. I've read mixed reviews and while I enjoyed it I can sympathise with a lot of the negative comments, although being in a group of ~20 people didn't make it my average eating experience. Mind you, I don't normally see Leslie Ash when I go out to dinner either (and once word got around there were plenty of predictable comments). Afterwards we stopped in at the bar next door for a few drinks and to get aquainted with the randoms sat on the opposite side of the table at dinner.

The final venue for the night was purple, part of Chelsea Village at Chelsea FC. Entrance (£15) and drinks (beer £4, mixer £6) were expensive compared to what I'm used to paying, but despite looking rather empty when we arrived the place soon filled up (probably to the capacity of 600) so the prices obviously don't put people off. Some of the crowd I was with thought the atmosphere was too pretentious, but I had a fun time (what does that say about me I wonder?) and there wasn't even a hint of trouble that I could see. Probably had something to do with the fact that most of the people in there were women. Which was nice.

Time went pretty fast and before we knew it Lionel Richie was ironically singing us the last song of the night, All Night Long. Is that supposed to be funny? We got a cab back to Dulwich surprisingly easily with a minimal amount of squabbling between females.

I learned two things later that night:

1) chips are always a better alternative to a kebab
2) I've got to stop falling asleep in my clothes