Champagne Charlies

New Year in the big smoke, with Nigel, TCO, Christine, Chris and various supporting characters.

Our subject turned up at Nigel and TCO's flat rather early and emboldened by the presence of another man Nigel quickly proposed that the two of them pop out to a local boozer and leave TCO to finishe the preparations. Unfortunately the local boozer was shut so they wandered the streets before finding the Windsor Castle.

A London venue web-site offers the following review, "Windsor Castle is a pub that offers stripteases from Thursday to Saturday in an upstairs bar with a separate entrance. In the main bar area, they provide a pool table and a big screen TV showing premiership football as additional entertainment. Catering for private parties of up to 80 guests is available upon request." Frankly we do not care to add to this.

A swift pint of guiness before moving onto the Neeld Arms. The Neeld Arms optimistically claims it is in St John's Wood but in reality it is is in Kilburn and is an old fashioned Irish Republican boozer, just right for a couple of public schoolboys who at least had the foresight to realise their impending doom and bailed out sharpish.

Two more restorative pints in a more upmarket bar (by this stage your correspondent's shorthand was already getting a bit shaky so we regret we cannot recall the name) followed before they returned to the flat.

Already mildly tipsy the Champagne etc. began to flow with gay abandon. The plan was to head to the Metropolitan for beers and the countdown to the New Year and the first part was executed (i.e. they got there) but, frankly, it was rubbish. Nigel said it was too old and he just wanted to talk to people (terribly middle-aged) whilst our lad just thought the clientele were rancid and so they bailed out back to the flat for more Champagne etc. to see the New Year in with Jools Holland and friends (including Katie Melua) on the TV in the background.

At some stage your correspondent's notepad must have fallen in a drink as our notes of the latter part of the evening are a little lacking in detail but we can report that our lad fell asleep in the early hours sat in a corner of the room snoring away with his eyes open.

New Year's Day was, as usual, a day of recovery punctuated by lunch with Katie Melua (passim) and others in St John's Wood. Nigel rather ruined our lad's efforts to appear entirely ignorant of who she was by opening the conversation with, "We watched you on telly last night."

Very graciously Nigel and TCO allowed him to stay another night as he was in no fit state to drive back and they all slumped in front of the goggle box and watched some rubbish films.