I wanted to get a new relaunched barbelith up today, but the site is so far away from being completed, that I just can’t. Which is a pity. Happy new Millennium people. Use it well.
Last night in a nutshell:
- 6:00 Start to get tense about various people not having contacted me about what I should be doing in the evening. Tension a direct result of over self-analysis in the face of large NUMBER.
- 7:00 Hear that the party that I thought started around 11pm, I shouldn’t be going to until 1pm having done SOMETHING ELSE. Desperately try to think of something else to do. Decide to join Toby in Central London.
- 7:30 Arrive in Central London – look around in an incredibly scared way. Trawl through mud to find several people I know sitting on inflatable sofa in Jubilee Gardens overlooking the Houses of Parliament and next to the London Eye ferris wheel.
- 8:00 Already slightly bored, I am delighted to see that something is actually going to happen as Tony Blair sends a signal from somewhere in London which starts the London Eye amid explosions of fireworks. It is very cold. There is a flyby by Concorde which is extremely noisy but completely invisible as the cloud is so heavy.
- 9:00 It’s even more cold now, and muddy and boring. Nothing is happening. Drink is scarce (which is partly my fault), but the absolute absence of anything to actually do is beginning to drive me insane.
- 9:30 My friend Fenner has a girlfriend called Sally. She has been wandering around for about an hour and a half trying to find him. She finds us just as he ducks off. She goes ballistic. He comes back, she is a pussycat. Women are weird.
- 10:00 People say that they want to walk around rather than sitting on inflatable sofa in middle of mud. Toby looks at them as if they are insane. Fenner admits to me that he is incredibly bored.
- 11:00 One hour to go and I suddenly realise that getting away from this central location after the fireworks is going to be appalling and will result in me being cold and bored for even longer than I feared. I suddenly decide that this is intolerable. Toby tells me that if I go anywhere else I will completely miss midnight. I decide that I don’t care and go for a wander. The crowds are incredible, heaving all over Central London. I go to Waterloo tube station, but they won’t let me in. I go to Waterloo bridge and it is closed for the night. They tell me that three bridges away you can cross the river. It’s half an hour walk which would leave me in completely the wrong part of London. I am trying to get to Bond Street to go to the party earlier than I was supposed to.
- 11:30 Getting increasingly convinced that I will miss midnight (but finding the running around much more interesting and warming than the sitting around) I finally find access to Waterloo Underground. It is all clean and new down underground, and almost completely empty because people are trying to get INTO London rather than out of it.
- 11:45 I arrive at Bond Street feeling mildly smug and wander down the road to the party. When I arrive I discover that it is a very small party which followed on from some kind of dinner party. I know almost no one there, but they are all really nice. The flat is astonishing and filled with very expensive looking period oil paintings, a dining room with dark mirrored walls and lots of strange corridors. Everyone is smoking and eating satsumas. I smoke a cigar for the first time ever and feel mildly ridiculous.
- 12:00 Midnight comes and I watch it on TV, while explaining to everyone exactly why I left the events we are watching in order to be at their party. They all ask about the people I am supposed to be there with. I look slightly sheepish and hope to myself that they will arrive shortly. Three major figures emerge at this point, Tiffany, who is a friend of a friend and extremely drunk (and who keeps changing the music on the stereo before her previous selection has even ended), Annie and her boyfriend Matt. Annie and Matt are both incredibly beautiful, with Matt being short with scruffy looking hair (which endears him to me immediately).
- 1:00 Kate and Nick arrive. Nick takes over immediately although he knows no one there at all. I gratefully recede into the background a little and try not to say anything too stupid. Kate and I play around like lunatics, giggling at straight men’s inability to dance.
- 2:30 I try to hide by myself for a while as I am suddenly tired and wishing that Max was with me, which he clearly isn’t. Get a bit maudlin. Three people come and insist on talking to me. I smile in a rather pale fashion and wish they would go away.
- 3:00 Kate, Nick and Tiffany decide that we should all go down to the river (which I left a mere 3 hours earlier). We never make it. Tiffany is too drunk and lears suggestively at every man we pass. Many of them lear back. Nick decides to be very ebullient to passers by. Kate handles everything extremely well, but is basically tolerating them. We walk around Central London for an hour without actually getting anywhere near the Thames.
- 4:00 Get on a night bus and arrive home around 4:30am!
- 11:30 Wake up. Have horrible lavatory related dietary problem. Decide to blame Toby’s cold sausages from many hours before. Go back to sleep.