So yesterday started late and ended even later. I’m getting to know the post-midnight vomit comet trains well now.

Spent the morning working from home thanks to a very broken railway. Two trains had had an upset somewhere just east of London and between them pulled down the wires. The way they said it on the radio you’d have sworn they’d been fighting. Anyway, they were agreeing with the railway web site that you should avoid all travel unless absolutely necessary, so I sat at home and wrote my editorial and did my best to change my car insurance. There was something fairly surreal about sitting around on hold at an Indian call centre listening to Gareth Gates singing Spirit in the Sky.

So much for not travelling, though. At 2 I braved the elements and walked to the station in the drizzle (I’d not seen the car in three days thanks to getting home too late to get it out of the car park). I arrived on the platform just as a train pulled in and 27 minutes was stepping off it in London. That counts as a record.

I was in the office by three and in Porters with Kathryn, Mark and Ross by half six. I’d sworn I’d never go back there after leaving PCW. In fact, I even gave away my founder member’s card to Dylan on my last day and told him to practice forging my signature for cheap drinks at the bar.

We took tables in the basement and slowly the group grew. First it was Will, and then Vinnie, who reminded us of the good-will egg disaster of the night before.

Among the guinea fowl and sushi they were serving at the gallery, there had been fried quails eggs, balanced on dainty little quails-egg omelettes. But omelettes aren’t as good as plates. They don’t keep their shape and when you’re trying to hold them and a drink at the same time you’re bound to drop one. And so it was that on my sixth or seventh one of the tiny fried eggs slipped off and bounced across the floor, coming to a halt beside a group of guests, a moment away from being squashed into the polished wooden floor.

So of course we scooped it up with an invite. And the invites looked like postcards. And the exhibition was… postcards. So when we put it discretely by the edge of the skirting of a wall full of pictures it took less than two minutes for a curator to assume the whole thing had dropped out of the display. With a look of horror on his face, he pulled on soft gloves and picked up the invite and dropped egg with the utmost care, then carried them off to some important looking place beyond the doors.

Sophie did her best to pick up a South African at the bar. He carried her drink, but soon got scared when she gave him her card with ‘call me’ on the back … and mine with ‘or me’ scrawled on the reverse - the only way she could think to work out if he was gay. Probably pouncing on him with a scream as he came out of the loo was not the best move.

After that we resorted to sending far less embarrassing messages around the pub by Bluetooth. Sending them off at random and then watching to see who gets them actually gets quite amusing if you’ve had enough to drink.

What time we left, I don’t know. All I remember was I was starving and I hit bed at the time that is all too rapidly becoming a regular.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2003 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.