After a day working on various words, up to London for Will’s “This is not a stag do”. Of course it was a stag do - kind of - as it’s inextricably linked to getting married, but without the obligatory tying him to a lamp-post and smearing him in honey, I guess at the same time it wasn’t.

And so we went to Jerusalem on Rathbone Place; so close to the office it was like going in to work for a shift.

London is so different at the weekend to the way it is during the week. It’s full of people who look very out of place; girls on platforms taller than Piper Alpha and Slip Knot t-shirts, late-teen guys risking neck-strain under the weight of gel in their hair, tourists looking lost having just got off the boat-train from Harwich.

Anyhow, Jerusalem. Comfortably full, and uncomfortably loud, so we ended up screaming at each other all night (in the nicest possible way, of course). The whole place is so warm and so red it’s like spending the night inside a smoky womb. At the bottom of the stairs leading to the mens loos there is a machine selling sex toys. Very strange.

It was a very good night. Loads of people there I’d not seen in ages. Ben, for the first time since Mark’s second leaving do. Guy - second time in a week after not seeing each other for about three years. Oh, and Rupert who I pointed at and said ‘who are you?’ I couldn’t remember who he was at all - even when he said about having sat in the same studio as me for so many hours.

To be honest at that point I couldn’t work out whether we’d been doing TV or radio together and so made a complete fool of myself by insisting that we’d never met.

Hmmm…

Anyway, he did move to Italy to write his novel and I’d assumed he wasn’t coming back, which was a semi-acceptable excuse.

Turns out it was a good move, though, as the first draft of the book is finished and we spent the next hour and a half comparing notes and methods and discovering we both have the same problems with the same bits of our stories.

I dropped him a card as he left so we could stay in touch. Now that he’s back in London, it would be good to have a writing partner.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2004 at 11:54 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.