Yesterday daytime was nice and relaxed. A late start after a late night, lunch in Galleywood with the cat (who is rapidly losing all of her hair) and then flopping around at home until it was time to catch the half five train to London. It’s ages since I’ve been on a weekend train, and I’d forgotten how fast they went. Can’t have been much more than twenty minutes from home to town; a far cry from the 40-odd it takes on a weekday morning.

Met Sal, Dan and their friends in Waxys. I’d not seen most of them since Dan’s birthday last summer, so there was the inevitabe name re-learning before we wandered on to eat Chinese in a restaurant that had very cat-like dead ducks hanging up in its window.

We sat around a three-foot wide Lazy Susan that became more and more a source of amusement as the pile of empty bottles grew. No sooner had you absent-mindedly put something down than it would have dashed off around the table as someone span the huge glass disc. The camera did the same, working its way quickly around the group, but it seems that somehow Sue ended up in pretty much every picture.

We ordered set menus, in spite of which the food came by the truckload and by the time we’d finished we’d worked our way through about half of it. There was more than enough left on the table to have fed us all over again.

I’m sure they must re-serve it when there’s so much left. In fact, perhaps we’d had someone else’s left-overs in the first place. Very cheap restaurants surely can’t afford to serve so much food without doing the odd bit of creative recycling here and there.

We paid up and went to drink Cosmopolitans in the Backroom Bar. I’d forgotten how sweet they are, or how well they go down. The place was heaving - much like the night we’d had the mag relaunch there, although this time we’d arrived too late to grab the comfy chairs at the back.

We were also too late to have more than one last drink, too, it seemed, as on the strike of 11 the lights went up and the crowd began slowly to disperse. We went with them and got home not long after midnight, on another suspiciously speedy train.

I was in no state for driving, so the car spent the night at the station until this afternoon. Chelmsford is not a pleasant place to be on a Sunday afternoon just before Christmas. The high street was heaving and in spite of the cold some semi-naked girls were prancing around on a rickety-looking stage, drawing a huge crowd that blocked the flow of pedestrian traffic. I suspect secretly everyone was just stood there hoping they’d see one of them die of hypothermia.

They didn’t, of course. Not while I was there, at least.

Mark and Ja came around for dinner and to watch a film, but we ended up doing neither. Ja has to be up at three tomorrow morning for work so instead they had just a quick cup of tea, which ended up taking four and a half hours.

Long enough for the Sound of Music. And then some.

1. Dance the night away
   Who needs to understand the captions when these pictures of Swedish dance bands speak so well for themselves? I've been reading all day and have...
   
   
2. Things that scream in the night
   Baggy eyes. The windows are locked tightly shut, but the things that scream in the meadow wake me. They are being eaten by the foxes....
   
   
3. Friday night…
   ...and I'm all partied out. That's not how the weekend should start. So, let's rewind to Wednesday. That was the night of the S____ party...