I’m writing this at 4:44am, having very recently got in from what has been a day of eating, drinking and general randomness.

It all started off fairly normally – arrived at the office at the usual time, then had a few nibbles and played a few rounds of some car racing game on the Playstation (I was shit, and crashed a lot, is all you need to know there). Once everybody had arrived, we headed off to the St Pancras Grand, where we were booked in to have our lunch.

I knew what to expect when we got there, as it was where we’d been the previous year. As was customary, we started off with various platters of seafood being brought to the table. I didn’t touch the oysters, but had some prawns and whitebait, which were nice. Then it came to actually ordering, and I had to try to choose from the menu of various delicious-sounding dishes. I went for smoked salmon to start, followed by a sirloin steak and chips. The steak was lovely – very tasty and not too fatty either. We then moved onto the cheese, where we might have overdone it a bit – I only managed a couple of bits so as not to spoil my pudding, which was an interesting variation on Sticky Toffee. It was more like a cake than a pudding, and despite being served with some mascarpone-type creamy stuff, I couldn’t help thinking it’d have been better with custard, like the treacle sponge I’d had at the Toby Inn the previous night.

All this food was washed down with numerous glasses of my default drink, the Moscow Mule, which basically consists of vodka, ginger beer and a twist of lime. The problem I have is that the more of them I consume, the less able I become to remember where said donkey-type creature hails from. Last year it went through various combinations to end up as a “Donkey Kong”, which confused many barpeople.

I didn’t get as drunk as previous years – after the restaurant we moved to Fluid bar in Smithfield, which was ok but a bit devoid of atmosphere. It was packed when we went in, but soon quietened down a lot. There was a DJ playing various anonymous tunes (the only ones I recognised were “Happy Up Here” by Royksopp, and “LSF” by Kasabian), and it was all Japanese food. Several people were rather drunk at this point, which led to our poor waitress having to do a lot of running around.

From there, we were going to head to 80s bar Reflex near Bank, but on arrival discovered the queue stretched around the block, which we thought unusual for 8pm. Instead, Colin had a bright idea and we went to the high point of the night (literally) – the “Vertigo” champagne bar at the top of the NatWest Tower, or Tower 42 as they call it now. This was similar in layout to the Paramount club at the top of Centre Point, which I visited with a certain Mr Fry, and rather famously got stuck in the lift on the way down. This time, however, there was no such mishap. The only slight issue was that as a champagne bar, they served nothing but champagne, which doesn’t even approach my list of favourite drinks. I ended up with a glass of a mixture called something like a Belini, which was basically champagne with peach juice, which I drank somewhat out of desperation. Shame, as it spoiled an otherwise nice bar, which had great views over the city (once the mist cleared, which it did).

From there we descended to catch some more taxis into town. Most of the remaining people had decided to go for a Chinese, however I quite fancied going for a bit of a b0p. There had been initial interest from colleagues in accompanying me, but in the end food won, so I went on my own. Now I think about it, it’s possibly the first time I’ve been out clubbing on my own. To be fair, it was G-A-Y Camp Attack, which is somewhere I know very well and generally feel pretty comfortable in. I found myself a spot and had a decent night. It was a shame the music was quite variable – rather too many remixes and dodgy boring dance tracks rather than the pop gems. We did get S Club 7, an odd remix of Tragedy, and some Spice Girls, which was nice, but sadly no Macarena or Saturday Night, which was a pity.

I ended up leaving at about 3:30am, hoping that a) the night buses would be quieter, and b) to miss the cloakroom queue. Sadly the first part didn’t pay off. Despite having fewer people on the N41, it seemed to attract more than its fair share of idiots who thought they shouldn’t have to pay, which meant we sat in bus stops for ages while they argued with the driver. It all came to a head when we arrived at Angel. After a short altercation with some idiot, said moron decided to spit at the driver. The driver quite understandably was not happy about this, and terminated the bus there and then. Thankfully a 43 was right behind, but still, an inconvenience. I hope someone lumped the spitting idiot one.

The observant will have noticed that I stopped mentioning alcohol after the Tower 42 episode. This is because once I got to G-A-Y, I had one WKD and went onto water, as I couldn’t be bothered to keep drinking (and WKD is nearly £4 a bottle in there). I’d sobered up quite a lot while in Fluid, so by the time I’d got to Heaven I was pretty much stone cold sober, which was fine. Nowhere near as alcoholic as last year’s Christmas party, where I drank a lot more Moscow Mules, spent an amount of time trying to teach people dance routines and giggling at a pillar, then went to meet a friend in Paddington, where I was found wandering the station concourse, pissed as the proverbial newt. Ah well.