And then we gatecrashed a party...

I have noticed that my nights out with friends are getting more civilised. Gone are the days of going out drinking straight from work with little more than a bag of crisps or bowl of nuts to sustain us. I'm not sure why we didn't used to eat - perhaps it was a budgetary thing. Now we nearly always go for a meal.

So last night, we were out in Camden, which was my idea as I'm bored with Soho. We managed to miss the rain, drank a bottle of rose wine (between three of us), then we had Japanese food. I'm not really a big fan of it as my fear of fish limits my choices somewhat, so I had the same Bento box I had the last time.

We went onto another pub (the one Graham Coxon used to frequent - he wasn't there last night), where the conversation turned to fancy dress and the best outfits we'd ever worn (no idea now how we got onto this subject, but it becomes relevant later!). Jo's favourite was a sunflower costume she'd worn as a child. I told the story of how when I first meet my friend Maia, years before we became friends, it was at a party where she was dressed as a Christmas Cracker, in a cardboard tube which meant she couldn't sit down.

Then we moved onto another pub. So far, so respectable, but then we gatecrashed a party.

We noticed that the upstairs room was closed for a private hire, so (again I'm not sure how this happened exactly) we decided that we should go and investigate. I think it was a combination of worrying we were missing out on something very exciting and the lure of going somewhere we weren't supposed to. So we walked up the stairs, spotted an empty table and sat ourselves down, momentarily thinking we'd got away with it.

Until we realised that everyone else was in fancy dress!

An Apache came over to talk to us and let Jo touch his axe, but a person of indeterminant gender in a pink feather boa gave us dirty looks, so we decided it was probably best that we left.

I arrived home at a reasonable hour and pretty sober, but I failed miserably to go swimming again this morning.