Dancing Queen
If you are interested in hosting a Karaoke evening (great fun), check out Rendezvous in Beak Street, a strange name I thought for what appears to be a Chinese restaurant with Karaoke rooms for hire. Each room also has a small bar which services it, and ours was run by a harassed looking old man and a younger woman. I imagine having to listen all those badly sung Abba songs day in and day out must take it out of you eventually.
After Rendezvous, we headed off to the Paragon Lounge nightclub on Hanover Street. Gigantic men manned the doors, and had I not known it was a club, I'd have thought some sort of illegal poker game was going on inside. Down below the music was great, with a lot of the Indian-sounding dance music that is all the rage right now, and which I love. Unfortunately, my cries of "Michael! Michael! Michael!" went unnoticed (or were flat-out ignored) by the DJ, and I was unable to do my various Jackson renditions which never fail to make onlookers think, "What a sad eejit".
Just a word of advice re. the Paragon Lounge, their drinks are very expensive. Marcus picked up a Diet Coke for a mere lb3. Louise got me a beer (Stella) and herself a vodka and diet Coke for lb13. Yup, not cheap. Also, there are more huge menacing-looking bouncers inside, so you have to behave yourself. In fact, I don't know why the police are so concerned about 24-hour drinking licenses; if enough establishments hire these sorts of chaps, there will be no trouble at all, trust me.
I had to walk home because there were no taxis, though it only took me 15 minutes or so. The streets of central London at 1am are not unlike, if you imagine for a moment, a lunatic asylum with a no-medication policy opening its doors to its inhabitants and saying: "Go forth, you're free." I did my best 'Don't mess with me walk', perfected through three years of living in a somewhat colourful neighborhood inhabited by a particularly delinquent collection of teenagers, and got home just fine.
Back at ours, Robert, Zo"e, and Greg were drinking wine and having a catch-up. I was glad to see he had done damage control in the bathroom before anyone used it, because when I am preparing for a night out, our spare bathroom looks like Liza Minelli's dressing room. I read a quote by Catherine Zeta Jones stating that a marriage stood a better chance if a man and woman had their own bathrooms. Not always possible in a place like London where half a million buys you a match box, but definitely worth it if you can, I absolutely agree.
I spent the entire night dreaming that someone called 'Becky' was hitting on Robert and had come back to ours to play 'World of Warcraft' with him. It goes without saying that I was gutted. The closest I come to computer games are the Harry Potter ones (the latest one doesn't have mouse control which I'm not happy about at all, but that's a subject for another blog) or online Tetris. Anyway, this Becky person was the persistent sort of female you get out there, some may even call them predatory. I told her (in my dream of course) that Robert was soon to be married, and she should stay away from him, and she annoyingly replied that they were just 'chatting', making me feel like a sad jealous paranoid fool.
Later I discovered (in the dream) that she was instant messaging him, and that's where I lost it. I got so cross I woke myself up, and tried to remember which woman from last night was Becky so I could have a word, only to discover there wasn't one (or at least not one that I met), and the whole thing was a figment of my alcohol infused paranoid unconscious. (Authors note: The Becky in my dream bore no resemblance in terms of appearance or personality to the gorgeous, lovely, and very unpredatory Becky, Robert's sister.)
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