2002-11-08 - 6:20 p.m.

I hadn�t really fallen off the hospital-enforced wagon up until yesterday; dangled off it absent-mindedly perhaps, but last night I not only threw myself from it with all the focus of an adrenaline charged lemming, but I let it drag me roughshod along the sobriety tarmac in its wake. �These are going down surprisingly quickly,� observed my cohort in crapulence as we necked our fourth pint of Guinness in about 35 minutes. I had to agree. Later on we�re meeting his girlfriend in one of the more salubrious subterranean hellholes of, I'm ashamed to admit, Londonstrendysoho �, mixing with the bright young things after having been surprisingly waved through � surprising given that we looked like farmhands who�d been sent home to smarten up. The only way to navigate the colon-rupturing bar prices was to get drunk enough not to care, a state that was achieved with consummate professionalism. It wasn�t really my kind of crowd, it being full of the city's most odious partiers, who are all probably in public relations or would describe their job as �events management� when what they really mean is �actively devaluing our collective existences� and random female punters kept doing strange things to me, like trying to sneak a lit cigarette out of my hand hoping I wouldn�t notice (�I was just trying to see how drunk you were�� was the blatant lie of an excuse) or trying to pull my chair away when I was about to sit down like I was some kind of performing bar monkey. I�m sure at one point an obnoxiously-pigtailed girl ASKED ME FOR A FIGHT and had to be dragged off by her braying companion, though what I�d done to arouse any kind of anger remained unclear. I can only assume I was drinking a provocatively unfashionable brand of lager. Somehow, we escaped unscathed, and tubes were evidently caught and my �not going to unsuitably located people�s houses� filter even worked, and I don�t remember much but I was jumping up and down on my bed at 1am thinking �it�s good to be back�.