2002-12-18 - 6:53 p.m.

This morning walking, zombie-like towards the tube, a woman behind me said �Yes, he gets on with everyone apart from children, cats and dogs.� I turned to see her talking to a friend whilst she was walking her Akita, which was the size of a small apartment, and only felt momentary embarrassment at the fleeting thought that she was talking about me.

Yesterday�s pigeon / rat / squirrel debate has turned into the most emotive yet. I must rant about vermin more often.

I was just remembering with not a small amount of pride my stoic resistance in the face of a free bar at last week�s office party. I sailed through with admirable amounts of faculty retention, my tactic being to hold out against venturing to the top shelf liquors, and sticking to the nice enough Czech beer and wine (my one concession being a cosmopolitan, seeing as the �theme� was Sex and the City, though disappointingly the de rigueur look for the girls was Carrie and not, um, one of the others whose name I forget). This no doubt comes as a shock to you, given that cash bars usually hold no such powers of dissuasion, but I�m once bitten and twice shy with free bars now.

The year: 1999. I was young(ish) and newly single (my current self wants to go back and slap my smug past self for believing this was to be a temporary situation), and arriving at the aftershow party for The Cardigans, having blagged in by working for the worst music review section in the city. Minor soap nymphettes were serving free shots out of their surgically modified belly-buttons (I may have romanticised that memory, but you get the gist) and I hit the champagne tab pretty heavily before it ran out, and we were cruelly forced to move to strong continental beer or vintage wine. I�d already made smalltalk with a couple of the minor Cardigans and held it together pretty well, when all of a sudden I�m sitting at the bar next to Nina, who was, at the time, one of the most desirable women on the planet. Buoyed with the confidence of having drained a virtual distillery without it affecting me, I ploughed straight in with some chitchat about the show, trying not to act too impressed, agreeing that the sound had been shoddy (I could really tell from my seat, several miles back) � being cool above the call of duty, ladies and gentlemen.

I vaguely remember asking her which festivals they were due to play, and then watching her back away quickly from a very strange angle, being, as I was, on the floor, wrestling with my newly-horizontal bar stool.

Oh yeah. I figure that�s how James Dean would have played it.

One slip was all it took to ruin our inevitable return to her hotel room and subsequent announcement of our engagement. The NME journalist that I apparently knocked into the next room wrote the following week �The aftershow was filled with London�s most odious party crowd�. God, those people in the other room must have been real wankers.