2004-07-19 - 4:55 p.m.

Yesterday�s really quite barbaric hangover was testament to another stag night, which are bad enough in themselves but this with the added frisson of not knowing anyone else there apart from the groom to be. Meeting at the train station, everyone bar me was kitted with extensive knowledge of the rest of the group, expensive, ironic t-shirts, and a natty job in the media. Usually this would have been the prompt for me to go and hide in the toilets until they had all gone away, or feigned SARS or something, but annoyingly they were mostly all very friendly too, something I hadn�t really bargained for.

It all went quite well, and we bonded how all big groups of males bond when faced with the enforced company of large groups of other males, namely by hitting the bar like we had Teflon livers. Conversation flowed almost as well as the pint I knocked over an unsuspecting member of our group, who had just that second got changed into his good shirt. Thank god for non-violent responses. We had a few problems gaining entrance to drinking establishments later in the evening � for some reason the local bar owners in the large seaside town didn�t take to the idea of fifteen charmingly drunk sophisticates patronising their establishments. Even when we had cunningly split up, we were herded out unceremoniously by one bar manager as he saw us talking to each other once we�d gained entry, claiming that there�d �been a level of deception�, though the only one that I could detect was the good reviews his bar had got in the local press.

Anyway, blah, more bars, yada, breakbeat club (Naturally I�m more of a hip-hop and scratch merchant), and only one instance where a grabby-armed, gel-sporting, coked up media boy talkedatmeforhalfanhournonstopaboutNOTHING.

The next morning I slinked off to the train with only my bed on my mind, and alcohol fumes on my breath. The trip was unremarkable except for the severity of my headache and the guy sat opposite me. He looked like a young fogey of an academic, kind of geeky hair and glasses, and he was reading some huge tome from a respected scholastic thinkery and then when he put it down, in my mind to give his huge brain a quick rest, his t-shirt said �Fake tits. Real tits. Who cares? They all taste the same!� Not that serious academics shouldn�t have the right to broadcast their preferences about women�s breasts on their t-shirts but it just came as a bit of a shock, like seeing Stephen Hawking at a Foxy Boxing night. Maybe �tits� are an obscure term used in astro-physics and it was actually�oh, never mind.