You can go to great efforts for a Big Night Out but you know that the unplanned ones are the best ones. The nights when you pop out for a quiet couple of drinks with your best friend and end up doing tequila shots with 15 RAF servicemen and dancing on a table 5 hours before you are due at work.
Look at New Year’s Eve. Who can honestly say that NYE is one of the best nights out they have all year? You spend twice as much, you have twice the anticipation and cabs are twice as hard to get hold of, yet you have half the fun of a normal Saturday night. Last New Years a gang of us went to an Alice in Wonderland ball. I had more fun getting ready in the hotel room with my friends than I did at some up-itself Berkshire nightclub (not sure why we bothered crossing the border now) where only those over 30 had bothered to dress up because the under 30s thought they were far too cool to do fancy dress. The Queen of Hearts was not amused.
I am an ‘organiser’. I’m not happy when I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, where and when and it annoys me when others don’t comply as I’ll put a lot of thought in to organising things. That said, I am well aware of the benefits of going with the flow because of previous nights out ending in utter chaos and some great stories to tell. So when my cousin turned and asked if I would take her out in London I only had a rough plan in my head. I had looked up bars that allowed 18-year-olds (as most I frequent are over 21) and checked for happy hours. She’s 18 and it was her birthday treat so I had to make sure I could fund most rounds! The PIC, being a good Partner in Crime (and never one to miss happy hour) decided to join us, so at 3pm we meet Baby Cousin at Oxford Circus (she’s from East Anglia so a trip to Top Shop is a must-do). We headed down to Piccadilly as I figured this was the best place to take an 18-year-old ‘tourist’ and ended up in Tiger Tiger for a first drink whilst we decided what the plan was.
Within half an hour we have a boy at our table. Shortly after this boy joined us, 20 of his friends did. It’s now 4pm and we are in the middle of a stag party, from which there is no escape. As they were very generous with the cocktails there was no reason to leave the party. At 5pm I am trying to convince them that it is too early for me to drink tequila let alone Baby Cousin. By 6pm a bottle of Bollinger has arrived on the table with only three glasses, by 7pm we’re dancing like it’s midnight and by 8pm Baby Cousin makes the grown up decision to drink water. Grown up decisions is not something I am familiar with. Which is probably how I snogged two of the stag party and swapped numbers with them. This happens when I mix champagne with cosmopolitans for five hours. Baby Cousin wanted to dance the alcohol off and was quite put out that the club portion of the bar was empty at 9pm. Just because we started early it doesn’t mean the rest of London did.
Suddenly the afternoon had turned to late evening and we realise that we need to get Baby Cousin back up to East Anglia and I need to get out to the Shires before the trains turn in to pumpkins on my line. So we duck out of the stag party and hot foot it to Kings Cross to drop off the youngest. As she hugs me goodbye she asks:
“Can I come out with you every week?”
Seeing as I only spent £20 she can’t have spent anything, plus she was chatted up by an attractive 25-year-old investment banker all night (who text her two days later), so it’s no wonder she wants to spend Saturdays with me now. I however am going back to meticulously planning my social life as I’m not sure my body can take un-planned craziness every week. Not quite sure what’s happening this weekend though, just that it’s a hen party…
singleintheshires 