The first few days of October

Mondays are a hard way to start the week. Anyone will tell you that. Especially ones that follow on from weekends consisting of a few too many drinks, too few hours of sleep and plenty of dancing and fun. Weekends like this one.

On friday night, I headed east out of the city for the weekend, to celebrate the turning 30 of the bestest of friends on saturday night. A few hours on the road was rewarded with a nice glass of pink fizz on arrival at the birthday girl's house and a couple of amaretto and coke zeros as we got ready to go out to a get together of friends. A few more drinks, some nattering and gossiping, and a couple of slices of toast at my home-for-the-weekend at 1am finished off the night. The next night, the birthday party, was a marriage of champagne, vodka and jaegerbombs, childhood penny sweets and birthday cake, dancing and laughing until the early hours. The birthday girl, the x-factor looky-likey, the man-who-can, the dizziest of blondes and I ended up outside Subway at 2am, me craving a 6" club on hearty italian, a dream that was cruelly disturbed by the arrival of the cab home. Heading for bed at 4.30, but chatting for hours more, meant the journey home the next day was accompanied by yawns and the need for sugar, satisfied by pancakes in the Little Chef.

So when the brunette suggested a "magically re-filling glass of wine" on monday night in response to my claims of poverty, my initial response was "no", followed swiftly by "I couldn't", followed even more swiftly by "go on then". 5.15 saw us deposited at a high table for tapas-for-a-tenner: a bottle of wine and two tapas dishes from the All Bar One menu. Joined by the boy-next-door, we polished off the shiraz rose in record time, prompting the brunette to dip in for another round. Calamari replaced the goats cheese bruschetta in accompanying the hummus-and-pitta in this round of tapas, but the wine remained the same, although having been left by the boy-next-door, it lasted fractionally longer. A chance meeting with a colleague led to one last bottle, a Marlborough sauvignon blanc belying his kiwi heritage, and the brunette and I stumbling out of the bar around nine, declaring it the perfect way to start the week, and the inaugural meeting of the monday night club.

Maybe that will make monday an easier start to the week?