It's a hard life

I felt exhausted today - perhaps it was all that going to bed late - although midnight is hardly a late time to get to bed on.  Today passed interminably, but all too soon we were leaving the office and heading for Lan Kwai Fong.

 It had the ambience of a party half an hour before the guests had arrived; instead of being rampacked with drunken gweilo, it was spotted with half hearted gatherings of people attempting to enjoy themselves, beer pumps set up outside the bars for the expected queues without any bodies scrumming up against them.  I suppose this was our fault for heading there at 6.30, long before the drunken crowds could finish watching the Sevens and head down.

The best we could hope for was a man standing outside Fong, who took a long and despairing look up and down the body of every woman who walked past.  No matter their age, dress or physical dimensions, he conducted the same check, before sipping on the pint he was holding.  He didn't look a very fine specimen of humanity himself; I wondered if he should really have been passing judgment on passing ladies.  Perhaps I should have told him this, but my London formed sense of self-preservation stopped me.

We parked ourselves upstairs in Fong, in an increasingly dark booth, and, crammed together, started drinking.  Well, everyone had one drink, and I necked my gin and tonic in about five seconds, and didn't want to have another one because I was intending to stay sober and unhungover tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a big day, after all - fighting in the morning, a special surprise for the girlfriend in the early evening, and then hosting at the comedy club in the evening.  Since it's the Sevens weekend, I suppose I should have some jokes about the rugby, but there's nothing that I can think of.

Apart from my dilemma about who to support.  The Australians, perhaps, because after all, my great-grandfather was a criminal.  Then again, he was put away for having sex with sheep, so really I should go for the New Zealanders.  Or the Welsh.  Nationalist slurs are so hard to get right, aren't they?

After a drink, I sloped off to Dressed in IFC, for a bowl of overpriced salad, and to read some more of Saturn's Children.  Stross has excelled himself once again - for a book that deals with the tedium of space travel and the depressing end of the human race, it still manages to raise quite a few smiles.  The plot is quite heavy going at times, but it's rewarding.

One strange thing is the cover, or rather, the difference between the British and American covers.

Here's the British version:

Here's the American one:


Which one is more embarassing?  A rather anodyne painting of a spaceship that could be on pretty much any block of space-bound sci-fi from the last fifty years, or a unfeasible looking sexbot?  Who's to say?

Anyway, these are the problems that haunt my mind in the early evenings. In the late evenings, I'm more upset at being thrashed to a fifty-point loss at Scrabble by my girlfriend, even after I utilised the low-scoring but usually reliably distracting "BINT" and "SLUT". What's a boy to do?