Do you remember the first time?

After feelings of trepidation and ennui beforehand, last night's show turned out to be great, even without me rehearsing properly. All the evening before I went on stage I had a nervous tingling in my body, like my last night performing at the club was just like the first time I ever performed. It's sort of good to be nervous, it reminds you that you care.

We went out afterwards to have a celebratory drink. Unfortunately, I had lots of celebratory incredibly cheap gin, and then went down to Senses to jam, which meant I had to start on the Tsing Tao, and before I knew it I was fighting with an accordion and had a half wrecked wrist from too much slap bass. But it didn't stop there, because over the road from Senses is another bar (with a comfy armchair in the loo) and a lot more cheap gin, and the aftermath of that was that I staggered up twelve flights of stairs at home at five in the morning, and crashed out, my memory smeared across all those empty glasses. I'd sworn not to have to walk up the stairs when drunk, so it's a mystery why I've been getting shitfaced all week and not dying.

I don't know how I managed to get out of bed before midday, but I got through two hours of martial arts on half a pint of water without vomitting on anyone, then had to go and get a beard trim. The alcohol-induced reality distortion field wasn't just affecting me, because the barber thought I was having a haircut. To be fair, the hair on top of my head is the same length as the hair on my chin, but I thought it was just a minor trim he was performing gratis, so I was a bit peeved when I found I was getting charged for a full haircut (and that's a proper proper pricey haircut), but it wasn't like we could sweep the hair off the floor and stick it back on.

We went home after that (my wife had accompanied me to the barber to make sure I didn't get lost) and we returned via the food festival in Victoria Park. This consists of thousands of people wandering around betwixt various tents selling all manner of (possibly) food-related stuff. My favourite tent was the German Well massage tent, where they had three vibrating grannies. That's not as perverted as it might sound: it's just three old ladies in the demonstration massage chairs at the entrance to the tent, wobbling under the strain of massive pulses of 'healing' vibrations from the machines they're strapped into.

On reflection, that is quite an odd thing to see. Maybe I've been drinking too much. Still, after the gluhwein this evening, how bad can it get?