How do you like those onions?

I woke aggressively hungover this morning. Last night, after being informed of my obsolecence by a Samsung employee, I'd clearly been affected, and ended up drinking heavily at a bar called The Bank, at 1 Shenton, on Shenton Way, which is a street full of banks, and thus a terrible place to give directions to. I suppose if they'd called it The Toilet it would be worse, but only slightly.

A visit to the doctor

In order to get life insurance, I have to have a physical examination first, to ensure I'm not trying to game the system by having no lungs, or weighing three times as much as an average man of my age and height.

Accidents will happen

Tonight was the company staff party and for unclear reasons, I'd volunteered to help organise it, and then the organisers had volunteered me to be the MC for the evening.

This was one of those tough venues where you're about six inches above the floor and the audience is dispersed in a wide arc around the walls of the venue, rather than pressed together in a scrum like I prefer. I tried a few bits of material but with a crowd like that it isn't very useful; what they wanted were big, broad bits, and so when I got on to my impossibly hard corporate trivia quiz things picked up.

Well, that and my constant cajoling for everyone to have another drink probably helped.

On my way

I was surprised this morning to see a friend from Hong Kong asking what he should do in Singapore. I had to answer "take a plane to Hong Kong" for although I'm a resident of the Lion City, a fair amount of my heart remains in the Special Administrative Region.

One more night

Another day draws to an end; and so the long journey back to Singapore begins. The best way to prepare for a flight to another country is to get plenty of rest and avoid alco- what am I saying? The best way to prep for a journey is to get as tanked up on booze as possible, to the point where you're breathing fumes over the customs officials strong enough to strip the paint from an oil rig, and then you can stumble with happy oblivion over the border from one country to another. That undiscovered country, indeed.

Drinking to forget ... Or something

I made the mistake of going for a drink after work. Well, two drinks; but enough that I was seeing double after a Deviation and a Corpse Reviver. We walked home after that and by eight I was ensconced on the sofa.

Drunk again

Tonight we went to a restaurant in Tanjong Pagar that served lots of different beer and cider. There was one common theme: it was all far too strong.

Come on round

Tonight I drank as much gin as I possibly could, while everyone from work came round to see our flat.

Can't see the Forest for the trees

Tonight I went for a run, and something went a bit mental with my heart rate monitor.

Well, that's the optimistic interpretation for it showing a reading of 190 bpm. The pessimistic interpretation is that I'm about to keel over in a hotel gym from a massive cardiac arrest. Well, I suppose the optimistic interpretation should be that I'm capable of ludicrous exertion.

Cheers

Last night we had the third and final round of our wedding celebrations, in the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street. When we arrived at 4:30 I was a bit worried as there seemed to be lots of people I didn't know, but they all cleared off around 5 as the first of my friends began to stream in.

Quiet Tuesday

A quiet Tuesday night in Hong Kong; after an uneventful and marginally disappointing day at the office, which threatened but never delivered anything productive, I went home to carry some cat paraphernalia down stairs.

Drunk in Ikea

This afternoon, after a Michelin-starred steamed dumpling in Causeway Bay, I headed over to Lantau.

One of our friends is remodelling the interior of a house in Pui O, so we got to sit in a building site and drink champagne, while looking down on the beauty of the bay. There's nothing like the scent of recently sawn plywood, combined with the taste of champagne and hummus. Possibly that is a little bit confused; we should have been eating hors'd'oevres (or spelling them correctly) rather than a recently purchased packet of bagel bites. Ah, them's the breaks.

Wine

This evening I was the MC for a winetasting fundraiser in Hong Kong. I did the same gig last year: a few hours standing on the top of some stairs, exhorting the wine drinking masses below to participate in auctions and lucky draws.

Maid Date

This evening, with time to kill, I took my brother's rifle, up on the hill.

Actually, my brother is thousands of miles away and I don't think he has any firearms (I wouldn't put it past him though) so I went with a friend to Maid Date in Causeway Bay.

Lost

This evening I went out for one quiet drink, but because I forgot that I was in the company of bankers, and they were paying for all the loopy juice, it wasn't one quiet drink at all, but a never ending stream of booze down my neck, into a stomach untroubled by wastes of space like food. At some point food did appear, and for one happy moment I thought I could soak up some of the drink with onion rings, but I was swifly diabused. Calamari is made from beautiful, fun loving squid, not from our friends in the onion family. There was nothing to dilute the alcohol, except for more alcohol.

Karaoke in Bellevue

This evening we went out for a few drinks after work, and I made the mistake of drinking nothing but club sodas. This meant by midnight when everyone else had reached a healthy level of inebriation, I was still stone cold sober, which meant when I started drinking I was really storing up trouble for myself.

Silence!

Tonight I went to see Silence! a musical parody of The Silence Of The Lambs, which I laughed at for two hours. Which is remarkable as I don't remember ever actually watching or reading The Silence Of The Lambs, so it's strange that I could keep up with the plot.

Fighting in the pancake trenches

It's strange that it's taken me so long to get back to Bangkok: something like two and a half years to drag myself onto a plane and fly to the City of Angels (and stuff).

Trains and booze

I'm cold and tired, after another day of training. Some of it is physically tiring (having a big lad try to pull your hands off your arms always is), some of it is fatiguing to my self-esteem (being corrected by a youngster when we don't have a language in common is, it turns out, harder than when you aren't struggling for comprehension). I've also had a chance to get really bored by a powerpoint presentation.

Good night

The club was packed tonight, which was a welcome surprise and a change from Thursday's almost empty room. Having seventy people to perform to presents different issues to seven: it was more difficult to make sure the whole room was involved, and the audience had a lot of local Hong Kongers, for whom the sophisticated wordplay often falls flat. Unfortunately even my crude stuff usually relies on a subtle difference of meaning between two homophones, so that was something of a challenge.