So I get this email this afternoon from Dan, circulated also to many other Vauxhall-going friends, wondering if I've seen a certain website. Which should be none other than David's jolly good A-Z of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

Which was, in fact, how I came across this whole blogging lark in the first place. Blimey, next thing you know they'll all be reading his blog, and maybe by extension mine, and then I'll have to write nice things about them...

You take one little day off work, purely in the name of using up your remaining leave, and what happens? They make you go to Milton Keynes, that's what.

Fortunately, I have returned unscathed after a morning of client meetings, which resulted in the somewhat bizarre experience of sitting in a theme pub on a housing estate having the manager explain his new high chairs (don't ask...).

And next week, Biggleswade!

No, I have no idea where it is, either.

Ok, so you know your porn name, and what you'd be called in prison, but what do your co-workers call you behind your back?

Modesty prevents me from revealing mine (have never been one to blow my own trumpet - haven't got sufficiently flexible back muscles...) - although if I choose to be David rather than Dave, it's probably rather more accurate...

I Can't Believe This Programme Exists, no.274: This afternoon, on BBC1, Diagnosis Murder, which is much along the lines of Murder, She Wrote, but rather than Angela Lansbury as a novelist-turned-detective, has Dick Van Dyke as someone who appears to be a doctor, but is also a detective, who just happens, for no discernible reason, to be a magician. Cue much sawing people in half, escaping from boxes, disappearing coins etc, all whilst solving one of those implausibly jolly and cosy murder cases. It's like: 'Cheer up, I know he's been brutally murdered, but look! A twenty-dollar note from behind your ear!'

I'm still not sure I actually saw this, or whether it was some after-effect of last night's indulgences...

Well, the socks were duly found, and thus began another weekend of excess. Firstly, to Dave's flat in Clapham to meet up and change, on the grounds that if we were going to arrive at The Fridge in ridiculous outfits, we'd have to go the whole hog and make an entrance en masse (well, that and a fair amount of 'I'm not going in on my own like this!'). So it was boots, shorts, harnesses, and horns a-go-go, and best of all, tridents into which Phil had managed to insert lightsticks so that they glowed. Ooohh.

I'm sure other people in, or approaching, their thirties, try and have some degree of sophistication and dignity when they go out. We, on the other hand, get dressed up and take toys. It's worrying, really.

But an enormously fun night as ever, much nonsense podium dancing and general silliness, and interesting just seeing people's reactions, ranging from the amused to the downright bemused - including the lovely Australian lady who insisted on massaging my shoulders, and a nice guy who stopped me as I stumbled past, saying 'I know I won't be your type but I just wanted to say you look really good in that..' Ah, the beauty of beer goggles. Although no idea why he was so convinced I wouldn't be interested - perhaps the assumption is one only goes for other leather-clad Beelzebubs.

Or perhaps the newly-grown goatee (or at least what's currently attempting to pass for one) is projecting a whole new rough and rugged image. Yeah ok, maybe not. But I think it might have to stay put - it was originally intended just to complete the devil look, but well, it's kinda grown on me (boom, boom!). And Kelvin loves it - partly for reasons I'm really not going into here - although more than one person has commented along the lines of "Aww, how sweet, you'll have his-and-his matching beards!"

Sunday night, and yet more Vauxhall madness - and if Phil and I didn't make enough of a spectacle of ourselves last week, well, I'm not entirely sure how somebody came to be bound and handcuffed to a pillar above the dancefloor by somebody else, but it can't have been us, can it? Really must learn to leave the cabaret to the superb-as-ever DE Experience. And as for what was going on on the stage at DTPM later in the night... Somehow I think we were living up to our mantra for the weekend: 'It's not cheap to be fabulous, but it's fabulous to be cheap...', just a little too much. Fabulous.

I must ask Jonathan where I can get my hands on five pairs of red football socks. Somehow I think he may have the answer...

They're the final item needed for our 'Horny Devil' costumes for the Halloween party at The Fridge tomorrow night, along with the aforementioned much-loved boots, leather shorts, and erm, flashing red horns.

Oh dear...

Of course, it would help if I actually wrote something...

Well, some news I'm rather happy about - Kelvin and I are going to Paris! Yay!

A romantic long weekend for two, no less, in my second favourite city (after this fair metropolis, of course), which we've been talking about for some time, but finally as of yesterday, have booked.

Admittedly, I've not been entirely without doubts - like whether it's too soon to be going away together, and spending four days solid in each other's company - but as of yesterday lunchtime (sappiness alert, the schmaltz-sensitive among you may care to look away now...), sat across a pub table, looking into his gorgeous eyes, I'm thinking 'how could I ever doubt anything to do with this beautiful, beautiful man?' (I'm sorry, I don't know what's come over me. Normal butchness restored soon...)

So, it's booked. Precisely two weeks from now, we'll be on the Eurostar, trundling towards the tunnel and then hurtling through the French side (where they have, like, proper railways), heading for our hotel, right in the heart of Le Marais, on a street I know very, very well, but more of which another time...

Marvellous.

It's Live in London you can read without the need for opera glasses! Yay for bigger fonts!

Brothel-owner wins first Oral Sex World Championships.

There's no picture of the trophy, but I think we can imagine...

Blimey, it's all gone a bit 'Surprise, Surprise' today. Out of the blue, an email from my childhood best friend Rebecca, who I've neither seen nor heard from since shortly after we moved from Gloucester in 1984.

Where, as I recall, we spent most of the time playing in the stream that ran past both our houses, insisting on camping in the back garden, writing all manner of nonsense on her dad's electric organ (and performing for our oh so lucky families, poor buggers) - and chiefly, dancing around her living room inventing routines to ABBA songs (which probably accounts for my parents' lack of surprise at discovering I was, well, not exactly the marrying kind...). Our copies of 'ABBA The Singles 1973-1983' and 'Now That's What I Call Music 3' were well and truly needle-worn.

But now apparently, there's been a chance meeting of the mothers in an NCP car park (...the glamour!), and so we're back in touch. Which is fantastic - but where, where, where do you start? It's been nearly seventeen years, there's so much to tell, and yet you know the conversation will at some point go:
'So, what have you been up to then all this time?'
'Oh, y'know, not much, how about you?'

Of course, now that I have this here blog, it'd certainly be one way to bring her up to date - but I think maybe one revelation at a time! Let's just say a fair few things have changed since 1984. Well, maybe except for the ABBA thing.