George Michael's Careless Whisper was number 1, Margaret Thatcher was regretfully living it up in Number 10, and on a late August afternoon in 1984, after a 36 hour labour, my mother gave birth to her first born. Me. Over due by nearly three weeks, my poor timekeeping is a flaw which has undoubtedly dogged me and everyone that knows me my life thus long.
If I arrange to meet you at 6pm for after work drinks, know that you can safely assume this to mean between 6.30 and 7pm. Because at 6pm I'll still be in the office, furiously applying blusher and backcombing some volume into my locks which are currently begging to be coloured and trimmed.
Friday night was no different and I made it to our favourite Soho haunt, LVPO at 7 just in time for a round of free cocktails. Despite the fact I'd issued a plea earlier in the week, imploring my friends not to let me touch the gin, I soon found myself slurping at that bitch Bombay and her slutty friend Sapphire; telling myself without conviction that it would be a quiet night. FAIL.
Shortly after I arrived, the scots joined us. Never be fooled by their petite frames or their distinct lack of height. Between the two of them they pack more punch than Ricky Hatton on a charlie binge. So when that short, leery, no gooder thought he'd attempt to mug Wee Wallace, he picked the wrong girl.
After snatching her iPhone, he promptly found himself smacked in the face and the iPhone snatched back. Not content with the humiliation of a public beating for being a thief, he went a step further on his shameful road to ruin and slapped her back. A thief and a woman beater; I believe that's what one sarcastically calls a catch. And caught he was - by the second scot who gave chase believing the bastard to have made off with her kinswoman's bag.
Now we've all seen Braveheart, so you know not to fuck with a Scot as they'll likely set Mel Gibson to give you menacing phone calls. But throw in a bloke with a sense of chivalry and slightly buoyed by the booze and you're in even more trouble.
Though there were no kilts lifted, no glorious charge of cavalry and not a smidgen of blue face paint in sight, the vision of those two heroically sprinting down the street, while the robber fled like a Dickensian villain, was poetry and the subsequent blow to the face that took him down was finer than a Raging Bull montage.
Oh how we laughed, how we cackled those deep, throaty, filthy laughs. The whole affair could not have been funnier less it had bam, pow and och aye comic style speech bubbles written all over it.
The relentless temptation of Happy Hour combined with the fact I'm 20 lbs lighter than when I moved here, mean that so far this month I've thrown up in a Wetherspoons, instigated a cake fight in a perfectly respectable watering hole, walked barefoot around the East end on my own at 3am, and found amusement in an attempted mugging of a friend.
At 26 none of these things are terribly clever, they're frankly little short of tragic. But since moving here I've found that things get out of hand. Things get out of hand, often. But all you can do is live, learn and laugh a lot, preferably over a decent breakfast and a Turkish apple tea on a blissfully sunny Saturday morning in North London.
Ate: pizza express at midnight
Paid: A measly £19 for pizza and cocktails thanks to free bar tab courtesy of our friends at LVPO
Lived: Just about. Survived attempted mugging, two night buses solo and a bad case of the gin blues yesterday evening
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