Today’s hangover isn’t really a hangover. That’s cheating, surely! Well yes, but I still feel like shit: tired, wobbly, discombobulated, pre-menstrual, undervalued, overlooked, restless, heavy, bored, a bit pathetic and dusted with the slight early-morning fuzziness proving receipt of a large glass of wine over dinner. So I feel perfectly justified.

Anyway! The point really is that after dinner, we went to see A Serious Man, the latest Coen Brothers’ film. On the way home, my partner in law-abiding events and I discussed the film. Now, I like Coen Brothers’ films. Like anyone who ever inhaled, I loved The Big Lebowski; apart from the gratuitous cow violence, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? is an unparalleled joy from beginning to end. And I like the weird ones too: Barton Fink; The Man Who Wasn’t There; the stark, brief, uncompromising Blood Simple with its few flashes of quite horrible, real-somehow violence.

The Coen Brothers – it’s entirely down to them that I became cinema-savvy enough to start caring who made my films. Alright, so my entire canon is basically them and Quentin Tarantino, but it’s a start, hey.

So – we concluded that it was a sideswipe at tradition; an affectionate yet unflinching look at the ridiculous ineffectuality of organised religion; a gentle tribute to those who always try to do the best as they see fit, in accordance to the ways that they have been taught, despite the fact that it gets them precisely nowhere.

We decided this after having first got our first initial thoughts out of the way: Why did the fat kid’s face only appear at the end? What was with that hurricane? What is the significance of the members of Jefferson Airplane?

And primarily, first of all, before all others – what the fuck??!

As we exited the cinema, I heard one confused soul turn to his girlfriend and slowly say: “well... it was billed as a comedy...”

Drinking and queueing - a paean to two national passtimes

Well my friends, it’s been a while. Are you still my friends – all three of you?

Time marches ever on while we mere mortals peep, bewildered, around at our new surroundings.

Nope, sorry, that’s just bollocks isn’t it.

A year has passed, nearly two, and everything is exactly the same. It’s Friday afternoon and I’m sat in the exposed concrete shell that constitutes a trendy London PR agency office trying to engage a preoccupied media with some stuff about a thing whilst nursing a head full of fog and a perpetual cup of tea.

Last night I queued up outside Londis by Clapham Common until a burly man deigned to let me in and join queue phase two inside of Londis to purchase a beer. After this, I waited briefly inside the door of Londis until the outside queue could be shuffled backwards sufficiently for the door to be opened allowing me to leave and then I joined what can only be described as a queue which on other days, I am reliably informed, is actually just the street.

Fireworks night my friends! And in these cash strapped, miserable times, who doesn’t feel a little bit cuddled by the notion of pretty-coloured gunpowder blasted into the sky and paid for by Lambeth Council? Lambeth Council, an entity more familiar to me as sender of bills, loser of personal information, threatener of bailiffs for unpaid council tax by someone who isn’t me and perpetrator of epic queues leading ultimately to £120 documents entitling me to park outside my own house. At least they’re consistent with their queues.

I remember the fireworks being bigger in years gone by, with unforeseen quirks of brilliance: reds turning to greens and faltering sparks bursting unexpectedly back to life with a fizzle. This year, the novelty started to falter as quickly as the sparks and like them, it had no reinvigorating tricks up its sleeve. The council’s seamless selection of Thriller into something inane by the Lighthouse Family was pretty funny though. That saw us through for a bit. Soon after, we entertained ourselves watching a family scrabble about in the mud looking for something they’d dropped – heroin, we decided.

The finale was a crescendo of colour and noise. I hummed the Lighthouse Family in my friend’s ear and my boyfriend squeaked like a mouse at the explosions. We are rubbish people to double date with. I think that’s perfectly apparent just from my cringey use of ‘double date’! Gross.

Afterwards, we meandered gently through the police cordons and in front of buses and terrified looking cyclists and weaved our way between frantic mothers and their separated children and had our toes taken off by angry mothers with prams, truly the urban woman’s weapon of choice. We had battled it out, braved the mob, kept our resolve in the face of agoraphobia-inducing crowds and now we deserved more alcohol.

Sadly, our plight was shared by everyone in Clapham. You should have seen the queues at the bar.

that most extraordinary of human traditions

Last night was that most extraordinary of human traditions, the staff Christmas party. Being a woman with her priorities in order, I have joined a company that holds a summer party as well as the obligatory festive shindig, so I at least had a pretty good idea of what to expect. The ‘party committee’ comprised a woman who is the very embodiment of Shoreditch twat (in a nice way) (sort of) and so we began the enforced fun in a bar on Brick Lane in our compulsory black tie. I teamed my frothy black dress with some scuffed white trainers leading a company director to accuse me of thinking that I am Lily Allen. Despite having neither her money nor a Chemical Brother on my arm, I do like to think that I share her talent for a witty put-down and should probably admit to being a bit of a mockney sparra and sporting a shit-eating grin (TM The Observer – I’d love to have coined that phrase about her but I didn’t. Credit where it’s due). Everyone else in the vicinity was wearing spray-on jeans and scuzzy t-shirts so we looked suitably stupid, although the good people of East London pretended not to see us. Perhaps they really didn’t. Maybe extremely cool people have a version of colour blindness which makes it impossible to determine between the uncool. Or perhaps it’s a form of cringey racism and they just wait for us to leave before claiming that ‘we all look the same’ to them.

Well oiled on East London vodka we traipsed to a pop-up restaurant in the Truman Brewery. Disappointingly, this doesn’t mean that you fold it up into a tin from which it springs forth when opened. Instead, this moniker serves the dual purpose of providing a PR hook for what is otherwise merely a restaurant and also an excuse to cover the management when it fails to make money and closes down in two months.

Of the three options for each course, one was vegetarian, and so I went for that. This led to the interesting scenario in which my dinner featured a first course of soup followed by a second course of soup. Accompanied by the vat of red wine I drank whilst waiting for the staff to master the evidently tricky task of serving two bowls of soup, I consumed enough liquid to ensure not only that I was sloshed but that I also made a sloshing sound when I moved. During this feat of dining, a woman wandered around the tables with a snake slung round her neck, and two androgynous acrobats performed a bizarre and melancholy dance on a rope suspended from the ceiling.

Like most things, the evening could not maintain its level of pretentious weirdness and ultimately had to dumb down to accommodate the masses. Once the wine was all drunk and the soup was all, well, drunk, we continued on to a rubbish nightclub in Soho. Once there, we drank more, danced to instantly forgettable music and stood out magnificently from the hoards of minor soap actors, second division football players and Arabic business men in expensive homogenous suits, having shouted conversations about their yachts.

There was more – there must have been, as the last phonecalls on my mobile were made at 4am – but I have no recollection of what it was. All I know is that I’ve cut my leg open and I’m still wearing the remnants of last night’s makeup. The great thing about staff parties is that you are all as ruined as each other. There is camaraderie in doling out alka seltzer and making epic tea rounds. The shame of it is that someone else is absolutely bound to remember.

giveth or taketh another year

Last week was my birthday. Although technically, there are things wrong with that statement, I feel justified in its application as I started drinking on Tuesday and finally stopped at some point on Sunday morning. By that point, I was no longer drinking because it was enjoyable; I was drinking to maintain momentum.

I consider myself to be quintessentially English. One facet of this is my long love affair with alcohol, a mistress that both giveth and taketh. She can play the perfect hostess to an evening, adding sparkle, gaiety and mischief, teasing shyer revellers out of their introspection, and bathing the collective in a warm glow of belonging. Other times she beats me up so that I wake in the morning with a black eye, and have to pretend to my parents that I walked into a door. Perhaps I did walk into a door, who knows. Not me.

you've got to laugh eh

Last night witnessed the second outing of my boyfriend's foetal career as a stand up comedian. Previous attempts have revealed him to be adept at both telling jokes and standing up. By 'adept' perhaps I should say 'prolific', and by 'jokes' I should probably say something like 'talking', and for 'standing up', no, actually, I'll leave that one.

Two large glasses of wine inhaled by 8pm meant that I had to concentrate to not giggle at the wallpaper, and so I feel entirely justified in my self-appointed position as key critic of the evening. There were about twelve or so slots to fill, with each Christian given five minutes in front of the lions. I'm leaving that in as I think it's a nice fitting analogy, but truth be told, it was Crouch End, and so tabby cats would have been a more apt comparison.

I can't remember the first one, although I have a hazy memory of people laughing, and so I conclude that he told some jokes with the end result of creating amusement in the audience. The second flailed about like a madman and told a story about having sex in a library, which wasn't very funny, and between you and me, I suspect to have been a fabrication. The third was a large woman in a big knitted cardigan who, I can only assume, is not entirely sane. Her salt-of-the-earth shops-in-the-salvation-army demeanour lead to the crowd really wanting to like her, reaching out with their tiny little alcohol-soaked minds and trying to give her a hug by means of a chuckle. But it was impossible. She wasn't funny. She wasn't lucid. She was a puzzle wrapped up in an enigma served on a plate of bewilderment.

And then it was my boyfriend.

He strode on stage to the sound of whooping, swirling around in an atmosphere still haunted by confusion. He grabbed the microphone and spoke to the crowd, confidant, composed, northern. He did what any discerning connoisseur of popular culture would do. He talked about Countdown.

I thought that he was brilliant. His poise was compelling, and his banter was fluid and engaging. He was less convinced. "They were silent the whole way through it," he interjected, before downing most of his pint, chain smoking a packet of fags, and trying to control the spasmodic shaking that was juddering his entire body. "I am never doing that again."

HR issues

Today's hangover is the kind where you are not sure whether you are still drunk or not. Although there is some interesting spatial awareness activity, there is no pain per se, and a tendancy to embark on long rambling pointless stories interrupted by sporadic bouts of giggling.

An additional dimension is added to the experience by having obtained this hangover from a night out with work colleagues. People who weren't actually there have alluded to me that my drunkeness was noted. Drunk people don't tend to note other people's drunkeness, so I can only assume that there were sober people there OR my drunkeness exceeded that of my peers. This strange emotional extension to the bizarre happenings within my being, recently identified by myself as 'shame', is intensified by my very obvious (to me?) wearing of exactly the same clothes I was wearing yesterday.

My recollection of last night is like watching a crap pirate film whilst submerged in a swimming pool. Occasionally, the odd memory surfaces from the depths and presents itself to me like a scene from a morality play. One I'm enjoying currently featured a young lady named Anna asking my out-of-work-actor boyfriend "What are you in?", to which I shouted "Debt!" and promptly keeled over at my own acerbic wit. The winner, however, has to be aforementioned showoff boyfriend dancing for Julianne, representing the HR team for the evening, which is definitely an HR issue.