Pink elephants and all that

I was drunk on New Year's Eve. I'm sure I wasn't the only one in the country to be able to make such a shameful, shocking and disappointing confession on December 31st 2008.

I imagine though that many were far more drunk than me. I was at that level at which I knew I was drunk, and thus should pace myself and be careful with any further intake. The kind of level at which one is very aware of one's own thoughts and, whilst all around is a little blurry and soft at the edges thanks to the intake of beer, wine, whisky and (gulp) absinthe (just a small shot of that - I remember the last time I had absinthe, which was ten whole years ago..), then one is also aware of the blurriness, and that the best thing is to enjoy it but also to take care.

By the time we got to the second phase of the night - we'd already been out just outside town, and were now back to go to a house party just a few minutes' walk from home - it was already well past midnight. I grabbed my bottle of wine, joined the two or three other companions of mine, and we headed to the party.

Inside, whilst not exactly a scene of debauchery, it had clearly been a heavy evening there, judging by the array of rictus grins, eyes in separate orbits, and perambulatory movements which might be some kind of approximation of walking, and whose relationship to verticality was no more than casual.

Not that this should imply the same of everyone who was there - as relatively lucid as I felt (ie I could look people in the eye, and also string a sentence together), I was in conversation for a while with a bunch of people who were clearly far more sober than I. I was together enough to do some washing up to make sure I and my friends had some clean glasses to drink from though (is that any kind of benchmark, I wonder?).

There was a very pleasant surprise: I bumped into a friend I'd not seen for a while, and really hadn't expected her to be there, since I didn't know that she had friends amongst the folk at the party who were familiar to me.

I went over and gave her a great big hug, and said Happy New Year, and we had a few minutes of conversation - I only vaguely recall what it was about - mainly catching up, talking about how Christmas had been, and so on. It was lovely to see her. Soon though I was back talking with my other companions and a mixture of familiar and new faces. Before much more time had elapsed, I realised I needed to go home. I'd had a good evening throughout, but knew that if I had any more to drink, my slightly-blunted senses would become altogether less reliable, and I would surely pay for it in the morning.

Oh, come on, stay for a bit longer - you haven't even finished your wine!

No, seriously, it's time to go. I can't drink any more, I need to go and get some sleep!

Ok. Happy New Year!

In the wee small hours, it was a delight to walk home. Utter silence, save for the faint, muffled repetitive thuds of music emanating from behind the doors of houses here and there along the way. It was refreshingly cold, the sky was largely clear, and the half an inch of snow gleamed and twinkled against the streetlights and the moon. I didn't rush home, weary as I was - I was determined to savour the scene.

Magical is a very lazy word to use, but it'll do. Here goes:

It was magical.

Apart from being a little tired and lethargic, I was ok the following day - clearly I'd made the sensible decision in making my exit when I had done. Nice not to feel utterly trashed or completely devoid of energy on New Year's Day.

The friend who I mentioned above, the one whom I was surprised to have bumped into at the party: we'll call her Karen.

Well yesterday, I bumped into a friend of Karen's: someone I happen upon and have a chat with from time to time.

Oh hello she said, how are you? Anything to tell me?

Suddenly I had a mild stab of anxiety, since there was a mixture of innuendo and curiosity in her voice. Had I been far more drunk than I'd thought at the party? Oh, bloody hell. Had I overdone it and embarrassed myself in front of Karen? I was sure that I hadn't, especially given the clarity of my recollection of the whole evening, but here was a little window of doubt starting to open up.

I replied to the effect that, yes, I'd had quite a drunken night on New Year's Eve. I asked about hers, suddenly thinking that she might have been at the party with Karen.

Oh, mine was terrible. Well it started out alright, but I was at a party and I hardly knew anyone there. Ended up WAY too drunk.

Oh, right, I replied. Where was this?

It was over at a friend's place down in South Wales. I was really embarrassed. Karen's been taking the piss out of me ever since.

Well you should have kept it to yourself then, and not told her!

Well I could hardly do that, she saw everything.

How do you mean?

She was there with me - we drove down together, and came back the following day.

This party - it was definitely on New Year's Eve?

Yes.

In Wales?

Yes!

Are you sure?

Yes!!!

With Karen?

YES! Well I'm hardly going to imagine it, am I?

At which point, I had to explain that I must have imagined seeing Karen at the party I went to on the same night.

All I can say is, I'm definitely going to stick to my customary vow of total sobriety for the duration of January.

Journeys by blog/ The last post ever

Well let me clear something up before we ("we?" Who's this "we" exactly?) get any further: the bit about "the last post ever" is bollocks. Complete and utter shite. I just wanted to inject a bit of pointless drama into the proceedings early on.

In a way though it does illustrate a point. I think. One reason I took a break from writing blog posts was that in some ways it all felt like using a lot of different words which could be summed up as elaborate ways of writing "me, me, ME!"

Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing in itself: it's in there amongst the reasons I actually started blogging in the first place - it was just that I stopped finding ways of writing "me, me, ME!", or at least, I stopped finding it interesting. So what does that have to do with including a stupidly melodramatic and mendacious line in the title? Well it just feels like another way of saying "me, me, ME!" but in a much more barefaced kind of way, and hence signalling a return to writing posts.

Hmm, not the most catchy way of resuming my blog activity is it?

The other thing is, I think it's only accurate to say that I was taking a break from writing posts. That break has done me good, but I realise that quite a lot of my activity during said break has been blog-related in some way. One such example was a good chat and Sunday lunch in rather genial company some weeks ago: a more than pleasant couple of hours spent in a pub out of town with good food and a couple of pints of Landlord.

Then recently I went to a blog party with an equally genial host and lovely guests. This too was a civilized affair, and was memorable not just for the food, fine wine and conversation, but for the incredible sound of torrential rain against the glass roof of the conservatory.

The thing about it is that I still find there to be an inescapable sense of weirdness (not in a bad way) about meeting up with people who I've previously - or primarily - known online. I'm not talking about it here in terms of the potential risks there might be - but just from the sense that meeting people who I only know through blogging is still something very novel, and...well, weird.

Put it this way, if two years ago you (whoever "you" are) suggested to me that I'd be heading up to Edinburgh for a couple of days on my own, and one of the focal points of that visit was to attend the book launch of someone I'd only communicated with online, I would have politely suggested that you were talking bollocks. Or I might have just said, no, you're talking bollocks. I wouldn't do such seemingly random stuff.

But then it's only just under two years ago that I had a conversation online with someone (no links to post here because the relevant blogs are now defunct) who happened to be in Berlin for a few days, a couple of weeks before I was due to head there myself. The result of that conversation was that the someone in question agreed to set me a challenge: she posted a photograph of a small piece of public art which I had to find and photograph for myself.

It's perhaps telling that I expected this challenge to be no more than an intriguing aside to my stay in Berlin: in the end, due to a number of factors, it ended up being tightly woven, if not utterly integral, to the whole fabric of my first stay there. It also seemed to carry a lot of meaning for me, amplified by the sense of headspace that you get (whoever "you" are, etc) when you're away from familiar sights, sounds, patterns of thought and so on.

I hope that this serves, though, to illustrate the weirdness that I'm talking about - the fact that I could spend so much of my time engaged in something which arose from a chance conversation with someone I only knew through words on a screen.

But really, therein lay the appeal. I may yet edit and post my writings about that whole experience, though I'll first have the courtesy to get the okay from the person in question.

Such was on my mind though as I headed up to Edinburgh earlier in the week. I wasn't going solely for nmj's book launch - but that served as the catalyst for me travelling up there in the first place and also giving me the chance of doing a few other things I wanted to do.

So I've had a couple of days with some much-needed headspace and the chance to explore somewhere new (but somewhere I've long since wanted to visit). With the main focal point, in terms of social activity, being an evening with people I've never met before - but some of whom I've had varying degrees of contact with online. The aforementioned blog connections.

As I noted either to bobo or maybe to nmj herself (or probably both and everyone else in the room besides, since I found myself chatting away like I was on commission, and also said hello to hullabaloo, though I can't seem to link to her), it's like a kind of celebrity status: you might recognise faces, you have a certain amount of prior knowledge, perhaps some sense of expectation.

The difference is that these same people are likely to know a certain amount about yourself too, and there results a delightful mix of familiarity and sheer newness: talking over territory you (whoever "you"...etc) may have covered many times - but now with the addition of tone of voice, gestures, eye contact and so on. I realise that's quite an obvious point, but the fact of it can still be just a little startling. Which again serves to emphasise that quite delicious weirdness.

So I've been away in terms of writing my own posts: but I've had a hell of a lot of overlap between Real Life and Blogging.

The other thing which has to be said about each time that I've experienced this overlap so far (most definitely including the previous examples above), is that it's been a fantastic, enjoyable, positive experience.

Last night's book launch was no exception. I was happy to have been asked by nmj to take some photographs at the launch - it was nice to have a bit of a role (perhaps analogous, albeit distantly, to having a challenge set for me as mentioned earlier), which might also serve perhaps as a barrier in case my social skills (of which I have plenty) decided to desert me (which happens aplenty).

But it was great, and I'm glad that it went so well for nmj. She displayed great wit, personality, eloquence and energy as she talked about the book and then gave a reading. (I use the word "energy" whilst being aware that crippling exhaustion is something that those who have ME have to face so much of the time.) It was also great fun: a relaxed and informal atmosphere, good people to meet and talk to, and wine there for the drinking. I haven't read her book yet - haven't had the chance to start it - but I'm looking forward to it.

Time flew. I'm back home already, full of good memories of the launch and the rest of my stay, and these reflections on that intriguing oddness of the overlap between real life and blogging.

I realise too that I'm rambling: I'll stop now.

I hope that this final comment won't detract from or diminish the value and the enjoyment of the interactions mentioned above, since they've been very much shared experiences and, in nmj's case the evening was, as it should be, all about her.

But I have to say, it does seem as though I've found some new ways to say "me, me, ME!"