Tuesday 10/11/09

This weekend was a chance to unwind. Work's been really busy lately, the flat purchase is still going through (albeit as slowly as the solicitor can make it) and thanks to the cold, dark and generally horrid mornings I'm pretty sure my seasonal affective symptoms have kicked in, so I'm more tired and grumpy than usual. I'm trying to look on the bright side; there are only 5 weeks or so until the days start getting longer so if I can get my head down until Christmas all will be well.

I went for a night out in Marlow on Friday. It's been a no-go area for a few years as far as nights out go. Not because we're not welcome there any more but because it's generally accepted that there is nowhere for anyone to go unless you are a) over 35 and b) more loaded than an American in a high school. Yes, my demographic is not welcome in Marlow. We were hardly welcome when we went to school there but transport and a realisation of a wider world took us away, toward the delights of Maidenhead and High Wycombe, much to the delight of the locals and the tender of the Higginson Park shelter, I'm sure.

We went to the George and Dragon, which doesn't want to be a pub and behaves more like a restaurant with a bar. It doesn't want to be a pub so much it charges anybody who dares to ask for a pint so much that they certainly wont get drunk in there. That said, it's a nice quiet place and the management didn't seem to mind too much when we knocked a table over and I ended up with a pint of beer on my previously bone-dry crotch.

We moved from there to the Ship, which also doesn't want to be a pub. Unlike the George, however, it wants to be a nightclub, not a restaurant. I hate places like this. I think I hate pubs that pretend to be nightclubs more than I hate nightclubs. I wouldn't enter a nightclub volitionally and I'm happy with that. I know what a nightclub looks like and what to avoid.

That is unless they are clearly hundreds of years old and called things like 'The Ship', which gives off an air of 'old man, dark, quiet and rustic' pub-ness. I'm not to know that it is not a real pub until I enter, by which time I've committed to it until the majority of the group wants to leave. Blasting out of the disproportionately large speakers is what fans call dance music but clever people call offensive and the only place for peace is the beer garden, but that may as well be called the smokers' hole and as I'm asthmatic (and not a loser who takes his inhaler out with him on a Friday night) I can scarcely manage two minutes out there before reluctantly going back inside for some fresh(er) air. I drink until my stomach feels a little unsettled and fail to communicate with anyone because it's too loud and they have blamed me enough for accidentally spitting at them trying to shout.

Then we leave, go home and feel rubbish in the morning because we forgot to actually drink the pint of water we poured the night before.

That was it. I enjoyed it more at the time. I know that alcohol is a depressant but I wasn't aware that its effects were cumulative to such a degree.