Charolastra No.1 Comes To Town

Charolastra no.1 came to town for a week, so Friday after work I met her and we went to the British Museum. We looked at all the Ancient Greek stuff and ignored everything else - except the kiddy gift shop, where we bought some postcards, a half price Gladiator board game and 3 necklaces that were runes with a symbol meaning "success" (one for each of us, and one for Pickled Lily). We then went back to my flat and spent the rest of the night drinking gin and developing the Gladiator Game into a fighting game by making tactical cards - 'Arterial Bleeding', 'Blow To The Head', 'Appeal To Caesar' (my favourite one, where you're about to die and you plead for Caesar's mercy via a coin toss - Heads and Caesar restores you to health, Tails and he throws you to the lions. I know, Classical Greek in-jokes, we're total fucking geeks.) That was my lovely chilled Friday night with Battle Arena! and Charolastra no.1.

Saturday was a different matter altogether - spent the day on the phone to Darcy trying to figure out his plans for the Summer so I can book him a surprise romantic holiday (I'm such a cliche) but he was hungover and couldn't do anything more productive than beg me to come over and fix him. The evening, I met Charolastra no.1 and Pickled Lily for some early evening beer gardening in Camden so we could catch up and chat as a collective before everyone else got there - me, Charolastra no.1 and Pickled Lily have known each other for years, we went to the same secondary school. Well, much as we went to the same school, we all went to very different schools.

Charolastra no.1 went to a school where she had a great group of friends (us), teachers neither loved nor hated her, academically she floated in the the middle of the current - not racing by at the top but not drowning at the bottom, just happily floating. To confuse my metaphors a bit, life was a breeze. Charolastra no.1 left FHS with fond memories.

Pickled Lily went to a school which wrapped her up in a warm happy blanket for years, then when her father died and her family ran out of money, turned their backs on her. Pickled Lily, being a wonderfully gifted artist, was deemed a wasted talent by some, and a waste of space by others. She left FHS confused and betrayed.

I went to a school which had inexplicably high expectations of me, where I was either particularly favoured or particularly hated by the teachers, and ignored by the students. Everything I was favoured for (my sense of humour, my interest in learning on my own terms, my independent thinking) gradually became everything I was berated for. I left FHS with a chip on my shoulder.

Me and Pickled Lily keep nothing of those days, except Charolastra no.1. Memories of everything else have been pushed so far into our collective subconscious that even Freud wouldn't be able to sift through all the neuroses and complexes to find them.

Anyway, I was trying to write about my ridiculous Saturday night and try to explain why I'm so hugely hungover I haven't gotten out of bed in 7 hours, but seem to have digressed somewhat. And now my head hurts. To cut the long story short, I had a stupid shitty drunken night with Pickled Lily and Charolastra no.1 in Camden that actually was a lot of fun, with some people we used to party with when we were kids, ended up in Marathon (the club in the back of a kebab shop) then a random house party in Maida Vegas with some of The Cats where I did quite a lot of drugs, peaked at about 4 in the morning with the BFG and Robocop before some more of The Cats turned up and we partied in the loos til 9am, when upon our emergence we discovered we'd accidentally outpartied all the little Skins-esque youngsters who were strewn passed-out across the various corridors, so we went back to the BFGs house and watched Only Fools and Horses, fucked on Mandy, til lunchtime when the shades came on (twas a beautiful sunny day in Maida Vegas) and The Cats went for Sunday lunch at the pub and I walked home, entirely wrecked but gloriously happy.

Probably not a note-worthy story, but I went home so unbelievably contented and guilt-free - which admittedly may have been due to the excessive amounts of Mandy, but I choose to believe it was just pure unadulterated joy from living life and being with friends, which doesn't come around for me that often. So in conclusion, yes, definitely note-worthy. Thus duly noted.

NB: Charolastra No.1 is so-called because of a clip from Y Tu Mama Tambien. We saw it when we were youngsters, and became the Charolastras, we even wrote a manifesto - none of which I can remember these days. Except 'La neta es chido pero inalcanzable', which was our motto. And something about astral cowboys.