Jazz! Nice.

It's been one of those disjointed weeks without any one really big event; I managed to do something mostly fun and mostly interesting each night without feeling the need to write home about any one of them. Lucky for you, then, that I seek validation through publishing verbose accounts of prosaic boozing and everyday chat.

Thursday night - see Flat Booze Destruction Day. Civilised post-swing drinks turned into a 2 am session where we reminisced with an old Pear Tree barman and argued over the nature of relationships. Ironic, really, that none of us appear able to hold one down without severe, repeated mental trauma.

Ah well. We commiserated, and it was good.

On Friday night I absconded from a work leaving do to join Jeff, Jez and the French girls for retro flat booze destruction. I dragged myself home at about 4 am after a drinking game, involving bouncing beer bottle caps into shot glasses, degenerated into straightforward drinking because the game was too dull.

I woke up with a bit of a cold on Saturday. And yes, I do know the difference between 'cold' and 'hangover', thanks. This always happens: I can't remember the last sick day I took off work and whenever I do suffer from anything approaching ill health it's at the weekends. Anyway, I struggled through the day (by stumbling around in my dressing gown and whining a lot) and that evening I went out to the Jazz Bar with Dave, Ali and some of her mates. It was a great night: lots of excellent chat with Ali's all-round top friends; plenty of booze and some jazz that was genuinely engaging as opposed to impenetrably wanky. The cover of High and Dry was perhaps a step too far, but I'll let it slide for the time being.

At one point I was in the toilet cubicle, noisily emptying my clogged-up nasal tract and then just sniffing like a bloodhound. I came out of the cubicle and bumped into a friend of Ali's (name redacted!) who rubbed his nose conspiratorially and said "Got some charlie, mate?"

"No," I replied. "I've got a cold."

Maybe you had to be there.

[As an aside to anyone who cares: what is it with jazz bassists and the monstrously over-engineered basses they invariably play? It looks to me that a six string neck the width of an aircraft carrier serves only to allow the average jazz bassist to play in a fractionally more relaxed fashion, without having to move out of a four fret range.

Four strings, please. Four. You want chords, you play a guitar.]

As a last hurrah, I went out for a couple of quiet pints on Sunday night, having accidentally locked myself out of the flat. Fortunately Dave, or 'Fate', as my phone's predictive text would have it, intervened to let me back in.

And predictably, I feel completely fine today.