Sloppy New Year

Well, it's been a while. Have you missed me? I thought not.

As per usaul, NYE was an anti-climax of great magnitude. Seriously, why does everyone get so frickin' excited about this one evening? Obviously, there's all that crap about the ever-so-exciting countdown, but, to be quite honest, it just seems like another reason to get paralytic. Don't get me wrong, I loooove getting crunk, but why the dickens does everything have to be so expensive? For instance, trekking to London is not uncommon for students and adults alike, but with the train being £13 and the generic nightclub ticket being at least £20, you've spent more than £30 before you even start drinking.

And that leads me seamlessly to the next point in my rant; the price of alcohol. The clubs think they can fleece you for a flute of fizzy cats' piss and flog it off as some buffting champagne. Just because, it's NYE, you're a bit 'zany' and you're wearing 3D specs, it doesn't mean you have to fork out for this tramp juice.

So, once you are suitably legless, and crowing random lines from 'Auld Lang Syne' in between spewing champagne (and, for that matter, your mum's liquified money) all over the pretty girl's favourite set of Primark heels, where do you go next? You can't take a taxi because there aren't any. You can't take the train because there are queues until breakfast, due to the untimely closure of the major tube stations in the vicinity. Only two choices left, I'm afraid; Night Bus, or shuffle around aimlessy for the next few hours, scooping up dog ends and licking Sub of the Day pictures, until you finally sober up enough to realise that you've lost your phone. And a shoe.

This scenario, my friend, is the precise reason that I went to a house party in Brighton instead. In conjunction with being safe in the knowledge that none of the aforementioned was going to spike my night, I entered 19 Bristol Road, a cute, purple pebbledashed student dig, expecting to fill my evening with conversations with adolescents with plastic haircuts and abbreiviated names. Instead, I started chatting to a delightful melee of artbitches from Maidstone, who, like me, knew no-one at the party except the chaps they came with. Over the course of a crate of Carling and an entire pouch of Cutter's Choice, we swapped names, background stories, and non-descript banter about clothes and music, while I even dabbled in a heart to heart about relationships.

The morning brought with it the aroma of blocked toilets, and the mellifluous snores of deep sleepers. 'Twas a charming scene.

The moral of the story, and my resolution for 2008, is: attend more house parties fuelled by alcohol and teenage frustration.

Oh, and London is shit.