Timber's weekend excursions N° 7: Belated birthday bundle

It has come to my attention that my previous blogentry was rather depressed in nature. It pleases me to inform you that this one is much cheerier. Anyway, life is a rollercoaster, just got to ride it, as Ronan Keating so sagely and perceptively caterwauled among drapes of gruesome light-pop slosh back in 2000.

Liverpool Anglican Cathedral

This week I have been mostly partying non-stop. It started on Friday 26th with work arranging general alcoholic carnage to celebrate hitting targets three months in a row. This distressed me somewhat as my Christmas bonus probably went on somebody else's bar tab. Having made tenuous friends with some archaeologists from the fourth floor, I made a fairly early escape, largely because I like my colleagues but absolutely cannot cope with drunken work parties at all, and subsequently pitched up at Bar Kick. This is an excellent place on Shoreditch High Street if you want to drink, eat, and/or play babyfoot. I wanted to do all three of these things, although Sam started to feel less enthusiastic about the latter activity after losing his first two legs 19-1.

Primrose Hill feat. darling Mother

The parents arrived on Monday and were entertained with various nonsense around London including an exhibition on War Propaganda posters at the Imperial War Museum. They stayed around until Wednesday lunchtime, and in testament to my own quite galactically atrocious levels of organisation, I actually spent the morning of my birthday trying to purchase a birthday present for my Dad. His was in July.

After they thanked me for having them - and vice versa, only 26 years ago, and in a very much more literal sense - I found young Sezinha at Euston and dragged her off to Liverpool where we found Em and Dan. We then went on a hunt for the SuperLambBanana which wasn't in the place where it ought to have been and hence made us late for dinner. We also saw the place where the This Morning weather map ought to have been and also wasn't. All in all it was not the most auspicious of sight seeing trips.

After dinner Sezinha and I made our way up to Anfield hence fulfilling the whole Hideout-related we'll-go-to-Anfield-one-day pact type thing I mentioned in May. This worked out rather well since we blagged seats virtually on the half way line and saw a 2-1 win. On a further but possibly more obtuse positive note, if you include that Fulham game last season, we have both now personally witnessed virtually the entire Liverpool career of Nabil El Zhar.

Posing with girls again, largely to irritate TimBarton

We slept over at Em's house and met her mother, dog, and father, with mixed results. The morning turned into a bonus mini-Beatles tour featuring a small church with Eleanor Rigby's grave and what was presumably Father MacKenzie having just performed the sermon that no-one will hear, followed by Penny Lane, complete with barbershop, bank, and shelter in the middle of the roundabout.

The tour finished off with Liverpool's two cathedrals - the Anglican one, which was designed by a Catholic (who also did a nice line in telephone boxes and power stations), and the Catholic one, which was designed by an Anglican. They are linked by a road called Hope Street. Presumably this is a powerful symbol of something or other.

Back in London on Thursday night I went to see some workmates in a theatre production called Mile End, which was excellent - don't just take my word for it.

Fulham. Stadium next to the Thames. Looks like a rowing club. Their fans are regularly outsung by passing waterfowl.

I finally managed to slip in some birthday drinks on Friday and Saturday nights, sandwiching a rather distressing trip with JSen to Craven Cottage. This was also notable for four lads from school, whom we'd not seen in 7 years, turning up and sitting in the seats next to us. We might have felt more like going for drinks afterwards if it wasn't for Reading outplaying Fulham but somehow losing 3-1. Still, as Steve Coppell, the manager, put it after the game: "there are 1.2 billion people in India who couldn't give a shit what happens to Reading."

Yes.

There is something very wrong about this.

On Sunday, Sarah of Derby came down to see me for the first time in ages, following her year spent gallivanting around South America. I treated her to a jolly tour of London that for some reason ended up in Euston Station forecourt. We discovered that this is one of the absolute worst places in the world to watch a sunset.

Finally I returned to work on Monday only for the office to decide that I hadn't got away with being on holiday for my birthday and that if there was any half-decent chance of an excuse to crack out some cake, they were definitely going to take it. My resistance to this idea was shall we say minimal.

Once cake was over I was informed that our sister office downstairs (whose advertising campaign is mostly my responsibility) had hit a major business target last month and that everyone involved had been individually awarded a bottle of champagne. Including me.

Which was nice.