Call the ambulance, Troy’s back!

Since my rather inebriated post about Rob & Em’s wedding, I’ve rather neglected World of Badger. Obviously the last week was rather taken up with my gran, but I thought I’d do a quick-ish run down of the ‘highlights’ of the previous week. I will be making copious use of links to e-street, a rather cool site I read about years ago in Internet Works magazine, but only just got round to visiting. It’s one of those “look up a bar/shop/bank in your area” sites covering lots of cities in the UK and Ireland, but with a difference: it includes photos of all the places listed (and it’s also very well designed, has details of disabled access etc, maps, and is very fast).

On May 5th, the Bank Holiday Monday, I met up with Troy for the first time since his return from Les Arcs (some of his photos of his season in France are up at Planet Sub-Zero). After some Rolo Muffins and a few pints by the river in Putney (and a trip to the cash machine — I mention this uninteresting fact purely so I can point out that e-street even have a photo of Barclay’s cash machine on Putney High Street!), and a few more elsewhere, we popped into a black-Dell-machines-for-hire place to watch Rob & Emma getting married in Vegas via live webcam. Naturally, as the service was delayed (second thoughts?!) and we were paying by the millisecond for the machine, Si and I swapped between the wedding and the trailer for Matrix Reloaded. In our pissed state this got a little confusing, but we’re pretty sure Emma was kick-boxing in lots of black leather, and Rob ended up getting hitched to some guy he’d met on the Strip named Neo.

So after weeping at the spectacle of our best chums getting hitched, what else could we do but go out to celebrate? After a disconcerting “Blenheim Crescent in Notting Hill, please.” — “Sorry the, the only Blenheim Crescent I know is in Notting Hill…”-type conversation with the cabbie, and a drunken chat to Simon H. on the mobile (if you’re reading this Si, sorry, we were a little tipsy), we eventually found ourselves outside the flat where Mel, Si’s mate from France, was staying. A couple of glasses of red wine later, we popped in for a meal at Mediterraneo, where we had some absolutely delicious spag bol and a super bottle of Italian red. Then back to Mel’s, before getting a cab back home.

The next day Troy and I did a little shopping (he wanted some obscure arthouse DVDs), then a little basking/people-watching in Soho Square and outside the Toucan. Then he dragged me along to see X-Men 2, which was surprisingly good fun, I have to admit.

The rest of the week was taken up with work, until Troy came over here on Saturday evening (10th May) with two bottles of cracking Grand Reserva Rioja. After that sort of start, the rest of the evening was inevitable… Guinness at the EDT and half a bottle of Absolut in the kitchen until the early hours. Utterly wrecked. I finally got up at about 1.30 the next day, with the foulest of hangovers, and we forced ourselves to head off to the pub with the Sunday papers to watch the Chelsea–Liverpool match (the less said the better). At least Troy knew a Hammers supporter to phone up, which did bring some much-needed schadenfreude. Still feeling like death-warmed-up, we went for an early-evening Mexican (alright, I admit it, I did try a hair of the dog pint of Guinness in Franklins too), and spent the rest of the evening watching TV (the highlight being Bremner, Bird and Fortune’s Beyond Iraq and a Hard Place — why the hell are they the only people on telly mentioning the PNAC?).

Right, that about brings me up to date.

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