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“No! It’s Not Burnt”

In the end, I survived my displacement from our flat on Saturday with little more than a sore head the next day, but this was after an unexpectedly drunken evening at Claire’s birthday on Friday night, which ended with Sally waking me from my drunken slumber and forcibly dragging me out of the venue to catch the bus–ah, my ability to fall into an alcohol-induced sleep at the slightest provocation knows no bounds. I was particularly pleased with my Zane Lowe celebrity spot, though, which took place towards the end of Saturday evening, because, as my haiku suggests, no one believed me at first. One of our group, who spends her working days in the meeja, and is thus exposed to celebrities on a regular basis, told me that the chap over the other side of the pub was categorically not him, because “the real Zane Lowe is much better looking”, at which another member of our group pointed out the balding chap that notLowe was talking to and suggested it might be Moby. When, later in the evening, we took the radical step of asking him if he was indeed the kiwi DJ, I got to feel mightily pleased with myself when it turned out that I was right all along. Well, it’s so rare an occurrence that I have to make the most of it when I can. [Case in point: the weekend’s second celebrity spot involved my sister pointing out that her off of that dodgy BBC sitcom had just walked right past me “looking a bit rough” on her way out of the Screen on the Green].

The night ended with me struggling to stay awake for the second day in a row, so it is perhaps fitting that I nearly didn’t get my last pint at all: I asked the barman for a pint of bitter, he repeated the order back to me (“pint of young’s bitter, yes”), and promptly made me an espresso. “Er, I asked for a pint of bitter?” I said, having presumed he was making that for someone else, and not thinking that espresso could ever be misheard for bitter. Then again, perhaps he knew what I really needed better than I know myself.

On Sunday, prior to my brush with celebrity, we popped over to Upper Street to grab something to eat. Sal and I had been to a French restaurant (Le Mercury) with really good, reasonably priced food a couple of times before. I’d even taken my parents there, so we thought we’d give it another go.

Unfortunately, things appear to have changed recently: this time the food was truly terrible. Top of our list of complaints was the completely burnt Yorkshire pudding that arrived with Sal’s roast. Her request for a replacement was met with bemusement and then the arrival of a second, equally burnt, one. When we pointed out that this one was just as black as the first, the waiter switched to the hairy butter school of defensive customer service, by trying to pretend that this one wasn’t mostly carcinogens.

Oh dear. That’s another one on the list, I suppose.