Woken by the phone making a noise yet again this morning. It must have been ... more »
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Sunday, June 3
Saturday, May 26
Pub Crawl 24 May 2007
by
mrtraveller
on Sat 26 May 2007 09:01 PM BST
Pleasant afternoon and evening with T's friend M. Which brings me to the barman at Qudos, which is near Charing Cross and tends to have Orientals in the street level, and, as they say, their admirers; whilst in the dark confines of the bar below stairs are the black lads doing their thing. It being comparatelively early in the evening, and in the middle of the week, it was all rather thin on the ground and I think the downstairs was closed, no doubt the black boys were still in bed recovering from whatever happened the previous weekend. Compton Street though was lively and we went to Ballens restaurant in the afternoon before a lesser pub crawl.
We were delayed getting there because, despite the congestion charge, the traffic in certain places is diabolical, largely because of traffic lights. There is a section along Piccadilly Road as it leads to the Circus which is an utter cow. The combination of traffic, the joining of traffic and a battery of traffic lights, which stupidly gives equal status to minor cut throughs and the main road, yet the main road itself is blocked by the conjunction/congestion of traffic crossing traffic at Piccadilly circus itself. The whole concept of circus and square from a traffic point of view has been lost and as a consequence traffic conjoins, has to be that word, from opposite or conflicting directions. It is a total mess and I blame the mayor. Anyway the barman...
Divine, many would say. We discussed where he came from for in my view he had the smoky texture of the Burmese, certainly he was Pacific Rim. I doubted a Cambodian or a Lao would be behind the bar, and he did not really look Thai, but his ears were big, so I plumped for Thai, and M thought perhaps South America (he has spent too much time in Saudi - the sun, you know). The boy said, "I come from Manila."
Ballens' boys were their usual chatty selves. There is a lovely boy from Israel who was subdued yesterday. But the rest were very gushing. We had a lovely salmon roast laid on 'Asian Salad' with a roasted sattay king prawn, the whole gently webbed with a pattern of Soya sauce, nery artistic. £14 - fuck in hell. But delicious. The wine was OK - Sauvignon ... or some such... we were there for hours. We added a cocktail as the afternoon went on and then set off on a pub crawl and a drift through the sex shops. M bought 3 DVDs for £20 remarking that he could not go wrong. I guess that on the beach in Jomtien one could get 20 for that amount of money. But East is East and West End is West End.
Amazing collection of people on the streets and the whole atmosphere was jolly and relaxed and altogether modern gay; everyone up for it, nobody doing it. The young and beautiful were as usual unaware that there IS a clock ticking, even for them. All too quickly the hours sped and train time tables edged towards their end, and the night gradually took over from the evening and it was too late to do much else, so I set off back to port getting home about 10.30... exhausted and with feet swollen from alcoholic excess and standing around so much.
Another day is upon us, lovely a sunny... and a bloody bank holiday Monday which means that the super markets will be packed by the panicking locusts afraid they will run out of food or something like that. I hate bank holidays.
M
What I am About
by
mrtraveller
on Sat 26 May 2007 12:07 PM BST
Introduction, clumsy mission statement. more »
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