OK I’m writing this at an hour I shouldn’t even be awake at, but I just wanted to give a brief synopsis of last night’s events.
The participants: me, John Larrigan, yojimbo, and Fretful Porpentine who’s currently passing through Dublin on her pan-European expedition.
We met up around 8:00 in front of a shop on O’Connell Street. John looked absolutely nothing like his photo so it was several minutes before I finally decided to ask the guy standing exactly in the spot where he’d arranged to be if it was him. Fretful, fortunately, was far easier to spot and yojimbo managed to appear out of nowhere and recognize all of us.
We headed for O’Neills pub - near enough Temple Bar to be crowded but far enough not to be jam-packed and big enough we all got lost trying to find the toilets. It didn’t take long before the conversation was flowing as freely as the drink. Obviously much of the talk was about the SDMB (including reminiscing - har - about Phaedrus and JohnJohn) but we also got in a few words about travel, politics, evil computer corporations, barbie doll heads, etc.
When O’Neills shut we headed for a late night pub, stopping into a takeaway place for chips which, unfortunately, we didn’t have time to finish before reaching our destination - cue Fretful being forced to throw her chip bag away and the two of us trying to eat surreptitiously out of the one hidden in my coat pocket. We each had a glass of what I assume was a Brass Monkey, Democritus’s poison - which was actually pretty good, mind you anything would have tasted good at this stage - but after finishing that yojimbo and Fretful and I reverted to our pints while John somehow managed not to drink anymore at all (due to an interview this morning, how’d it go John?).
Things get pretty hazy after that but the pub finally shut and we walked down to Dame Street trying to work out how we were all going to get home. I think I did my usual end-of-a-drunk-night sudden exit (i.e. “OK I’m leaving, 'bye”) and I don’t remember what happened to yojimbo at all but I’m sure everyone made it home safe somehow (the only rough spot on my walk home being the young drunken Englishmen falling out of Temple Bar but they were easy enough to fend off :))
All in all, quite a good night. Hopefully some of the rest of you will come visit us soon.
I’m going back to bed now …