Drunk and Disorderly

Nothing else has been broken, thank goodness. Dorothy and Julian are due back today.

Went out to lunch yesterday at Sorriso in Rockingham Street with the SE1 forum lunch club. There was an excellent attendance: about eight or nine of us. Sorriso are doing a lunchtime offer for £6.99 of soup or garlic bread or bruschetta, followed by any pasta or pizza dish plus a glass of wine. The soup was home made and excellent and the pizza fine. We all had variations of this offer and several bottles of Italian red wine and coffee.

After most people had left, after some persuasion by Ian, Plum and I went nearby to the appalling Rockingham Arms. This appeared to be half full of drunk old men, but we managed to find a table, and proceeded to drink a couple more bottles of wine. There were several drunken women singing, and one came up to Ian, saying he looked exactly like someone called Sean who had won the X-Factor in 2005. Fortunately she found someone else to target quite quickly and moved on, to Ian's relief. I had a very bland milky coffee as my alcoholic capacity is not great.

A gay couple sat at the next table and determinedly struck up a conversation with us. One of them, called Anthony, wore a very ill-fitting wig, a college type scarf and a duffel coat. He was apparently from Brixton and his father was a 'friend' of Francis Bacon. He started an age guessing thing and stated that he was born in 1976. This did rather surprise me as I would have thought he was at least 45. He was with another guy who was quite genial and smiled all the time. BSB managed to really annoy Anthony by calling him Tony, and Anthony was apparently quite rude to Plum, before asking to borrow her tobacco and papers to roll a cigarette, so she had 'words' with him.

However, Plum made some new friends on her smoking break outside who joined us and bought another bottle of wine. They worked for a company which did Sushi for parties etc, so Ian took a card in case we wanted a sushi party of our own.

I noticed that a security guard had been posted at the door at about 8pm. Suffice it to say that we started lunch at 12.30 and finished at 9.30 before going home. Quite disgraceful, but fun.