I’ve spent the last hour going through photos from the year I lived in Heidelberg, Germany during 2004-05, and it’s made me realise that I suck at staying in touch with people. I made some amazing friends during my time there, from all over the world, and there’s very few that I still speak to regularly, and even fewer that I have physically seen since we all went our separate ways.
I saw one particularly funny photo and emailed it to one of the girls, along with some general catch-up news, and she just happened to be online. An hour later, chatting, and it seems like only yesterday that we were saying our tearful goodbyes in Heidelberg.
I think I’m going to upload a batch of those photos to facebook, and start a tagging frenzy, just to get back in touch with a load of people. I’m too lazy to write 100 individual emails at the moment.
I’ve heard a rumour that a reunion is planned for some point this summer, as it will will be five years since we were all there. I would love to go, and it’d be great to see some familiar faces once more. I never should’ve let them get away from me, but at least I can try to start talking to them again…
We had a few friends round for dinner last night, and between the eating and the Wii golfing, one of them commented on my renewed facial hair. It makes me look like Edward Norton, apparently.
Usually, that’d be no bad thing: he’s a handsome chap, quite striking and I’d be happy for that kind of comparison to be made.
Unfortunately, the Edward Norton she was referencing was his appearance in American History X, where he plays a violent, racist neo-Nazi murderer with a swastika tattooed on his chest.
Can’t win them all, I guess.
The girlfriend and I, in Gordon's
Guns & Ro's
They were all over each other, all night
It was dark...
I spent yesterday evening in my absolute favourite watering hole in London, Gordon’s Wine Bar. It’s a tiny little place down by Embankment station, run by a French family, and serves nothing but wine and sherry.
It’s underground, with some tables in a really dark, small, cramped, cave-esque hole that you can see in the third picture, behind the couple that were eating each other’s faces all night long. Somehow, we booked a table for eight, and ended up in what was pretty much a cage at the end of the room, which was brilliant.
The wine there is fantastic, and we got through a stack of bottles between us. A particularly good Malbec was my favourite, but then I really like Malbecs in general. We also had a few plates of some great cheese, with some awesome brie and a good chunk of gouda.
As one of the guys pointed out, it was decadent.
I met a friend after work yesterday, and rather than doing our usual thing of just finding a bar and shooting the shit over a few drinks, we decided to do something a bit different. We ended up in Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, where there was a small art gallery opening, where we, erm, shot the shit over a few drinks.
The exhibition itself was tiny, to be honest, but pretty cool. I especially liked this one print/painting which was a view directly upwards from right underneath an electricity pylon, mainly because of the geometric symmetry. I’m a bit of a mathematician at heart, and in art especially I really like lots of straight lines and shapes.
There was also a cool painting of a heart, as in the organ not a logo. I’m not sure if I could cope with that on my wall 24/7 though…
It was good to see my friend, who I met when we were both studying Germany a few years ago. Despite us both living in London nowadays, we don’t see enough of each other. She hasn’t even met the girlfriend, which is crazy because we’ve been together nearly two years now (which in itself is crazy). Hopefully we’ll remedy that situation next month.
And I did enjoy going somewhere a bit different too. I seem to always end up in Covent Garden to meet people, because it’s near my office. But I’ve done the pubs and bars there to death, and it’s getting a bit boring now.
Having said that, I’ve been to Brick Lane loads of times, and have probably eaten in half of the curryhouses on the street. Usually with a good few beers in me first!
SOS - Smiths of Smithfield
SOS is one of my favourite restaurants in London, and it’s handily located very close to my office. The Smithfields part of the name refers to the famous meat market directly opposite, from which SOS sources its meat. And that’s “meat market” in the sense of a collection of butchers, not as in a nightclub which is densely packed with inebriated females.
SOS is a little odd because it’s essentially 4 restaurants in one. Each floor is almost entirely separate from the others, and the higher you go, the more luxurious and expensive they get. The top floor is practically impossible to get into on the day, and you need to book way ahead of time.
I met a friend for a quick lunch in the ground floor restaurant earlier today, where you can get simple, snacky types of food. It also doubles as a bar, which gets particularly busy after work on Fridays. Hell, on most days, to be honest!
For a more gourmet experience, you have to head upstairs and be prepared to put your money where your mouth is. I’ve been to the upper-level restaurants before with work, and they are very, very nice. They have some fantastic wines, and the food is just divine. Too expensive for me as an individual, but if someone else is paying…
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Oasis - Gas Panic!
I was listening to a bit of Oasis the other night, and this song really stood out. It’s from their much-maligned Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants album, which I always thought wasn’t as bad as people made out.
For some reason, these lyrics seemed particularly poignant for me:
Cos my family don’t seem so familiar
And my enemies all know my name
I seem to have got to a stage in my life where my circle of friends is dwindling. I like to think that quality is beating quantity, but at the same time I’m realising that the number of people I can ring on a weekend to just go do something is getting ever smaller.
I have many, many acquaintances through work and elsewhere, but there aren’t many amongst them with whom I’d choose to spend time outside of the workplace. And yet I spend more time talking to these people than those that I’d actually prefer to hang out with.
Is this a sign of getting old? If it is, I’m not a big fan.
11 plays
One of the girlfriend’s friends has just got engaged, and sent round an email this morning about the rough plans for the wedding. Yep, already! But she’s been hankering after getting engaged for a while, so I’m very happy for her and her fiance (who, incidentally, is an absolutely top notch guy).
The friend, like my girlfriend, is Zimbabwean, although she lives just near us in southwest London nowadays. As such, the wedding is going to be back in Zimbabwe, giving an opportunity for all of us non-Zimbabweans to experience the country where so many of our friends/girlfriends grew up. My girlfriend in particular is very excited about showing me her homeland.
The wedding is pencilled in for shortly before Christmas at the end of 2010, and the girlfriend is already planning to make a big trip of it, culminating in Christmas Day on the beach in Cape Town with her extended family. Sounds good to me!
God knows what kind of state Zimbabwe is going to be in in 18 months time, but I feel that it can’t get much worse. With any luck “Bob” (as white Zimbabweans call Robert Mugabe) will have popped his clogs and things will have improved.
The girlfriend constantly tells me that I just don’t know what it’s like in Africa, and that it will be a massive shock for me, but I’m already really looking forward to it. We’re in Egypt in about 6 weeks time for a holiday, which she’s claiming isn’t proper Africa, as it’s not sub-Saharan. We’ll see…
This is the second day in a row that after-work drinks with friends have been cancelled at the last minute because the other party can’t make it. As it turns out, I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in a restaurant and pub for work purposes, so wouldn’t have been much company anyway…
It’s just annoying that I’m trying to make the effort to keep up with my London circle of friends and make sure that we don’t drift apart, but still haven’t been able to see too many of them for a good while now.
It’s weird that I enjoy Twitter so much yet can barely stand to look at the Status Updates page on Facebook. The vast, vast majority of people I follow on Twitter are randoms; people I don’t know and have never met. Hell, I’ve not even exchanged an email or @reply with most of them.
Whereas on Facebook most of my friends are in fact real life friends. Admittedly, a good chunk of them are people from school that I don’t talk to any more, but I did know them well for a few years.
I just find Facebook updates to be inane, utterly uninteresting, and pointless. Yes, many critics of Twitter have accused that service of containing the same level of banality, but the beauty of Twitter is choosing who to follow.
On Facebook, it’s harder to go the whole hog and delete someone from your friends list, just because their updates are annoying. On Twitter, it’s not so much of a big thing. Maybe this is because of Twitter’s anonymity, and because of the knowledge that I won’t ever meet the person I’m unfollowing.
With Facebook, there’s more of a chance of bumping into someone, especially when I go back to my hometown for Christmas or a weekend. I doubt that there would be any repercussions, but it’s not nice to have to face someone and basically tell them that they’re annoying!
Equally, some of my best mates/friends, who I would never think of deleting from my Facebook, post some of the biggest loads of crap on their Updates. I’d have to plough through that each day/hour to get to the occasional good post from someone a bit more random.
With Twitter, I’ve fine-tuned who I follow so that I don’t have to sift through the crap to get to the good stuff. Likewise with Tumblr, I guess.
You can tell we’re getting older as it’s time for another member of the Melksham Group to take the long walk down the aisle. It’s Eddie’s turn to say goodbye to laddism and enter into a new life as a married man. The up side of this is of course we get to have a weekend of drinking to celebrate Eddie’s final outing as a single man.
The intro to an invite to a stag do for one of my good mates. We’re having a long weekend up in Newcastle at the end of April, which will no doubt wipe five years off of the life of my liver. The two best men organising it should be putting on quite a programme of events, I reckon.
I’m an usher in the wedding, the first time I’ve been involved in one since I was a pageboy at the age of about six or seven, dressed in maroon corduroy knickerbockers. I’m very, very excited.
Eddie’s the second of our group to get married, which is about right for a bunch of guys in their mid-20s. Another one got engaged over Christmas, while at least five of us live with long-term girlfriends. Two of the guys also turned out to be gay. There’s only a couple of kids around, that I can think of, but no doubt that’ll increase in the next couple of years.
It’s weird to think that we’re all adults now, seeing as I’ve known most of them since we started secondary school nearly 14 years ago, and a couple of them for even longer than that. Although we’re spread out across the south of the country nowadays, it’s so easy to slip back into the old ways when we’re all together, which is unfortunately ever more infrequently.
So it’s another wedding this summer, possibly one more next year, and then who knows. One of the best men, who has been living with his girlfriend for a while now, was using the other best man as a buffer to hold off proposing, as best man number two has been with his missus for years and years without popping the question. Of course, with best man number two doing so at Christmas, that’s switched the peer pressure from himself to best man number one.
And I guess that would put me next in line after that.
