Friday, January 07, 2005

Living in 2005

After an uneventful but thoroughly enjoyable New Years at The Bedford (which requires a post all of its own, which I can't be bothered to write now), New Years Day was spent in the altogether more surreal surroundings of Living in Brixton.

Arriving at 6:30, heavily hungover and fairly dubious, things didn't look like they were going to start well. I'd recieved an email about the New Years Day party, which was free from midday until 3am, and featured 80s & 90s disco classics from Nervous Stephen upstairs. How could it fail? Thing is, a fairly random group of friends were meeting up with me that night, and I was really hoping they'd all have a good time. But, when the first of us arrived, the place was full of semi-conscious bodies either avoiding our gaze or aggresively staring at us. Not great.

Trying to make the best of it, we quickly got ourselves enveloped in a sofa and a couple of beers (over-priced, naturally), and busied ourselves by staring at the nightmarish seventies wallpaper. Then, suddenly, half the bar just upped and left, leaving only about ten people in the place, sprawled out across a multitude of cushions and attempting to calculate how many hours they'd been awake for. Then, just as suddenly, it began to get heaving. Apparently, we'd just witnessed the changing of the Brixton guard, as last night's casualties finally made it home and the fresh meat arrived.

Things picked up after that, with a busy and trendy crowd downstairs dancing to some fairly pants house music and taking 2005 far too seriously, whilst me and my friends took over upstairs, dancing unashamedly to the Bugsy Malone soundtrack. There were only a couple of other people who had ventured up the stairs, so thankfully we were free to embarass ourselves to our hearts content.

All in all a great night. Living seeemed to be full of people who knew each other, or were desperately keen to give that impression, but the music upstairs was all good fun, and you can't really argue with fifteen hours of free drinking..!