I’m a few days behind and typing on a German keyboard with a hangover.
On Saturday there was a Christmas get-together at the Clown & Bard, which I largely missed. One of the resident gang there is an English kid called Tommy who is on acid every time I bump into him. He had a new pet rat which everyone was playing with and he made the mistake of bringing it down to the Blind Eye, leaving it with people he didn’t know very well and going off for a couple of hours. Within 15 minutes we’d lost it down the back of the sofa. Meanwhile the resident three dogs and one cat patrolled the bar area. Survival chances were judged to be slim. As I left at 4am the rat was still lost, the owner not in a state to really mind, yet.
Sunday was my first ever Christmas away from home at the age of 26, and in a country where it had already been and gone by the local reckoning. Next year will be the same too, then I’ll be back in the UK some time in 2007. The first thing I had to do was phone my Mum, Dad, Sister and Nan and explain / break this to them. That done I got down to some serious cooking for the Blind Eye Christmas dinner later in the day. Then Dennily came round, we ate some of the food, watched some Peep Show and got off down to the Eye with the remainder. It was a good party with very good food. I tried biscuits and gravy for the first time and was pretty impressed. Tommy managed to find his rat after it being lost in the bar for 20 hours, not just an impressive survival but a good present for the guilty parties too, not having been responsible for the death of someone’s pet after all. Somehow I ended up playing scrabble in the back room for a while. After that it was just a normal sort of night.
Now I’m in Berlin. More later.