The Morning After...

Well! Last night was quite some night...

We had a bit of a do at the end of work to celebrate our department being relocated to its own building. The move has been good for me location-wise. I now have a great view from my desk of Regents Park but my team of seven is unfortunately split up over three floors of the building. I get a lot more exercise now!

We used to be in an open plan office and being spread around the place has already caused a few problems when I haven’t thought to communicate decisions to everyone as quickly as I could when we were all sat together.

Anyhow, we had food and drink laid on in the auditorium (yes, we have an auditorium in our building!). It was the only room where the forty or so people in my department could fit.

Things started civilly enough. A few drinks and nibbles…polite conversation but as the night progressed and more people left to head home the rest of us seemed to have no problems finishing off the rest of the booze between us.

First cans of 5% proof Belgium lager and then when that ran out onto wine. I am a crap drinker. I’ve made a conscious effort not to drink much nowadays and so I’m always at a disadvantage when it comes to any major sessions. I bowed out after 3 hours. Ironically not because I wanted to but I managed to drip strawberry juice down the front of my white work shirt and after soaking it in the washroom sink, just sobered up enough to decide to head off.

Coming in this morning, I found out that things had turned out to be a hugely eventful session for those hard-core enough to stay around. (For “hugely eventful” read “drunken debauchery”!)

The drinks in the auditorium were finished off swiftly and everyone then headed off to the local pub. This is only about 2 minutes walk away, so tends to be the setting for most drink-related “happenings” after work.

So what happened next? Pieces of gossip that went around the next morning… Ermmm…. Lap dancing demonstrations, drinking from shoes followed by toe sucking sessions, wrestling, falling down stairs and people being picked up and shaken upside down. One of the girls was very kind to put up one of the lads in her flat as he couldn’t get home, although she says that she didn’t realise that he is engaged. A pretty ordinary night out in London, really...

And they all still can’t believe that the staff didn’t throw them out. I think that they were probably too entertaining on a quiet Monday night to get thrown out.

We are all heading back on Friday for someone’s leaving do and a few of us are going along to “The Great British Beer Festival” in Olympia (on my way home, fortunately) on Thursday. So I should get plenty of drinking practice this week!

I’ll top that off with a BBQ on Sunday at the house of one of the girls I was in Cuba with. Suffice to say, drinking limits should be raised by the time I get to that afternoon!

The picture is off what used to be Abbey National’s HQ on Baker Street (and also the location of the postal address 221b aka Sherlock Holmes.) This tower is all that is left of the building. I guess that it must be protected or something. Bit drafty for old Sherlock nowadays though!