Apart from finishing off the new look for the site, I also found time this weekend for three very good, but different, nights out. On Friday, we caught up with Sal’s cousin’s fiance, Wayne, who was over in the UK for a quick holiday, at a bar off Covent Garden called The Langley. Despite sounding a bit like a private members club of some kind, it turned out to be a slick, undergound bar below a quiet back street. It was heaving as we arrived at the tail end of happy hour, and didn’t get any quieter for the rest of the evening, but Sal had booked us a table at the restaurant, something that the management had gone to great lengths to hide away behind a partition in the far corner of the furthest room. I’ve no idea why (the food was actually quite good), but as a result of this subtefuge we virtually had the whole area to ourselves, and just sat back in our oasis of calm drinking the impressive number of beer bottles that appeared at our table at regular intervals.
In another life, back in Melbourne, Wayne happens to captain one of the aussie rules teams, and as we were leaving a couple of random drunken Australian blokes bounded over to shake his hand with a shout of “Go the Tigers!” It must be odd to travel 12000 miles from home and be recognised by complete strangers.
On Saturday, we headed over to the wilds of Acton (a place that turns out to be surprisingly far away when you miss the last train by 10 minutes and end up, through a succession of unlikely occurances, missing the last tubes and catching a collection of night buses home). The occasion was a Halloween-themed birthday thing. My token gesture towards dressing up was to wear the oversized comedy hands we had found in a fancy dress shop on Upper Street, but everyone else had made an impressive amount of effort, as the photos will attest.
Finally, Sunday night saw us at the tiny Borderline club in Soho watching an amiable Australian chap by the name of Carus play some thoroughly entertaining acoustic guitar music, occasionally accompanied by another bloke on mandolin. All in all, rather good really.