Sitting down at the tables we met a whole bunch of people and got a stick on the go. Midnight rolled around, and we danced a little up by the bar, waiting for the action to start. And they were selling Chupa-Chups in the toilet for a pound each.
A drink at the pub round the corner let us gauge our arrival to give us just enough time to get into the club, take a dump in the toilet (it's Dave's and my little ritual) and drop some sweeties down our necks before midnight. We hooked up at mine first and prepped for the evening with some music, chat, a few tinnies and a special New Year's present from me to the guys, straight from Peru. So George, Dave and I hit up The End, a fairly small and nicely relaxed club near Tottenham Court Road for a night of house and twisted disco. Now with Dave back, effectively for one night only, we were all set to kick ass and chew bubblegum. Dave and I used to go clubbing in Japan, then George arrived and got into the scene, then I left and Dave and George went clubbing a lot, then George came back to England and he and I resumed operations. He would definitely help make it a special occasion, NYE or not. So the only option that made any sense to George and I when we got together one evening in December was doing exactly what we would have done on any other Friday night, only with the added bonus that the one person we hadn't been able to share a Friday night with was in the country for a few days over Christmas and the New Year. Staying in on NYE with friends is all about huddling together against the bleak inevitability of anticlimax and manning the psychological watchtowers to warn about impending washout. And even then, why aren't you having this cosy get-together on any other day of the year? Because on any other day of the year there isn't that absolute need to do something, so you don't feel the necessity to band together and defend yourself against the certainty of crushing disappointment should you go out. Unless you have a select group of friends and can actually just enjoy each other's company and reflect on the occasion without regard for the expectations of it, you're stuffed. Come midnight you look around for some people to get hold of but even the taste of their mouths can't take away the bitter taste of predictable boredom in yours. Consider the typical situation when you go out: you go to a bar you probably wouldn't go to normally, pay, usually through the nose, just for the privilege of being in a position to buy overpriced drinks in a vastly overcrowded venue, and then proceed to imbibe at such a rate as to render yourself incapable of reminding yourself just what a fool you were for coming to this horrible dive in the first place. Drunk so that we can enjoy ourselves in even the most awful situation, and blind drunk so that we can't even see how awful it is. It's almost as if culturally we have developed a defence mechanism against the awfulness of NYE, and that is to get blind drunk. There are basically two things that you seem to be able to do on New Year's Eve
It's an institution, the shit NYE, as certain and predictable as the Queen's Speech, and about as fun. It's an old story, and everyone knows it: New Year's Eve is shit.
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