Cricket report

The cricket day out was excellent. Since I was a complete novice at the sport the other chaps in the team arranged a short training montage for me to learn the basics of how to hold a cricket racquet and so on before we started.

This went okay and so I was full of beans, and rather a lot of beer by the time we took the field. We were playing against a team of people involved in a wine shop who were opening batting. I was fielding, which involved standing about and concentrating on things in the distance. I only touched the ball once during the entire fielding experience but I managed to throw it back fast and in the right direction and thus I feel I contributed.

I was 9th in the batting order, and by about half way through our batting we realised that while it was mathematically possible for us to win the odds were astoundingly long. Still we bravely fought on, and I got to have one whole ball thrown at me while holding a bit of wood to hit it with before the game was over. Still strolling about in the padding was quite entertaining.

After this match there was the final which was played by the two teams who were taking it seriously while we drank more booze - moving onto the wine and tequila now and basked in the sun. There was a lot of reading of the Saturday papers while we experimented with different types of cocktail mixes. Smoothies go jolly well with vodka but you have to drink them fast.

With the final out of the way there was a play off for third place which some of the chaps insisted on playing in their underwear as they had offered to do this if people would donate more for charity, which they did.

We managed to win this game, although I didn't actually get to bat, or touch the ball so I don't feel that involved but a win is a win I suppose. So I don't think I'll be investing in a Cricket costume anytime soon but it was a smashing day out.

Mr Wells and the cats

Last night was a surprise. I had expected to spend an evening alone frantically working on new ideas to sell for money. Instead I got a call from a chum saying that there was some gallery opening in St James, and well things went a bit wrong.

Free booze was mentioned, so I pulled myself together, found a semi-decent shirt and set off. A short, rather warm tube journey later and I was sipping faux-champagne and looking at extremely expensive prints of cats by Andy Warhol. Honestly, some people do spend an awful lot on art when they could be buying motorcycles with their money.

The event was rather jolly, we met a photographer who attached himself to our group and then a strange Hungarian man called 'Mr Wells'. He just breezed up to us and introduced himself and then told us his entire family history. I liked the fact he asked for our first names but he was more formal and insisted on being called Mr Wells. After Mr Wells had revealed when his great-uncle had decided to come to London but failed we ran off to my chums club for drinks. Mr Wells didn't join us which was probably for the best as the blighter just wouldn't stop talking about distant relatives and their position on the globe.

We arrived with the photographer who had decided to join us. So we grabbed a table, drank rosé, ate artichokes and roared with laughter while talking about fingerless gloves and tinfoil parrots. I like going to that club but I fear, if I became a member I would go rather too much.

I'm all for becoming an old soak, but I just can't afford to do it just yet.

Breakfast wines

I had wine for breakfast today, not because I'm some decadent dandy* who bathes in Champagne and uses silk for loo paper but because I'm ill and I'd completed some tricky work even though I was practically deaths door due to man-flu and the only food I had in the house was a couple of slices of bread, some slightly 'troubled' cheese and half a bottle of terribly good Shiraz.

This morning I had to finish off a feature which I should have completed a while ago, and suddenly it was asked for so I woke up at 7am and wrote it, then I finished off another piece of work all before 9am.

To mark this Herculean effort I made myself some English Rarebit, which according to a telly program I watched last night is cheese on toast where you give the toast a good sploshing of red wine before you put the cheese on. I tried this and it was marvellous, so good I did a little dance.

Sadly after I ate it I realised it was the last bit of food I had in the house so I'm going to have to shuffle down to the shops while unwell. Blast, but if I do make it out I'm morally allowed to buy all sorts of treat foods because I'm not long for this world and I probably should enjoy it while I can.

It's entirely logical if you think about it.

*Although most of the time that is more than enough of a reason.

The Prisoner

Today was supposed to be a day of rest, and catching up on things. I had a couple of features to finish off for other places and some things to research which involved a very long phone call with a chap at the Navy.

Anyway, having finished off all my work on time, I decided that what I really wanted to do with the afternoon was the following.

1) Cook a smashing lunch, maybe some of the Thai Soup I made before that was so nice.
2) Go and test a couple of motorbikes out, I already know the one I want but it doesn't hurt to test the competition does it?
3) Amble over to my favourite wine shop and try and bottle of the wine that they especially ordered in for me because it's my favourite wine ever.

Now I don't know about you chaps but that sounds like a cracking afternoon to me, but it isn't happening. Why? Because my flatmate has locked me in again (who knows why) and so I'm stuck in the flat again and she isn't answering her phone. Drat.

Spring and Jools Holland

Spring seems to have arrived, it's a tricky season to dress for as while the day may be pleasantly warm when the evening arrives it will be jolly chilly. So if you are going to go for an afternoon picnic you need to be careful. I've been caught out a couple of times wearing a light summer jacket when it's still cold in the evenings and I was forced to stop in every pub on the way home for a drink just to keep my body temperature up.

Yesterday I went to a restaurant with a friend to review it, I ambled into Knightsbridge to meet up with her and go to a little place tucked away on Beauchamp Place. The last time I was at this restaurant I was on a date with an adult actress we had been shopping in the area and ducked inside to avoid the rain. The restaurant was as good as I remembered, it's tiny and pleasantly strange.

About half the items on the menu have the name of a celebrity next to them to let you know which screen idol liked that pizza the best. We didn't recognise a few of the names but a swift check on the Internet revealed that one was a drummer in the Who (for a bit) and another was an actress.

After we ate I ambled home and fell fast asleep. I'm trying to keep myself busy as on Thursday I get some BIG NEWS (hopefully) and can't let myself think about too much. It's like a special sort of Christmas and I have to stop myself from looking out of windows and thinking about it.

Luckily the Woo is taking me along to a recording of Jools Holland's show so that should be a good distraction and tomorrow I've got a wine tasting, so the next couple of days should be just about bearable. Just.

Itinerary for today

9am - Pitch ideas to newspapers, and a magazine.

10am - Bimble into work in Soho, I'm not officially in today so it's more of a social visit.

12am - Take someone out for lunch.

4pm - Wine tasting for a pilot radio show.

6pm - Drinks with old work colleagues.

7pm - Learning rude sign language off my favourite lesbians (some of whom are deaf).

8pm - Leaving do in a scary pub with lovely people.

Aches, Port and Champagne

I ache a lot today, in places I hadn't expected to ache. It feels like I've been punched in the stomach, it's not a very pleasant experience but at least I've not got any bruises.

After I'd finished scampering down buildings I returned to the office to get changed and after a bit of messing around with words it was time to go to my favourite wine shop in the whole world - Planet of the Grapes - to do a wine tasting recording for a radio show.

The shop was very busy so we couldn't do a recording (that is going to happen today) so instead we sat around drinking port and sampling some very nice wines. We drank one with 'cashmere tones' according to the chap from the wine house who was there doing business with the owner.

Once we had worked our way through a good percentage of the samples we moved onto the white port and helped the owner with his tasting notes. It was fun trying to come up with ridiculous phrases for him to put in my personal best were

'The nose is like a spring meadow with a bee hive, just hints of honey in the wind'

'This wine has a confident flavour that struts across the palette like a Troubadour'

When the wine nonsense was over I was filled with an urge to by some champagne. When I was proper bachelor I always had champagne in the fridge.

This is because you should always have it around for emergencies. Emergencies like meeting someone fun and you don't want to stop drinking yet but the pub is closed, a bottle of very good champagne chilling in the fridge can be just what a chap needs to save the day.

Port, pigs and gin and tonic

Yesterday was another silly day of a silly week which is exactly how it should be. We may be adopting a pig at work for the purposes of annoying someone who has annoyed us. Well that and getting lovely bacon in a few months time. I think it's an often under-used insult.

'You sir, shall have a pig named after you.'

Or maybe it shouldn't be an insult because pigs are lovely animals. Anyway adopting a pig just might be the new craze sweeping London because everyone we mentioned it to wanted to adopt a pig too. Adopting pigs is so 2008.

On the way to the tube we (work person and I) walked past a wine merchant we know. So we thought we would pop into to say hello. We even said we wouldn't drink because we were both a bit broken from last night. Sadly there was a wine competition going on downstairs, or one had just finished. The place was running over with opened bottles of wine that were just going to be poured away. It would have been awfully rude to not drink.

So we started seeing if our palettes were up to much and while the rest of the table were saying things about 'full body' and 'simple texture so probably a New World wine' I could muster nothing better than 'this is probably a red wine' or 'it makes my tongue want to die'.

I know nothing about wine, I can hold my own about Champagne and could probably represent England in a blind gin taste test but wine. Well I can tell if it is red or white, but that is about it. Anyway, after about two dozen bottles I was struggling to even tell the colour of the wine. So we had some port.

After the port it seemed like an excellent idea to go to bar to for a gin and tonic to refresh the palette, which actually turned out to be a few gin and tonics to make our legs go numb. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.

Wine, public relations and the law

I went wine tasting last night. It was the office Christmas party so we went to a great wine shop in Bloomsbury with a little room downstairs full of interesting bottles. After about five minutes of tasting our team had identified the first round of wines from a list but we decided in the interest of being sure we would give them a very thorough tasting, very thorough indeed.

Due to this dedication we found identifying the second round of wines much more tricky. I didn't get notes of raisins or a complex taste just 'red' and 'makes my tongue go numb'. Through luck more than anything else we managed to get them right but sadly were disqualified from winning because we got all our questions correct which made the judge suspicious.

I also learnt an interesting fact about liable law in England. If you say something about someone and it is untrue you can be sued but if you are just rude to them there is nothing they can do.

So to say the actor Jeff Cruise is gay would get me in a lot of trouble but if I said Jeff Cruise was a wanker. Well that is fine.

I'm currently waiting for a P.R. to get back to me, I would be providing some publicity for one of her clients in exchange for a quote but they are being a nightmare about it. Still writing about nonsense makes a nice change from writing about the value of bets or trying to explain the rules to yet another game of 'lose your money fast'

Oh and no new interesting searches this week, apart from 'Birthday Helmet'. I'm sure the searcher was looking for something else when he or she arrived here.

Crimble

I love Christmas, it is well skill. Giving people stuff, wearing silly hats, drinking special wine, what isn't there to like?

Last year I went drinking out with a friend in Soho while wearing a Christmas hat, and I swapped it for some coconuts. That is a Christmas miracle. It's also the only month of the year when it is acceptable to have a tree full of squirrels, birds and lights in your front room.

This year I wonder how many days will pass before I get sick of mince pies, I'm going to bet about 4. It's not a problem, there is always festive ginger bread and a plethora of chocolate based snacks to mark this special month.

T.P.'s parents don't go in for Christmas in a big way, so this year is going to be a bit of a shock for her. Christmas is a big thing at Chez Louche, and none of that religious poppy-cock either, I'm talking about eating too much, playing silly games and watching James Bond films through an alcoholic fug.

Hello Soho

I've rather disappeared of late. With out an Internet connection I felt as if I disappeared off the face of the earth, well I'm back now. At least at work, yup I'm sat at my new desk, in the new office in London's trendy Soho. I saw a Drag Queen as I cycled into work, is there any better sign of a good area?

The office is small and slightly spartan but only because we haven't really moved in yet, Soon art created by chimps will adorn the walls and later today a delivery of wine is arriving (40+ bottles) so we will have an extremely well stocked wine section for the office. Thank you PR company. We don't have a bottle opener yet but it is only a matter of time.

I'm extremely excited, this company is so cool it makes my teeth hurt. I'm listening to French Jazz in the office as it seemed like the right thing to do. I must admit I'm slightly concerned as what my exact job will be. So far it seems about having lunch in members clubs and talking to people at parties but that can't be all.

The new flat is lovely, it's still a mass of baggage and the sofa isn't completely made but it is starting to get there. We have plates and everything now, so the days of eating out of recycled Chinese food containers are over.

I saw a parking attendant on the way into work, he was putting a parking ticket on someones car and his hat was at an angle which almost anyone would describe as jaunty. It doesn't seem right that a supposed authority figure should have a hat resting on his head in a stylishly rakish way. Would you accept a telling off from a police officer if their hat was on backwards?

Mime, wine and plagiarism

Last night was very good fun it was an extremely hard music quiz, I was of almost no use to the team until a section on Quincy Jones came up and I trumped home thanks to my extensive knowledge of his involvement in the Italian Job sound track.

We drank a lot of free wine and threw biscuits at the other teams, just like a proper pub quiz.

After the quiz had finished we went to a late-night drinking den in Soho to talk about nonsense. I ended up doing some complicated Mime with an old friend, why is drunken mime so entertaining?

The next morning I opened a fresh copy of a magazine that I have a big piece in (v. good) but also noticed that later in the magazine one of my ideas has been plagiarised by someone else. This is a tricky issue because I like writing for the magazine but I can't have my ideas given out to other people.

Oh and everyone liked the waistcoat, apart from Henry who said I looked like a snooker player on the way to a wedding. Cheers Henry.