BEER AND SHARKS! BEER... NEAR... SHARKS!

I said it all day before the party and about a fucking JILLION times at the party. BEER... NEAR... SHARKS! You know why that’s not the best sentence ever? Do you even realise? Let me help you out here with a simple preposition. One single four letter work which makes one awesome sentence into a friggin’ INCREDIBLE HULK SENTENCE... the word... is...

FREE!

FREE BEER NEAR SHARKS!

I don’t even go to work parties really. Socialising with work people just strikes me as kind of lame. You know? I’ve got real friends to be drinking and hanging out with. Sure... only two of them, but two is enough for the most part. Regardless, neither of my remaining friends could make this happen for me. It’s not even a dream of mine, because at no point in my life would I ever have considered that one day I would be going to a party in the London Aquarium where drinks would be free and sharks would be near.

The ‘Theme’ of the party, because apparently you can’t have a party anymore without first having to fall in line with some fucking theme, was Pirates and Bling, possibly the most tenuous connection between two things on which a party has ever been built. The foundation of the Pirates and Bling was so shaky I half expected the entire South Bank to just fucking, up and collapse into the river.

Obviously I didn’t go as a pirate... or as bling. I went in my normal clothes because I have a personality which cannot be expressed with a simple cheap costume [and also because no Fancy Dress Bank in the land carries a “Curmudgeonly Dick-Head” costume]. We arrived a little fashionably late and everyone I was with [work people... *Shudder*] headed straight for the dance floor.

Idiots.

At the bar I tricked the hapless and for-some-reason toga wearing barman to give me two drinks instead of the regulation one, and from then on it was Double Beer Night. I like to make a point, whenever drinking on someone else’s coin, to have two beverages on me at a time. You never know when their bottomless pockets will suddenly run dry and the booze shoots up in price from Nothing pence to Something pounds! Double Beering has the distinct advantage of getting me loaded in half the time, making an already magical evening of reckless drunkenness in the proximity of the ocean’s deadliest killers even more nerve racking.

I mean... it wasn’t all like that. There were times when I was just hanging out with Nemo, eating from a tiny bowl of sausages and mash or chatting to people queuing up to have their tarot read [honest to God I have no idea who was in charge of this thing. Pirates, Bling, Togamen, Tarot cards, sausage and mash... the only thing that made any sense was the presence of SeaBreeze cocktails, of which I had three]. Then there was this Amy Winehouse impersonator who looked a lot like Vinnie Jones sown into a pair of curtains, but could carry a reasonable tune when she wasn’t just trying to talk to the crowd. She was from Essex and had a voice similar to a market trader after eating a block of cheese, smoking 40 woodbines and drinking a pint of milk. Awful.

Eventually they stopped serving drinks, at which point I made for the door. There’s no point talking about who did what, because you won’t recognise any of the names, Let me try...

Jason and Kev wound up kissing each other because Yashna and Shiqi promised to kiss each other too, but all they did was video it and show everyone at work for a week afterwards.

How did you like that? Meant nothing to you did it? Well it happened, and so did my walk home from fucking Stratford for 45 damn minutes because we missed the last Central Line, because Lee Brown maced Jason in the eyes with minty breath spray.

Then the next morning I went to work and spent the entire day staring lifelessly into the eyes of my colleagues.