When you start Uni, those first few weeks and months, you meet a lot of people in a real condensed time frame. It's all so hectic and emotionally charged, you can easily get carried away. It seems like everyone you meet is awesome and you're learning tons of new stuff from them, and surely this new group of people will be in your life forever! You'll move into a house and cook and hang out and drink and have an amazing time all the time. Only obviously you don't do any of those things. Once you move out of halls the group splinters, and as your cell adds different people so do the others, becoming more and more disparate. It was great being taught about Dub Step and checking out that bar with the resident Jazz pianist, and meeting folk with interests different to yours is always exciting... for a bit.

But ultimately you'll do what you always do. What everyone always does. Seek out and befriend people like you, who like what you like and go where you go. Over time the fantastic group of 27 odd people that you adored a few years ago is down to MAYBE 4, if you're lucky. The others move house, or you do, and you lose track of them. Don't despair though. You shared some important times, and one day you'll be out somewhere. Say, Alton Towers, and you'll bump into one of these people in the queue for the Sonic Spinball. Perhaps his name is Ollie and he tells you that, amongst other things, he's moving to London in a couple of weeks. THEN imagine those weeks pass and he invites you to a BBQ at which he's also expecting a handful of your other long lost friends. Would you go? Or would you bake a cake?

Me? I'd do neither. I'm a miserable cuss for the most part, and I just got Alan Wake on the 360 too, so I was quite content to sit in the flat and play that till the cows choke or the power cuts out, but Ollie is a persuasionist if nothing else. So while James broke new ground in culinary architecture, I ventured to Old Street tube to meet O-Dog and Missing Pal #2, Jime.

Now known as Jim, he works as a navigational something or other for large cargo ships and the life. A vocation SO stressful that he even gets his own slave, who irons the man's uniform and GOD HELP HIM if he gets it wrong! Earlier in the year Jime saw a young shoreman remove his glove after a crushing incident, shake it and watch two dismembered fingers slip out and thud to the floor. Gruesome. It's little wonder that Jime feels it necessary to espouse the heart bursting pressure of it all at every given [and some taken] opportunity. I got to Ollie's Back-Estate Harry Brown nightmare ground floor "apartment" and headed out to the garden [in which he’d placed a couple of sofas. Nice touch] and met star of Bargain Hunt and fake French DJ Thommy, followed quickly by my former arch nemesis and vegetarian Fonzie, Liam.

Man hugs all round. Quite out of nowhere I realised we'd all pounced on Jime, refusing to let him get a point across over the trifecta of mockery. Don't even know how it happened. Probably something to do with the slave. I think he'd hoped squeezing a ton of BBQ sauce onto my burger would act as punishment, but he's obviously forgotten who he's dealing with. ‘1 Ton’ is the exact measure of BBQ sauce I'd apply myself to any and most foods. Jokes on you FOOL!

Speaking of burgers, they were home-made and chuffing DELICIOUS, and I'm not just saying that because the guy who made them looked like he might give me a kicking if I'd have been anything less than 100% complimentary. They were hella nice, and I had 2 of them. A fact Liam gave me attitude for it, but you know what? Fuck him. He's a vegetarian. He's lower on the food chain.

To take the heat off himself, Jime made the call to Sam Chapman [AKA Serious Sam, AKA Brent, and as it seems AKA Fat Man Scoop]. Word around the BBQ is that Chappers [He's AKA Chappers] had spent the last couple of years chowing down like a lazy bulimic, and had subsequently packed on the pounds. It was all anyone could talk about, apart from Jime's job [NOTE: Stressful]. I didn't know what to expect. In his former days Sam was a reasonably trim cat. He wasn't fucking Jesse Owens or nothing, but I wouldn't hesitate to have called him svelt.

But this talk was casting that right out of my mind. What had happened to the man they now referred to as Biscuit Tin? What sort of hideous bloated man-ball would I have to contend with? To find out, we left the BBQ and headed to Shoreditch, where the "Big Man" had promised to meet us. At the bar I headed straight downstairs for a slash, and upon returning found that Sam had arrived. From behind he did look kind of puffed out, but soon as he turned around and I prepared myself to say "have you... been working out?" to the immoveable blob, I discovered the Puffed Out part of him was about 2/3 coat. He looked a bit pillowy, at worst, but all in all he'd probably put on about half a stone. The way everyone had fattened him up in my mind I was expecting to have to go outside and meet him lying on a giant bed being spritzed with water to keep him cool.

It was a tad disappointing. I said as much, but I was overruled by a bit of relevant nostalgia. Shortly after I left Leeds in 2007, Liam and Sam's hitherto friendly rivalry hit a peak and skidded off the track into a race. A race around Hyde Park [gay rape capital of the North]. A race that Sam ‘Lunchbox’ Chapman won in spectacular fashion. "Smashed it" says Jime. Chapman was of course all over this victory, using it as Defence for all the chubster comments he was eating. Liam retaliated with yet more Cartman based jokes, and back and forth it went. In the bar, outside the bar, at a cash machine... It had to end.

Ollie, being the catalyst that he is, put down £15 on Liam to win should another contest be held. To counter, Jime threw his own 15 nautical pounds on the table for Chapman. I can't bare to side with Liam on anything, so I went for Buster Bloodvessel as well. ESCALATION! Hoxton Square was just a few yards away. It would be decided once again. Who was fastest... NOW!

It's pretty amazing how swiftly one’s bluster dissipates when the chance to put oneself to the test arises. Liam chose not to run!

Oh how the mighty, etcetera! Sam seemed pretty up for it, and the rest of us damn sure were. Except some cardigan wearing bell-cap called Ivan of all things, kept crying about how "childish" and "puerile" it was. Penis. What kind of man doesn't want to see his friends race each other? Ivan, clearly. He was almost uniformly ignored, except by Liam who latched on to the his ‘Won't Somebody PLEASE Think Of The Children?!’ whining as a platform to avoid having to run. In the end the least fun heads prevailed and The Amazing Race II was cancelled in favour of some Shoreditch bar whose bouncer forced us to queue despite being the only people trying to get in and letting us all in right away. It was in this arbitrary line that I bid farewell to Jime, Ollie, Liam, Sam and Thommy... but not Ivan, and made my way home. It'd been good to catch up, even for a few hours, and I fully intend to do it again sometime in 2013.