What a wanky name I've given this event. I'm not changing it, and I hope that James doesn't either. It needs to stand as a testament to what I've done, to shame me into doing better next time.

The point of all this is that I work in the retail department of Madame Tussaud's Famous Statue Looking Emporium, vending fine wares and London based tat from a variety of in-house points. The last month or so has been particularly lucrative for us, and as a reward the upper management decided [due to massive pressure, obviously] to grant us some money for a night out. I tend to shy away from these work do's 9 times out of 10. Sometimes I go because there's a section of the evening in which I'm interested, in March there was the Marvel Super Heroes info for example. I wanted to know which figures we'd be getting from the Marvel Universe and then afterwards there was free beer and pizza so I stuck around.

This time the lure for me is the complete and utter lack of anyone from any other department. It's not that I dislike those people [although I either don't care for, or about them] it's just that for a number of years I've been attracted to anything with a degree of exclusion. I'm no elitist, despite my penchant for Pepsi over Coke and KFC over McDonald's. I just like knowing that there's somewhere I'm invited to that other people aren't. That's why May's ‘James’ Shit Party’ Gazz guest list was painstakingly whittled down and cherry picked and those invited warned not to breathe a word to anyone else. I like excluding people, and the Retail Party would be doing exactly that. Beyond my personal dicketry there were the particulars of the evening, which began with a private pod on the London Eye [yet more exclusion as we piled into our glass egg ahead of paying customers] followed by drinks, food and bowling at the nearby Namco Zone arcade complex.

Obviously, because my life is like a fucking cartoon, we turned up to The Eye about five minutes late [not bad really, when you consider how incredibly fucking lackadaisical pace at which the majority of the group were coasting, as if we had all the damn time in the world], and boarded the jumped up Ferris wheel post haste. The Eye sounds like a wonderful thing when you first hear of it, and seeing it in the flesh [metal... obviously it's not forged from flesh] is quite something too. Amazing, you think to yourself as you gaze up at the giant spokes, Mr. Fantastic held that together just before Silver Surfer turned up in that movie.

In reality the initial go around is pleasant enough. You see Big Ben at a higher angle and you look out over London town in all of its majesty. But it's a long ride. Like... 20 minutes or so, rotating in a bubble, and once you've seen everything on the way up and gotten over the giddy thrill of being at the top, there's just everything to see again on the way down and that takes a good 10 minutes. It's still better than the Wheel of Nottingham though.

Inside the Namco Zone bar we had a specially roped off section with sofas and that. Lovely lovely exclusion. Even better were the bowling alleys, 6 of them, booked for the rest of the night in their entirety just on the off chance that we might fancy a roll later. At one point we were throwing some stones [that's what they say right?] and a man rounded the corner with his young son. They were all smiles and joy at the prospect of some Father/Son pin action until they were halted by the velvet rope of despair. Smiles faded and turned to confusion as they stood there for a good few minutes looking at the rope, looking at us, then at each other and back again. I think the Dad was hoping we'd see them and the forlorn look on his son's little face and extend the offer to take a lane. No fucking way. I was the only person who even noticed them and I think we all know how I feel about including people. There's a velvet rope lads, and you never cross a velvet rope!

I managed to come 2nd in my lane for bowling, due in no small part to my "Steve Perry" psych-outs on the other players. When that stopped working I resorted to saying “Testicles” and “Bell-End” to distract them, bringing me up from Bronze to Silver by use of cunning. I might be the craftiest mother fucker alive, for all you know! Sadly unlike the Trocadero, Namco Zone has NO Mario Kart arcade machine, so I settled on a 4 player battle of SEGA's popular [probably] Outrun 2. I was having it as well! 1st for about 80% of the race, I lost it and gained it again several times as the other players jockeyed with each other to take me out. I got SO close to winning with the other 3 nipping at my ass but at a little towards the end a truck turned onto the race course and I just couldn't avoid it. I'd hit other trucks during the race and they just bounced off into the middle distance like Dodge sponsored beach toys, but this guy was no rubber novelty. He was carrying a job lot of lead on the back of his concrete lorry and I rammed the back of him at 200 odd miles an hour, flipping bonnet first into the air and spinning around and around before landing back on my wheels. Pretty slick, if the game didn't then force a 2 second ‘CRASH CRASH’ animation on me during which I was unable to move. Sitting there like a gerbil tied to a chair as Fiona, Alice and Mittens flew by me and laughed was a humbling experience, and I never recovered or regained my lead. I finished dead solid bollocking last and withdrew from the game with my head hung low to watch everyone take on Julia [possibly the sweetest person living today] thrash the living balls off everyone at Dance Dance Revolution.

First she took on Tara, who was black when they started playing but got demoted to White as a result of her terrible performance. She tackled Jason next, an Essex boy who went to school with Blazin' Squad. His loose association to the Wetherspoons of boy bands didn't do him any good and soon he was beaten by the pale skinned teenager from Surrey. She beat Fiona, a kicking I relished after my earlier defeat at her hands, followed by Amy and then Mad Becky, who actually held her own reasonably well in high heels and with a surprising amount of dignity what with her micro-skirt threatening to rise 1/8th of a millimetre and expose her cheeks to the Namco Zone. There was Guitar Hero [once again I lose to Fiona, but in my defence she HAS Guitar Hero at home and also I don't rock as hard as I could these days] and later on when most had pissed off to ride the bumper cars [apparently I'm the only man on Earth who calls them Dodgems], I stuck around the Demilitarised Zone to drink and run out the clock till home time.