Mike's Bar

Being on the road, and trying out some new bars over the last few weeks, I've found my mind wandering back to past travels and fortuitous bar discoveries of years gone by. Perhaps I've also been subsconsciously fretting that there are certain subjects I really should have covered on this blog, and will now never get around to, because I'm closing it down next week.

This is what brought Mike's to mind.

Mike's Bar (now, apparently, styling itself Mike's Irish Bar, although I'm pretty certain the 'Irish' is new; and it's the kind of pointless affectation that would be likely to put me off a place), is a large British-style pub in the centre of Athens, and I spent a week or so there over Christmas and New Year, in the middle of the spell that I spent working in Toronto.

Yes, I spent pretty much the whole week in that pub. My hotel accommodation began to seem superfluous, because there were at least a couple of occasions when I stayed in Mike's all night, and only went back to the hotel at dawn for breakfast.

Now, in fact, there was a much smaller, darker, and cosier pub just a few minutes' walk away (whose name I have entirely forgotten, I'm afraid), which would have been my preference for an evening hangout, but Mike's Bar had the advantages of large size and convenient proximity to the hotel, ensuring that it immediately won broad popularity among the group I was part of. It achieved a critical mass which made it impossible to lobby for any alternative rendezvous, it became the essential default boozing option for the duration of the holiday.

The group I was with was large and aggressively sociable and - for the most part - very hard-drinking. I was there for the World Universities' Debating Championship - an event I'd had experience of judging when at Oxford some years before, and had become involved in again while at Bar School. Well, I had been President of my Inn's debating society that year, but had selflessly abstained from picking myself to attend glamorous overseas events as a competitor (a level of ethical restraint rarely displayed by other holders of this office, I discovered); however, I worked my butt off in that job, and by the end of my term of office I thought I had earned a small treat for myself. And since Athens - the next designated host of the 'Worlds' event - was a relatively inexpensive trip, I thought it would be reasonable to volunteer my participation as a judge and thus get myself a little expenses-paid winter holiday.

And so it was that I got to hang out for 8 or 10 days with 1,000 or more boozy students. But at least competition debaters tend to be amongst the brightest and best of the student population. And also, in fact, amongst the most mature: a good number of them, probably the majority in fact, are graduate students, or members of certain professional guilds or vocational training schools or institutes of higher learning that aren't strictly universities (like my own Middle Temple). I'd say the average age was at least 25, and I was still only in my early 30s myself at this time. So, it was a very convivial crowd. And after the first 4 or 5 days, when a mini-league system involving all of the hundreds of teams winnowed down the field to just 16 or 32 teams for the final knockout rounds, most of us were left with nothing to do during the day - except catch up on the sleep we hadn't had the night before. (I initially felt quite bad about not making more of being in Athens, but I had visited the city twice before, done most of the standard sightseeing; and everything was closed over the holidays, anyway.)

Greece is probably my favourite country in the world. I love the sense of openness and generosity towards strangers that you find everywhere, the notion of hospitality that has been at the heart of their culture for thousands of years. (A favourite example from a visit a few years before: I'd been drinking with a friend at a table beside the harbour for a few hours. When we settled up, the bill seemed rather high; I suspected they'd inadvertently added a few drinks that had been ordered on the next table. Anywhere else in the world, the customer might start feeling paranoid about the likelihood of a deliberate scam, and the staff would probably get exaggeratedly defensive, and it might end in a lengthy and awkward wrangle, at the least, perhaps a stand-up fight. In Greece, I knew it was almost certainly an honest mistake, and queried it as such. The waiter immediately acknowledged that he might well have goofed, and asked me how much I'd like to pay. I think I happily paid rather more than my actual tab, because it was such a delightful way of handling a dispute.)

I suspect this national emphasis on the virtue of hospitality explains why the Greeks are almost always so good at running restaurants and bars, even restaurants and bars of an alien kind. Most people make a complete pig's ear of trying to emulate another country's food or its bar culture (the Chinese interpretation of Thai food being my particular bugbear here in Beijing). But the Greeks, bless 'em, somehow they manage to do it right.

The eponymous owner of Mike's Bar is not English or Irish or American, but Greek through and through. And yet he has managed to create one of the best large-scale pubs I've ever been in. 

I suspect, though, that dear Mike never sussed out why all these young foreigners were suddenly flooding into his bar every night, or how soon they would depart again. He had a bonanza week or so, was ordering extra kegs and hiring extra staff to keep the beer flowing all night, every night. I hope the adjustment back to his regular level of custom wasn't too painful for him.

Three Postscripts:

I may perhaps have been driven to drink more self-destructively than is usual for me because I was still smarting from a painful breakup six months earlier - and, as Fate would have it (Cruel Fate!), she was there. And having a fling with someone else, I soon learned.

My principal drinking companions on this trip were a daffy pair of Belgian accountants (it remained obscure as to how they were eligible to be taking part in a student competition), who introduced me to the useful term liquid sandwiches - to describe beer consumed in lieu of lunch.

These two Belgians caused some consternation to the hotel staff, when it appeared that they had consumed the entire contents of their heavily - and, of course, expensively - stocked mini-bar in a single night. In fact, they had merely transferred all of the miniature bottles of spirits and so on to a sock drawer, so that they could pack their fridge full of beer.

Unexpected tastes

For a final entry in this 'Music Week' (although I'm still playing catch-up after a week of problematic Internet access, hoping to insinuate a few more posts into empty slots earlier in the week - so keep an eye out lower down the page), I thought I'd review some of my slightly more left-field enthusiasms, the musical predilections that people tend to find a bit surprising about me.

A Top Five Unexpected Musical Weaknesses

5)  Early rock'n'roll

And the cheesier, the better! I'm not quite sure when I developed this vice. I suppose I must have had some exposure over the radio when I was a kid, but there was none of this good stuff in my parents' record collection (their tastes were very, very middle-of-the-road). I imagine George Lucas' American Graffiti must have been an important influence; that soundtrack album was probably one of the first (of many) '50s/'60s anthologies I acquired over the years. The Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack epitomises all that is so wonderful - and terrible - about this area of music: cheesy as all hell, yet an utterly irresistible singalong. Here's a 1964 TV performance of the song - ropey sound quality, but worth it for the visuals, especially the hilarious depiction of Johnny the motorcycle rebel. [You can listen to the album version here.]

4)  Henry Rollins

How can anyone not like Henry Rollins? He's so loveably crazy! But sensitive and literate with it. I like quite a lot of American music out at the more punk-ish edge of things (Dead Kennedys a favourite during my college days), but Rollins' work has more depth to it than most of these. Here's the Rollins Band doing Next Time. [Audio only, unfortunately. You can also check out a live video here: terrible picture quality, but a fun performance.]

3)  Country & Western

I mentioned my susceptibility to this yesterday (although I try to keep it hidden around my buddy The British Cowboy, because he proselytises a little too hard). It can be trite and cheesy, yes. But accessibility is not a bad thing. And, thanks to its folk roots, it is distinguished more than most other genres by its tunefulness and its lyrical craft. Hey, beyond just liking C&W, I actually like Canadian C&W. Well, I had a lot of exposure when I lived in Toronto for a year back in the '90s. And the dedicated TV channel there (CMT, I think it's called - Country Music Television) is way better than its American counterpart GAC. This, She's Got The Kind Of Heart That Breaks by Chris Cummings, is one of those earworm songs that got permanently lodged in my head during that year of watching CMT (The Cowboy probably wouldn't even admit this to the C&W fold; too poppy for his taste!). And it's a lovely little video too - a bit of a Gregory's Girl thing going on, with the goofy boys bewitched by the pretty girl who also happens to have superior skills on the hockey rink (so Canadian: they really are all obsessed with ice hockey!). [It's a pity it's such dreadful picture quality (transcribed from a VCR??), but this seems to be all that's available on YouTube at the moment; and likely to be pulled shortly because the record company are such fascists about their videos. As a back-up, here's a nice live performance from 2008.]

2)  African music

Like most Brits of my generation, I got my introduction to this field through the wonderful Sowetan township sounds that Paul Simon incorporated into his Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints albums in the mid-1980s. That led me to start checking out some compilations of '70s and '80s township bands, as well as, of course, the wonderful Ladysmith Black Mambazo choir who had performed with Simon. A little later, Peter Gabriel's Real World record label started introducing me to people like Youssou N'dour, Geoffrey Oryema, Daby Touré, and the Kenyan nyatiti master Ayub Ogada. And a guy I became friendly with while backpacking around Fiji in the early '90s later sent me a CD of Missa Luba, another tremendous choral record by the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. However, the fountainhead of modern African music - as I only started to discover in the later '90s, not long before his death - was Fela Kuti, the mercurial Nigerian who pioneered the 'Afrobeat' sound, a heady brew of jazz, funk and psychedelia infused with native African rhythms. Here's one of his great instrumentals, Expensive Shit.

And here's a live performance from some time back in the '70s. [You should also check out this great little excerpt from a 1971 documentary about him, shot by legendary drummer Ginger Baker.]

But the top spot today goes to....

1)  Michelle Shocked

I'm sorry - I'm an über-fan. I was completely blown away by her 1988 debut Short Sharp Shocked, and have bought everything else of hers I can get my hands on since. I saw her play live at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford (unaccountably renamed the New Theatre a few years ago) round about 1990, and it was one of the most enthralling shows I've seen (actually, not wonderful all the way through; she was experimenting with a 'big band' sound that didn't really suit her, and wasn't entirely winning over the audience; but then there was an interlude in the middle where the band left the stage and she played three or four songs solo on her guitar - and that was a shivers-down-the-spine experience). She is, I think, possibly the greatest female singer-songwriter of my generation - and certainly the ballsiest, the most politically engaged.

This song, Come A Long Way, is a particular favourite of mine, one that I often play to pep myself up before heading out for the evening. The beautiful tune gives it a very upbeat feel, although the subject - riding around the soulless streets of Los Angeles all day on her motorcycle to try to avoid having it repossessed - is actually rather downbeat.

An autobiographical anecdotal postscript:  In a bar I used to drink at quite a lot during my Oxford days, the student Beer Cellar in New College, they had an entire Shangri-Las album. This was just after CD jukeboxes had started to appear (so, I suppose it must have been during the early '90s, when I was working back in Oxford for a while, rather than when I was an undergraduate in the '80s). I wasn't a member of this college, but a mate of mine had been the elected student Bar Steward there for a while, and I'd hung out drinking with him so often that most of the staff had got to recognise me - and come to assume that I was a member of the college (it was stricter than most in trying to limit access to members only). I was still able to get away with this four or five years later, when I started hanging out there again - this time, in pursuit of a girl! On one occasion, I even managed to persuade them to grant admittance to two of my Oxford Union drinking buddies of the time, passing them off as my father and my younger brother - a somewhat implausible blag, since their ages were ten years either side of mine. But I digress....

Yes, I was fascinated to discover a whole Shangri-Las album - none of which I'd ever heard before, apart from Leader of the Pack, of course. I wasn't sufficiently fond of the group to check out many of the other songs, though. And other punters in the bar were apt to be intolerant even of my frequent selection of Leader of the Pack; I might have provoked a riot if I'd cued up any of their more obscure tracks. Once, I did a bad thing: I succumbed to a sudden mischievous impulse to feed pound coins into the machine until I could select the whole album, 10 or 12 Shangri-Las songs back to back. I never heard them myself, of course; I fled the scene of the crime as soon as Leader of the Pack had finished. And I didn't dare to go back to that bar for quite some time.

Bonus Treat  -  Henry Rollins on modern 'music'

Top Five Embarrasing Admissions

I have always maintained that I hated the Eighties musically. It was the decade where I passed through my teens into my early twenties, so it should by rights have been the peak period of my life for exposure to contemporary music. Many people in their forties - especially Americans - seem to have a huge nostalgia thing going for the Eighties these days. But I'd been a precocious brat: I turned on to music early in life, and was already perhaps starting to get a bit blasé about it by my late teens. And the preceding decades seemed to have produced far more worthwhile music: my childhood in the Seventies had seen the exuberance of glam rock and the iconoclasm of punk; the Sixties, which I'd experienced a little vicariously through my parents and my older brother, had seen things like protest folk, the blues revival, psychedelia, and... well, almost everything good that ever happened in rock music, really. And then in the Eighties the music business (re)discovered that there was more money to be made selling records to teenage girls than to teenage boys, so androgynously good-looking male vocalists became the vogue. Somebody thought it was cool that you could use a computer instead of a drummer to lay down the beat. And people started playing keyboards more than guitars. Yep, the Eighties SUCKED.

And yet, and yet, much as I deplored the general trend of the times, I have to admit that in amongst all of that synth-pap and New Romantic bollocks, there were a few really outstanding artists at work, and some fantastic tunes being written. Much as I would like to write the whole decade off as a musical aberration, I do find myself getting sometimes quite wistful about a lot of the stuff we listened to back then - even some of the synthy stuff.

So, here is my shame-faced confession of....

The Top Five Eighties Tracks That Froog Really Likes (Despite Himself!)

5)  Depeche Mode - Master and Servant

These guys epitomised the synthy sound that I hated, but damn, they produced some good songs, particularly on the Some Great Reward album which came out shortly after I started at university. Atheist that I am, I liked Blasphemous Rumours best, but this is unquestionably catchier. And it's hard to resist a song about BDSM (the only other one I'd ever heard was Tom Lehrer's Masochism Tango). [Also quite a good live performance here.]

4)  Thompson Twins - We Are Detective

I don't think I liked anything else this band did, but this was one of the best singles of the decade for me. The warped, witty lyrics, and the odd, lilting, folky feel of the tune - somehow evocative of Viennese café culture (I wonder if they were consciously seeking to conjure reminiscences of The Third Man?) - really made it stand out from the crowd.

3)  Big Pig - Breakaway

Australian Oleh Witer put together this drumming collective towards the end of the Eighties, and their debut album, Bonk!, briefly made quite a splash. Alas, it took them too long to put together a follow-up, and the project fell apart. But they had a really unique sound, and some very solid songs on their first album - and an outstanding vocalist in Sherine Aberaytne. I'm disappointed we haven't heard more from her in the last twenty years. [You should also check out their Devil's Song from the same album: not as catchy, but an even better song.]

2)  The The - Infected

I loved the dark intensity of Matt Johnson's lyrics, and he was one of the few artists of the early Eighties still emphasising guitars over synths (Johnny Marr played with him on a couple of his later albums). His 1986 album of the same name was a strong contender for album of the decade, in my view.

And there's a great live performance of this song here.

But my No. 1 this time, somewhat inescapably (since I was myself unable to escape it throughout my student days: it remained permanently lodged on the jukebox playlists of student bars for at least four or five years after its first release), is....

1)  Soft Cell - Tainted Love

Despite the underlying bounce of the tune, it was hard to credit that this song had started life as an early, unsuccessful Motown single (you can hear that original version by Gloria Jones here). Marc Almond made it completely his own. I'm always surprised to read that his version was released in 1981: I didn't really hear it until a couple of years later. And it wasn't until some years later again that I bought the album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (one of the GREAT album names!); I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a lot of other good stuff on it - not least Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, which somehow passed me by when it was first out as a single. These days, it's hard to conceive of a song becoming such a huge hit with such a terrible video; but video was very young back then.

PS:  I really wanted to include something by the Kane Gang here, but there's still not that much of them around on YouTube. Here are links to my two favourite songs of theirs, Gun Law and Losersville; but the former has rather dodgy sound quality, and the latter is audio only. Better than nothing.

If they'd asked me...

I see The Beijinger magazine has started a new feature this month called 'A Drink With...', quizzing some notable on their personal drinking history. (Well, OK, I just noticed it for the first time this month. But I've been away for a while. And I don't read The Beijinger very often any more. Maybe it's been going a while.) This month's subject was Matthew Niederhauser, a young photographer noted for his portraits of Beijing's rock musicians.

I don't suppose they're ever likely to ask me (since I've spent the last ten years assiduously protecting my anonymity!), so I thought I'd borrow the format for a quick post of my own here.

A Drink With... Froog

Who would you most like to get drunk with?

Well, my friends, naturally. The Choirboy, foremost amongst those available to me in Beijing; and my old teaching buddy The Arts Entrepreneur, the most dearly missed of my drinking companions back in the UK.

However, the question is angling for a celebrity nomination (living or dead), so..... I did once have a drink with seminal 'Unsuitable Role Model' Jeffrey Bernard - so I don't think I can cite him for this. If I had a time machine, I think the drinker who has most fascinated me, and was most likely to be erudite and witty company, would be the Irish writer Brian O'Nolan. Amongst folks still with us, I'd like to say Tom Waits, but he renounced booze a couple of decades ago. I believe the Irish musician Jem Finer still tipples, though, and I bet he'd be excellent company on a wee bar crawl. I'd be interested to meet Paul Auster too, one of the few contemporary writers I really admire (not sure if or how much he drinks, but it seems likely he's not averse to the occasional snifter).

If you could only imbibe one drink for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I am reminded of a very wise joke I heard in early childhood: A group of newly deceased souls are given a choice on admission into the afterlife to nominate the food they'd most like to be able to eat for all eternity. Thinking they are about to enter Heaven, they all eagerly pick their favourite things... only to discover that having to eat the same thing all the time soon becomes HELL.

It would be a big mistake here to choose the drink you like most (probably, for me, single malt Scotch). Things you enjoy most powerfully tend also to pall the soonest, if you have no change from them. And spirits and cocktails are too scouring to the throat (and the liver!), too dehydrating to drink all the time. You have to pick something you're not going to tire of. That, for me, would be a beer of some kind - probably Guinness.

How old were you when you started drinking?

Well, I didn't start going into bars on my own that often until my last year of high school, when I was 17; but I had been doing so intermittently for a year or two prior to that. My parents had allowed me to drink with them in pubs (in a very modest way: shandy, rum'n'coke), and at home during the Christmas fortnight, from about the age of 11 or 12. The first time I was sick from drink, I think I was in fact only about 10 (accompanying my Dad on his Skittles Night, and being allowed a couple of bottles of Stella - far too much for my untrained tolerance!). However, the first time I was drunk - though happily so, and without being too seriously ill - was a little earlier even than that. My eccentric German grandmother got in the habit of giving me a flagon (2.5 litres, I think) of cider as a birthday present every year from the time I was about 8. Usually it was consumed as very weak cider shandy over the course of a few weeks. But in the second or third year she made this gift, my parents left me in the care of my elder brother for an evening, he was delinquent in his supervisory duties, and I quaffed most of the jug - well, whatever was left in it - in just a few hours. I was high as a kite, but, as far as I remember, I was not actually sick. That might have been a dangerously positive early experience of booze for me!!

Tell us about the first time you got drunk.

See answer above.

Tell us about the last time you were drunk.

The last time I was really drunk - in a doing embarrassing things and then forgetting them kind of way - was on my birthday last year. When I was a student, I used to get that drunk 3 or 4 times a week. In my mature years, it has lapsed to a few times a year, at most.

What's the dumbest thing you've done while drunk?

During my student years, I was walking home alone one night, very drunk (after a free tasting of port, sherry and madeira; I was on the Wines & Spirits Committee of the Oxford Union, and we'd just introduced a new range of fortified wines to be sold under the Union's own label, so this had been a small private party to commemorate the event - with unlimited supply), and I paused to collect an abandoned shopping trolley. I protest that I was motivated by public-spiritedness, since the Sainsbury's it came from was only a few hundred yards up the road and I was intending to return it. However, I started racing with it (against myself, just for the thrill of speed!), ran it against a kerb when I was running flat out, and was launched over the top of it - flying for a good 10ft or 15ft before landing face-first on a cement paving stone. It was only the softening effect of so much drink that prevented me from suffering a serious injury, although I suspect I gave myself quite a bad concussion.

What's your golden rule of drinking?

Know your limits. It's supposed to be fun, not self-harming.

Where's the dumbest place you've gone drinking?

Probably a rather dingy back alley in a small town in Fiji. I was drinking kava, the local 'herbal tea' (very mildly narcotic), rather than booze. I'd developed a taste for it, but was frustrated that there were few opportunities to indulge (it's an almost nightly ritual out in the villages, but it doesn't happen so much in the towns; or, if it does, it's rather hidden). I'd got chatting with this gaggle of local ne'er-do-wells in a bar about this, and they had invited me to join them for an impromptu kava session out on the street. Three of them were harmless old soaks, but there was a younger hanger-on who had a disturbing psychotic intensity about him. When I noticed that he was carrying a monkey-wrench wrapped up in a plastic carrier bag, I decided to bug out of there before I got myself mugged.

Could you organise a piss-up in a brewery?

Ah, that's a rather unfair idiom. In fact, organising a piss-up in a brewery is HARD, because it's a place of work; and although there's beer all around you, very often there's nary a drop of it available to drink. The Yanjing Brewery in Beijing has a very comfortably appointed bar (a bit too comfy for my taste: rather like the UK's dreaded 'saloon bars' - all beige carpet and upholstered seats) at the end of its visitors' tour. I have often thought of dragging the lads out there for a session.... Hmm, now there's an idea.

What's your favourite place to go drinking?

In Beijing, of course, it is well documented that I spend most of my leisure hours in the most excellent 12 Square Metres bar... and/or at (my older, and rather deeper love) The Pool Bar. However, my absolute favourite place to drink in Beijing is any grotty streetside restaurant where you can keep ordering chuanr and 3-kuai beers until 3am or 4am.

Great Love Songs (35 & 36)

My little post yesterday about the comforting familiarity of being back in Beijing (where everyone seems to know me) of course put me in mind of On The Street Where You Live, one of the best songs from Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady. It was my old college drinking buddy The Bookseller (another big fan of musicals - it's NOT just a gay thing!) who first got me into the habit of singing this on the way home from the pub at night during my student days in Oxford... where there were just a handful of streets we seemed to traverse dozens of times a day... and where love seemed always in the air... and where there wasn't very much residential space in the city centre (other than the colleges themselves), so such late-night ebullience didn't seem too likely to disturb people's sleep. After lapsing from the habit for years, I found it powerfully revived on moving to Beijing - perhaps because I am so often walking home drunk at around midnight here. In my first year, particularly, returning each night from the 'Adventure Bar', I would frequently burst forth into joyous snatches of this song on the brief walk home.

Here's the scene from the film, with a young Jeremy Brett playing the infatuated Freddy (although I gather his singing was overdubbed by an actor called Bill Shirley). I doubt if this will stay up on Youtube for long, so enjoy it while you can.

And here's a great instrumental version by jazz pianist Errol Garner.

In fact, largely as a result of how ferociously cold Beijing was in my first winter here (and even in autumn; the second half of October was absolutely bloody freezing that year), it was another song from that show that I found myself singing even more often, the song that has become most associated for me with my sojourn here in Beijing - Eliza's fantasy of simple creature comforts, Wouldn't It Be Loverly?

Audrey Hepburn's singing in the film was famously dubbed by Marni Nixon, although some of her original test recordings of the songs resurfaced some years back, and are, I gather, included in the extras on the latest DVD editions. Unfortunately, I can't find Audrey singing this on Youtube, but you can check out her rendition of I Could Have Danced All Night. It doesn't have the polish or power of a professional singer, but there's a simplicity and zest about it that is as captivating as... well, as captivating as Audrey always was. Fellow devotees of the classic musicals may be interested in this posting, in which the same scene from the film as above is overdubbed with the original theatrical cast recording, in which Julie Andrews was the voice of Eliza.

Another nail in my heart

The Carpenter's Arms, on Nelson Street, at the bottom of the Jericho area of north-west Oxford, was my 'local' in the early '90s when I returned to my student stomping grounds to work for a couple of years. A little later, my oldest drinking buddy The Bookseller lived for a year in a nice basement flat on Walton Crescent, almost directly opposite this little gem of a pub, which extended my close acquaintance with it for a little while longer.

The ambience wasn't marvellous: it felt too much like the living room of a private home, with plush beige carpet throughout (most of the pubs in that area had indeed originally been private residences, many having been converted into commercial premises in the mid-1800s as a result of the Beerhouse Act). But it had a friendly landlord and landlady, a mixed crowd of regulars (partly thanks to having the Oxford Synagogue next door), some decent bar snacks, and a very well-kept pint of Guinness. It also had three other conspicuous attractions: a good dartboard (I don't play much; but I like a game occasionally, and having a decent quality board that won't spit your darts back out on to the floor half the time is a major incentive to take your arrows out with you more regularly), an excellent jukebox (including a lot of The Kinks: Sunny Afternoon, Lola, and Apeman were particular favourites in there for a while), and..... an Aunt Sally court (the BEST pub game ever: like an aerial version of skittles in which you have a single wooden 'dolly' mounted on top of a post as the target, and you hurl great billets of wood at it from some yards away; most miss and thwack into a sheet of canvas or plastic stretched behind the target to catch them; it is very satisfyingly physical - and a great fun competition for anyone to join in, because it's very simple but almost no-one is really that good at it).

Back in those days, the place also had its resident eccentric, a rather sketchy character of indeterminate age (though a little nearer to 60 than to 40, I would guess) called Dave, who, despite appearing half-cut most of the time, was a formidable opponent in any kind of pub game. I was reluctant to take him on at cribbage or dominoes, having seen him trash others of the regulars at these uncomplicated games. But he mentored me for a while at Aunt Sally. And he taught me a very good betting trick at darts.

Another unexpected delight of the place was that most weekends I would find my old friend Mohammed in there. I was a little taken aback when I first bumped into him there, surprised to find that, although a 'good Muslim', he was fond of a pint of Guinness. I was also impressed that he still recognised me, quite a few years on from when I'd last seen him. Mohammed had been one of the first guys to open up a kebab van in Oxford (nowadays, there are a dozen or more such mobile food stalls around the city centre; when I started there as a student there were only four, and only one or two of them sold kebabs, the others being burger or baked spud places; but there was a veritable 'kebab explosion' during the mid-80s, with new vans appearing every term). He was also one of the best (my college made him an honorary member of its Junior Common Room in gratitude for his contribution to keeping the student body well fed); and even after he gave up his own van after half a dozen years or so, he'd still occasionally reappear on a new van somewhere, sharing his experience with a young friend or relative to help them start up (the benefits of his input did not always persist for long, but you could guarantee that any van on which he had been sighted would have excellent salad and a properly fiery chilli sauce for a month or two afterwards).

So, although I was only hanging out there for around 18 months (and, most especially, during the month or two that my old college pal Richard - the one who seduced me into coming to China! - stayed with me during a break from China one summer), I have a host of fond memories of that pub. And I had been looking forward to popping back there on this visit - just one drink, for old times' sake. Alas, it was not to be. The place has closed down, and been converted back into a pair of terraced houses. According to The Lost Pubs Project, this may have happened at some time in the later '90s - though I'm pretty sure I recall it still being there in 2000. Well, whatever, it's gone now; and I have a lump in my throat.

A day later, I noticed the Horse & Jockey on Woodstock Road was gone too; closed in 2002, apparently. I have fewer regrets about that: it was a large and fairly charmless pub, never a favourite or regular haunt of mine - although I did drop in occasionally during my student days, since it was the last pub heading north out of the city on this road, and was a convenient stop-off if visiting friends at the adjacent St Anne's or St Anthony's colleges.

It seems we've lost something like half of the pubs we used to have in the UK 40 or 50 years ago, and, if the recent rates of attrition persist, we could have lost half of the 60,000 that remain in another decade or so. I hope this won't happen: the situation seems to be stabilising a bit now, after a few brutal years of closures precipitated by the smoking ban and the crash of the economy. But it is dispiriting, disorienting to find that so many of the landmarks of my student days in Oxford have now disappeared forever.

Alas, poor Oddies!

One of the greatest transformations in the UK during my ten-year absence has been the sudden dying out of the high street off-licence.

It wasn't hard to see it coming. The might of the major supermarket chains has been growing steadily over the past 20 years. Many of the country's small corner shops - often run by Indian or Pakistani immigrants - have been taken over by chains such as Londis, Nisa, and the Co-op, allowing them to purchase booze in bulk and become more price competitive with the big supermarkets. The supermarkets, in turn, have shifted their emphasis away from the big edge-of-town stores (running out of places to build the bloody things, I should think) towards smaller 'convenience' outlets in central locations, with trendy new sub-branding like Sainsbury's Local and Tesco Metro. Not a lot of room left for the local offie any more.

I gather Unwins was one of the first big off-licence chains to go under, at the end of 2005, followed by the once ubiquitous Threshers in 2009, and then last year by Oddbins (although I gather that has now emerged from administration again, and is soldiering on with 37 core stores - a drastic shrinking from its peak of 278 outlets 20 years ago).

I had to go on a little excursion this afternoon to replace a bottle of Bombay Sapphire for my host Little Anthony (there had only been a couple of slugs left in the bottle, but I really shouldn't have finished it off in his absence: Bad House-Guest Guilt set in!). Well, it proved to be a much longer excursion than I had anticipated. I find that 5 or 6 of the city centre offies I remember from my student days in Oxford have now disappeared, a couple of them quite recently by the looks of it - including the large Oddbins on the High Street at the corner of King Edward Street, my 'local' replenishment centre during my years as an undergraduate at Corpus, just around the corner.

I eventually found one of the handful of surviving Oddbins up on Little Clarendon Street, and was able to get my bottle of Sapphire there (damn, Antonio has expensive tastes!); as far as I can discover, it is one of only two off-licences remaining in the city.

The decline of the offie has been a gradual process, ongoing for a decade or more. The trouble with my having been out of the country for most of that time is that it seems to me as if it has happened overnight. It is a rude shock to discover that an institution which had played such a central role in my young life has 'suddenly' disappeared. 

I am particularly grieved by the loss of that Oddbins on Oxford High Street. That was where I first started to learn about wine, and about good malt whiskies and exotic foreign spirits as well. It was a place of comfort, a venue for some window-shopping, fantasising for 10 minutes now and then that I lived on a better budget as I browsed among the rows upon rows of mysterious, sexy, and unaffordable bottles (yes, there's probably a metaphor for my love life in there somewhere; I did hang out far too much with posh girls with whom I never really had any chance...). It was a little bit of a social hub too, somewhere I could almost always count on fortuitously bumping into friends from my own or neighbouring colleges. It was even, on a few occasions, a pick-up joint; or, at least, if you happened to bump into people buying booze for a bottle party, it was perfectly straightforward to start chatting with them and invite yourself along. Ah, student social life - it was so easy (in some ways; so hard in others!).

And now that Oddies, my Oddies, is gone. As if it's not bad enough that nearly all of my favourite pubs from those days have been closed or had wanky gastro-pub makeovers! I came back here for a nice self-indulgent wallow in the featherbed of nostalgia... and I find that they've replaced it with a bloody rock-hard futon.

Footnote:  I have turned up an interesting little business article on The death of the British off-licence.

Bright college days!

Yes, I've posted this before, but that was ages ago. And it seems unavoidably appropriate today, since I have this week been enticed back (for the first time in about 15 years) to a full-scale reunion of my disreputable Oxford contemporaries. Back in our undergraduate days, I imagine we used to think the rotund and ruddy-faced forty- and fifty-somethings who would mob the College Boathouse at the end of the Eights Week rowing festival - downing pints of Pimm's one after another and reminiscing loudly about the "good old days" - were rather sad old farts. Now, that is US. Oh dear. 

 Take it away, Tom.

[This is the live version from An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer. The studio recording can be found here.]

This week's drinking excuse

The 26th January is Australia Day.

For the last few years this has been a welcome pretext for special over-indulgence at my favourite bar, the Aussie-owned 12 Square Metres.

I don't know what kind of a turnout we'll get down there this year. It is a particularly welcome distraction for foreigners during the drab Chinese Spring Festival holiday; but this year, more than ever before, almost everyone seems to have quit the city. And the party has gone rather better in the years when it's fallen just ahead of Chunjie rather than smack in the middle of it.  Moreover, there used to be a bit of synergy with the other two Aussie bars in the neighbourhood - Ned's and MaoMaoChong together with 12SqM forming an Oz Triangle ideal for short-distance bar crawling. Ned's, alas, is now gone; and MMC has been keeping very irregular hours while owners Steve and Stef are on their long winter holiday this year. So, 12SqM will be flying the flag alone this time. Maybe having a monopoly on the Aussie custom will be a good thing; or maybe the event just won't gain a lot of momentum this year. Swings and roundabouts. We shall see.

The Coopers Ales are going to be a very tempting 20rmb each, and new laoban MB has managed to source some Australian beef pies for the day - for the first time in six months. And we should be tuning in via the Internet to favourite Aussie radio station Triple J's traditional holiday countdown of the 'Hottest 100' songs in Australia this past year, as selected by a listeners' poll (the only way I keep up with what the rest of world is listening to these days!).

Australians have their rough edges, but you have to admire their robust appetite for life, and particularly for drink. The nation's prodigious drinking abilities are epitomised in former Prime Minister Bob Hawke - an Oxford lao tongxue of mine, who was celebrated as holding the world speed record for downing a yard-of-ale (equivalent to around two-and-half pints, and very tricky to drink, because of the odd shape of the vessel) while he was a Rhodes Scholar there in the early 1950s. After all these years of happily believing the myth, I now find Wikipedia has pissed in my tankard by alleging that in fact he drank a comparable volume from a sconce pot (a large drinking bowl traditionally used for penalties and drinking challenges at formal college meals), and that his time of 11 seconds was equivalent to the then yard-of-ale record, but this mark has since been bettered. Oh, print the legend!  [The Turf Tavern, a famous real ale pub in Oxford (and a favourite hangout of Colin Dexter's fictional detective Inspector Morse) has recently started advertising - quite mendaciously, I think - that the feat occurred there. In my day, the stories had it that it was either in The Bear or The White Horse; but Wikipedia - apparently following Bob's own memoirs - is adamant that it happened in the dining hall at University College.]

Bob, now 82, is still capable of opening his gullet to guzzle down the amber nectar at mindboggling speeds: just a few weeks ago he was filmed obligingly chugging a pint in one at the Australia v India Test Match in Sydney.

I've never been able to do that!

To cap today's celebration of Australian-ness, here's Colin Hay - founder of the great but sadly short-lived '80s band Men At Work - doing a great version of his signature hit Down Under in LA a few years ago with the Ringo Starr All-Star Band. [Lyrics here; it's also worth checking out this solo acoustic version.]

Great Love Songs (30)

This might also merit inclusion as a Great Drinking Song - in that most of my (all too few!) romantic breakthroughs down the years have been significantly alcohol-assisted. And I'm not talking about getting the ladies drunk to wear down their resistance. Oh no, I am sternly moral about that: I have, in fact, numerous times refrained from responding to apparent advances because I was concerned that the young woman's rationality was too far compromised. No, I meant that I need the disinhibiting boost of alcohol to soothe my nerves and hang-ups and fears of rejection. So, the scene evoked in this song If You Gotta Go, Go Now calls to mind rather too aptly a number of awkward culminations to evenings of drink-fuelled flirting back in my college days (and since, once or twice, I grant you). It is enormously refreshing - but oh, how rare! - to meet a woman who'll cut through all that 'red tape' of social deference and embarrassment, and just tell you to get on with it.

It is particularly bewitching to imagine someone as entirely lovely as Margo Timmins assuming such a role! So, yes, here - from their offcuts album Rarities, B-Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes (which I actually prefer to most of their regular albums; it's a fabulous collection) - are my beloved Cowboy Junkies singing it. [A pity it's just a still photo - and a rather unflattering one, at that! - on this YouTube clip, but there was no version of this available at all until recently. Margo always manages to seem gorgeous, but the lads all look caught-in-the-headlights petrified.] This is one of those covers that completely eclipses the original: Bob Dylan's whiny, braying vocals leave it dead in the water; and it's just so much more poignant, and so much more sexy done from a female perspective.

Another nostalgic tremor in the ether

Another piece of news that caught my eye in the Oxford Drinker magazine which JK brought back from England for me a couple of weeks ago (which I have probably read cover to cover about three or four times) concerned Andrew Hall, landlord of the Rose & Crown pub on Oxford's North Parade.

I remember him - and the pub, of course, one of Oxford's best - from my student days there back in the 1980s. In fact, he was one of my first ever employers, as I worked as a barman for him one summer. He gave the impression of having been around forever, but I learn that he had in fact only just taken over the pub when I first started going there. Now, though, he really has been around forever: still going strong after more than 28 years (I had thought he was in his forties when I knew him, late thirties at the very least; so, he must be quite a good age by now). After a quarter of a century of running the place as tenants, he and his wife Debbie finally bought the pub for themselves a few years ago. That's very pleasing news - congratulations to them! I'll have to look in on them when I next make it back. It seems the Rose & Crown may be about the last piece of 'my Oxford' to have survived unchanged. [Weeps]

[As I recall, Mr Hall came across as a bit of a humourless git much of the time, and did not enjoy a very affectionate rapport with his customers or with his staff - certainly not with his staff. However, he most assuredly knew how to run a good bar. Actually, there seems to be a long and noble tradition in England of great, long-surviving landlords being notorious curmudgeons (Eric, owner of The Temple, my main Oxford haunt, was a grumpy old sod, too; Norman Ballon, the celebrated proprietor of the Coach & Horses in Soho for many years and a world-class grouch, also comes to mind, of course; and there are many others). I wonder why that should be?]

The greatest little boozer.... [Great Drinking Songs (27)]

Aaah, that time of year is upon us once again - St Patrick's Day, possibly now the largest single excuse for a piss-up worldwide.

What better way to celebrate than with a classic bit of The Pogues, Sally MacLennane, from their Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash album (which I played to death during my second year at university... until I discovered their even better debut album Red Roses For Me, which has been one of my favourite late-night melancholy indulgences ever since).

This is a performance from the great, much-missed BBC2 music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, a seminal influence on my 1970s childhood. (Apparently, they've been doing re-runs of this on the 'new' BBC4 channel over the last few years, so a lot of high-quality clips are starting to appear on YouTube. They also seem to have begun issuing 'Best of...' compilation DVDs, but so far I've only managed to find one of these in Beijing... I am constantly on the lookout for more.)  It's a good performance, but, unfortunately, it is cut slightly short at the end. (And it pains me to reflect that this must have been 27 years ago!!!)

There's another good live version here, from a 1988 concert in Japan (YouTube user Cosmotype seems to have uploaded that entire concert film: well worth a look); and this one perhaps best captures the infectious drunken bounciness of the tune (from a gig at the Barrowlands in Glasgow in 1987; without video).

This song provided one of my favourite excuses for missing a tutorial (a one-to-one interrogation by a senior member of faculty, which is how they like to do most of the 'teaching' at Oxford) in my student days: I'd been singing it - and a load of other Pogues songs, and a few AC/DC numbers like Highway to Hell and Touch Too Much - so riotously with my mates at an end-of-term party the night before that I completely lost my voice (my cynical head tutor insisted that I show up for 5 minutes to demonstrate as much). That left me free for an extended hair-of-the-dog lunchtime session with the same bunch of mates, at the end of which we really did have to escort one of our number - barely able to walk unaided - to the railway station to put him on his train home. It was one of the happiest moments of my life (ah, the world without responsibilities!); and, as a result, this song is always a little apt to get me tearing up.

Have a WILD St. Pat's, everyone!!

[By the by, that Wikipedia link on the OGWT offers an explanation of the name I'd never heard before.  Ostensibly, it was an expression from the old days of tin pan alley, when music companies would try out their latest songs on the grey-uniformed doormen of Manhattan's upscale hotels and apartment buildings. The thinking was that any tune the 'old greys' could remember and start whistling after just one or two hearings was a guaranteed hit. This explanation is attributed to the show's notoriously low-talking presenter 'Whispering' Bob Harris - part of the inspiration for John Thomson's Louis Balfour character in the 'Jazz Club' segments of The Fast Show. I note that the same idea - testing new song ideas on their obliging but tone-deaf doorman - was used in the wonderful Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore rom-com Music and Lyrics.]

Top Five Mornings After

My most loyal commenter over the past couple of years, JES, kindly sent me a link the other day to an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper on The 10 Best Fictional Hangovers.  (I do read The Guardian online fairly regularly, but this had somehow passed me by.)  All the expected entries are there: Kingsley Amis' Jim Dixon feeling as if he's "been expertly beaten up by the secret police", and Richard E. Grant in Withnail & I announcing, "I feel as if a pig shat in my head."  And there were a few that were new to me, too.  An amusing waste of 5 minutes.

And this got me to thinking, What incidents from my own experience might I compare to these?

Well, the problem is - as any long-standing readers of the blog might just conceivably recall - I don't get hangovers.  Not really.  I had ONE, an oh-god-NEVER-again humdinger after my brother's 21st birthday party (when I was only 14); and I think that set my pain threshold so high that I've never really suffered any post-drinking unpleasantness that seemed worth complaining of since.

However, I have - a handful or so times in my life (mostly in my first year or two at college, funnily enough) - drunk so much that I suffered a near total blackout about what had happened the preceding evening, and had to try to piece together the "unfortunate events" from the fragmentary clues in my immediate environment when I returned to consciousness the next day.  I think I can probably muster a Top Five from those experiences.

My Top Five Strange Morning-After Experiences

5)  How did she get there?

Well, I was a pretty wild drinker on occasion during my first year or two in Beijing as well.  I was too poor to drink anything other than the piss-weak local beer, but I'd often stay up half the night shooting the shit with my two best buddies, drinking solidly for 6 or 8 hours at a stretch.  After one such occasion, I was mildly alarmed - on rising shortly before dawn to stumble to the bathroom for an emergency piss - to discover a naked woman sprawled on the floor of my shower.  (Full story here.)

4)  TRAPPED - in my own trousers!

I had a good couple of years in Oxford in the '90s, returning to the scene of my wild undergraduate days to work as a private tutor for a while (after a nasty illness had punted me out of my schoolmastering career).  Because my old college buddies were not long out of that carefree world of drinking every night (far enough distanced to be starting to feel nostalgic for it, but not yet encumbered with the mortgages and marriages and so on that would get in the way of occasionally reliving it), I became a fairly regular focus of weekend reunions - often having three or four buddies crash out with me in my small (two single beds and a couple of armchairs) flat on Walton Street.  After one of the best of these - the exact details of where we went, and how much we drank, and WHY have always remained foggy; but there must have been A LOT of booze consumed - I found that I had stupidly hobbled myself by attempting to take off my jeans without removing my shoes first.  The jeans were stuck fast, wrapped around my ankles, pulled only a little way past the end of my toes; the legs of the jeans had somehow become so twisted that they were practically cutting off the blood supply to my feet.  And I found I'd given myself horrible rugburns dragging myself to bed.  I rather feared I was going to have to cut open a nearly new pair of jeans in order to extricate myself, but - with some difficulty - I eventually managed to slide a pair of scissors up inside the bottom of the trouser legs to snip through my shoelaces; after which, I was (not without some further struggle) able to remove the shoes, and finally the trousers.  That was probably the most angstful first twenty minutes of consciousness I have known the morning after a heavy night.

3)  Mysteriously neat

After one of the heaviest of my early college drinking experiences, I awoke the next day feeling remarkably tranquil and refreshed - far better than I had any right to, after the excesses of the night before.  Remarkably good physically; morally, I confess, I was a little troubled - there were nagging doubts that I might possibly have behaved badly the night before.  As I looked around my tiny student room, the first indication that something was seriously amiss was my clothes: they were folded neatly on the upright chair beside my desk.  Not casually draped over the chair back (as I'd usually leave them, if I went to bed moderately sober); not discarded in a rumpled heap on the floor (as I'd usually leave them, if I went to bed moderately drunk); not still on my body (as I'd often leave them, if I went to bed very drunk); neatly folded.  Further investigations revealed that I didn't have my room key, either; how on earth had I got to bed the night before??  Well.... as near as I can piece it together, a group of my new friends called down to me from an upstairs room (where they were, I believe, having the also popular but much more genteel tea-and-toast kind of undergraduate party - tea and toast at midnight??  oh yes, we were young and crazy then!) as I returned to the Freshmen's accommodation block after an evening of over-indulgence at some 'cocktail party' or other (all the rage in '80s Oxford, in the wake of the enormous success of Granada TV's adaptation of Brideshead Revisited - and a particularly dangerous phenomenon for the inexperienced drinker, because you never quite knew what you were imbibing or how strong it was; plus, these things tended to be all-you-can-drink deals, and an 18-year-old knows no self-restraint!).  One of them had lost or mislaid her room key, and we had already ascertained (don't ask me how) that her key and mine were a match (there were a lot of these key pairings in that building; not awfully secure, really), so she asked if she could borrow mine.  Recklessly, I tried to throw it up to their window 30 ft above.  Amazingly, I succeeded (though probably only after umpteen botched attempts; this detail is not recorded).  The friend only took a minute or two to open up her room, while I waited down below, in the small courtyard inside the building gate - next to the rubbish bins. Then she threw the key back down to me.  And - unsurprisingly - I had missed the catch.  It seems - although at this point my friends' versions of events became very sketchy, and not entirely consistent - that I convinced myself that the keys had fallen into one of the giant wheelie-bins (no lids on the darn things, or the lids open!!), and so I'd climbed inside it to try and retrieve them; I failed to find them, but made rather a laborious effort of climbing out again, and may have fallen and hit my head slightly as I did so.  At which point, two of my friends from the room above descended to rescue me - escorting me back to my room, undressing me, putting me to bed, and folding my clothes up for me.  Yes, they were  both girls - I blush for shame.  One of them was the one I'd been lending my keys to; hers, it seems, had somehow been locked inside her room, and she'd used them to open my room for me (convenient!).  My keys - which apparently hadn't been in the bin at all, but lying on the ground in more-or-less plain sight - were recovered by someone else, and returned to the College Lodge for my collection later.  Gosh, we were a friendly and helpful community - the joy of being a member of a small college!

2)  You don't want an audience for this

Fast-forwarding several years again to my spell back in that second-floor flat on Walton St in Oxford in the '90s... this was where I first started hanging out a lot with my two good buddies (and occasional commenters on my blogs) James The Nags and The British Cowboy (although he was yet to become The Cowboy), who were both stalwarts of the Oxford Union, and thus regularly managed to get themselves invited to the weekly freebie debauch of the Presidential Drinks (this was nominally a thank-you party for the celebrity guests who'd spoken in that evening's debate; but in practice the star speakers almost invariably headed straight off to a hotel somewhere, or tried to catch the last train back to London, so it was just an enormous piss-up for the Pres, and his friends, and the friends of his friends...).  A few times one or other of my new pals would entice me along to one of these (I didn't require a lot of persuading, truth be told).  And on one particularly extreme occasion... just as I was about to head home, at 1am or 2am, already severely pissed, The Nags lurched up to me, barely capable of speech but with an excited gleam in his eye.  "Look what I've found," he burbled, and produced an unopened bottle of Highland Park whisky from behind his back.  I think we drank at least half of it over the next couple of hours, with only a little help from a couple of other revellers.  In fact, the lion's share of it was mine.  I didn't have to work until the early afternoon the next day (a 16-year-old student was coming to my flat for a private Latin lesson), but, after consumption like that, I slept deeply until very shortly before then.  I found that on getting home I had managed to disrobe, but hadn't made it to the bedroom; I had crashed out in an armchair, wearing only my boxer shorts.  I had only ten minutes or so before my class was due to begin.  And I had a nagging feeling that I must have thrown up somewhere when I got home.  So, I spent several minutes running all over the flat half-naked, madly searching in every obscure corner I could think of for potentially embarrassing patches of vomit.  Mercifully, I appeared to be living in a vomit-free environment after all.  But I now had only about three minutes to spruce myself up and put on some clothes.  It was at this point that I noticed a pair of window-cleaners had been enjoying my strange performance...

And the doozie of them all....

1)  Ships that pass in the night

During my second year as an undergraduate (we don't use that 'sophomore' terminology in the UK, you know), I was very unhappy in my studies, and drinking.... well, for a while, way too much, I admit.  I think I was sort of experimenting with it as a drug, seeing how blitzed I could get with it, rather than just enjoying it as a mild buzz and a social lubricant.  I was - on just a handful of occasions - doing things like drinking a third  or more of a bottle of vodka, and then going down the pub for the night.  On one of these occasions I achieved a complete memory wipe - a blackout period whose contents I was never able to piece together, because I had apparently not been hanging with any of my usual friends (at least, not after the early evening), and so didn't have anyone to give me helpful reminders.  As with No. 3) above, I felt indecently well on waking, positively serene.  But the scene that greeted me in my room was even more puzzling than in that earlier instance.  I was naked in bed, apart from a pair of boxer shorts and my socks (I usually took my socks off, but put a t-shirt on to go to bed).  I was wearing a pair of sunglasses (at night, indoors, in bed??  and I didn't own any sunglasses!).  Two empty bottles of white wine were on my coffee table (I hadn't had any wine in the room, so I must have bought them from somewhere that night).  Strangest of all, dozens of my record sleeves were strewn across the floor; and some of my records were out of their sleeves (I would never, never, NEVER treat my records so disrespectfully!).  Ah yes, and there were two wine glasses on the table - one of them with lipstick on it.  I had evidently had one of the great music-enthusiasm-sharing evenings of my life with an entirely unknown young lady (but a lady, it would seem, of some taste and discernment).  I was very disappointed that I was never able to discover who she was, that she never came back to see me again.  I do hope I didn't do anything to scare or offend her that night.  (I think it's very unlikely; I'm just not that sort of guy.  Anyway, I like to fill in the gaps of that strange night with positive fantasies...)

Top Five Parties I Have Thrown

Time for another 'Top Five' list! In the aftermath of my rather disappointing housewarming at the weekend, I have been reflecting on the more 'successful' parties I have given. I think I'll restrict myself here to parties I have thrown at my home, since it's a little difficult to make a comparison with parties organised at bars or restaurants (and there are an awful lot of those, since I was a "semi-professional" party organiser as a student, heavily involved in the 'dining society' and cocktail party scene).

So, here we go then.....

The All-Time Top Five Parties Thrown Chez Froog

5) 'Collections' Cocktails

At Oxford University, 'Collections' are internal examinations organized by the individual colleges, usually administered just before the beginning of each term - to check whether you've done your assigned holiday reading! They soon become a humdrum routine, no more than a minor irritation; but for first-year students they can seem rather daunting. Most of my friends and I were pretty nervous about the first set of 'Collections' we faced just after Christmas (not least because, in my case at least, I hadn't done any of the holiday reading). So.... I threw a breakfast party for a dozen friends in my tiny undergraduate room for an hour immediately before they were due to start: croissants and cocktails at 7.30am. It was such an outrageously silly - self-destructive! - idea; but it was just what we needed to distract us from the impending exams and reduce our anxieties.

4) The Pyjama Party at the old Froog Towers

Everyone has to throw a pyjama party at some point in their lives - particularly if you live in Beijing, where the penchant of the local people for using pyjamas as outdoor wear (and at any season of the year!) is one of the city's most appealing quirks. I did mine about 5 years ago, in my previous - much larger - apartment. The pretext for that party was my girlfriend's (American academic, The Buddhist) birthday; although, I fear her celebration got hijacked or upstaged rather by the sudden return of my buddy The Chairman to China (Big Frank was still around at this time, so the evening degenerated into a Three Amigos reunion as we sat in a cheap neighbourhood restaurant drinking 3kuai beers until 3am or 4am). People seem more inclined to turn out for parties in the evening than in the afternoon; and the birthday pretext was probably also an incentive - so, it was probably one of the biggest turnouts I've had for an event here in China. A lot of people failed to enter into the dressing-up spirit, but enough did to render us quite a spectacle when we went out on the road at around 10pm or so - headed to our 'after-party', which was of course in nearby BED bar. There are probably still pictures of us out on the Internet: I don't think I've ever seen such a large group of laowai wearing pyjamas in public!!

3) New Year's Eve Party in Oxford

I'm not a big fan of New Year's Eve, and this is the only occasion on which I've thrown a party on this date. In my penultimate year as an undergraduate, I was renting quite a big semi-detached house in West Oxford, and so thought I should put it to use by inviting a small group of friends to come and party with me. We had warm-up drinks at the house, then went into town for a slap-up Chinese meal, then returned to the house for midnight revelries. The party expanded rather beyond the originally anticipated numbers, and we all got very, very drunk. Around 3am or 4am, there was no more booze to be had in the place..... so my enterprising Scots friend The Bookseller cracked open a bottle of Benylin cough syrup and started offering that around to anyone who was still conscious.

2) St Patrick's Day Party at the old Froog Towers

I'm not sure why, but I think this actually drew the biggest attendance of any of the parties I've thrown here in China. For once, people were all fully willing to come in the afternoon. And for once, I hadn't over-extended myself with the catering: I simply cooked up two huge pots the previous day (leek & potato soup and Irish stew), and put them on a very low simmer on party day - both were very well received. Naturally, I got very tired and emotional (I'm a terrible Plastic Paddy!), and tried at one point to sing The Wild Rover down the phone to The Chairman (who was working in Hangzhou that year, I think).

And....... the wildest Froog party ever was.....

1) The 'Back on the booze' party at that house in Oxford

Yes, that was a great party year. Six months on from the humongous New Year's Eve party (number 3) above), I had another, even wilder bash. I had been starting to fear that my drinking was doing bad things to my bank account (if not to my liver), so I decided to go completely dry throughout most of the summer term. Of course, that gave me the perfect excuse to throw a huge end-of-term party at my rented house in West Oxford when I started drinking again. I laid on strawberries and ice cream..... and lots of Pimm's (much of it consumed in combination with sparkling white wine - a concoction popularized, if not invented, by my fellow Corpuscle [as members of my college are affectionately known] Mr A, and known by the suitably warning name of 'Rocket Fuel'). Most of the party took place in the large garden out the back - which was bizarrely decorated with numerous pieces of ceramic toilet furniture (I was renting from a mysterious and slightly sinister Chinese businessman who owned a couple of restaurants in town; he had decided to re-equip the restrooms in one of them, and just dumped all the old fittings in my garden; they all seemed perfectably serviceable, and we assumed he would one day put them back in another of his restaurants or sell them on..... but he seemed to just forget about them): there is a group photo of me and several of my guests sitting on lavatories in the open air - like living garden gnomes. At another point (I cannot remember why) a good number of us had improvised 'Kamikaze' headbands for ourselves with strips of loo-paper and red felt marker pen and were running up and down the garden in formation, crying "Tora! Tora! Tora!" Alas, many of these headbands were later unwisely disposed of in the loo, causing a severe blockage (and my female housemates were somehow convinced that I had done this deliberately to piss them off - it wasn't me, ladies, honestly!). The frivolities came to an abrupt end when The Bookseller inadvertently put his foot through our glass front door; but, luckily, he wasn't badly hurt, and this accident just provided a convenient excuse for us to adjourn to a bar in town. After 6 or 7 weeks of abstinence, my alcohol tolerance was well down; I am afraid I got very, very drunk. So drunk, indeed, that I have very little recollection of what happened with the remainder of the evening; I remember suddenly finding myself walking home, as if I'd just materialized from somewhere, been beamed back to earth after an alien abduction episode; it was around dawn, and I was perplexed to find that I was wearing my boxer shorts outside my trousers. Ah, we were young and crazy then. I don't think that one will ever be topped.