The evils of drink

Oh, it starts innocently enough.

Just a drink at the Square Pig and 'Swine Bar* to welcome the new staff member. Surely no one could object to that?

But a pint becomes two...

And then someone suggests adjourning to Ciao Bella for dinner...

Next thing you know you're knocking back the limoncello with a piano-playing lawyer** who has inexplicably formed the impression that you're a group of actors***; of course you have to maintain the illusion, while simultaneously chatting him up on behalf of your single but absent music-loving friend, and all this makes the hours just fly by...

So you miss the last train, and the night bus doesn't come, so you end up walking along the river with the LWP, bemoaning his latest heartache****, admiring MI6 by night*****, discussing how "postmodern" in architecture actually just means "whimsy", and disagreeing on whether that's actually a bad thing, and finally crashing in his basement flat in Pimlico******...

And then it's 4am and you're wondering how early the trains start running******* and whether you can make it home before Beloved gets off night shift********, and you screw up your homeward journey and there's a signal failure at Twickenham and here you are at last, full of rue, Beloved's fast asleep and the cats********* have disowned you.

All this just to welcome the new guy. I tell you it's not worth it. Tonight you should stick to cola**********.
_____
* Some of my colleagues abjure the place for that appalling pun. I of course love it for exactly the same reason.
** Who looks attractively like a cross between Beloved and Hugh Grant.
*** This could be something to do with my tendency, after a drink or three, to toss my hair and declaim, but I'm more inclined to blame my dear colleague the Luvvie Without Portfolio, who seems to have escaped a career in The Biz (like which there is no other) entirely by some peculiar accident. He lives with a film producer type, dates actresses, reads scripts compulsively, name-drops shamelessly, and takes the Bard's dictum that "all the world's a stage" entirely literally.
**** Always madly in love with someone wholly inappropriate, he is. It's very entertaining, though possibly not to him.
***** Ooh, in my quest to bring you a picture I seem to have found a most fascinating London architecture blog. That's my morning then.
****** LWP has but a single criterion when apartment hunting: posh totty. There must be posh totty in the neighbourhood. Meaning there's always a W and a 1 in the postcode. He does manage to live in the most amazing places - he once proposed to me with the offer of lots of cupboard space, which is quite something for Victoria, at least on a journalist's budget. The present flat is somewhat (read: almost entirely) devoid of natural light, but absolutely cavernous and you really couldn't get a better address.
******* Not that early.
******** Turns out I could, but not by my normal route, and I figured it out just a minute too late to catch the requisite train.
********* They did of course have enough food. If not, I would made damn sure I got home.
********** Although all this bad behaviour appears to generate an unprecedented number of footnotes. Count 'em, I've made it into double digits. Now I have a record to break!