Bloody New Year

Rather than dump six new articles here on 2007-1-17, a day so wholly unremarkable that I actually found time to blog, I'll spread them over the first weeks of the year. Like diary entries from when these things happened. Ooh, am I posting from the future now? No, I'm just a big fat charlatan.

New Year's Eve is so over-rated: the pressure is on to have the best time of your life (and you'll never have the best time of your life if you're waiting for it to happen). Alice and I, no longer dating, decided to celebrate together anyway. We went to a pub in her neighbourhood and ignored the karaoke in the corner. Friends joined us. London topped Sydney at fireworks on the telly. It was "beer and skittles" all round... until midnight.

The less said about what happened next the better. Alice hurt my feelings and made me feel unwelcome at the after-pub party (at which, adding insult to injury, the only booze available was what I'd brought with me). It wasn't the first time alcohol and Irish rage have mixed to leave me wondering what the hell is going on, but I struggle to recall having a worse time at a time when I was supposed to be having a good time. Poor me!

But I didn't come out of retirement to bitch and moan - far from it. Like a bad dress rehearsal followed by a great opening night, Alice and I are getting along better now than we did before. Does that seem strange? It's so easy to walk away from a messy situation and I was secretly impressed at her for doing quite the opposite in the days that followed. On Friday we had a good ol' fashioned heart-to-heart of the kind we somehow never had when I was her boyfriend. Then, on Saturday, we re-celebrated New Year on a bar crawl, roping in two bemused couples from the next table in Baroque to toast with us at midnight.

So in the end I had a fantastic night and nobody needs to open a can of spam-bots on my ex-girlfriend's website after all. She'd only thank me for the extra traffic anyway, although traffic ain't been a problem since USA Today linked it last week. (Click "shocked and upset" in the last paragraph and prepare for some disturbing subject matter.)