New Year's Eve I

The worst new year's eve that I spent I was peeing behind a bush in Kennington Park, behind the tube station, as the clock struck midnight. Or perhaps it was 2002 when Lisa and I had a terrible, terrible argument. I'm not sure, new year's eves have never been very special for me with the exception of 97/98.

Howard, Percy and myself went to Hamburg to stay with Sonja's friends, and ex flatmates, Sandra and Silke. Sonja had been living in London and was right in the middle of my circle of friends. She was engaged to Howard a few years later but they never married in the end. She now works as a journalist in Berlin.

We all had lots of fun. Howard, Percy and myself found some lovely, top quality, grey, curly wigs in a wig shop that suited us and which we wore for the week. I also remember Howard dressed in a nurses outfit standing on the balcony in the freezing cold attracting trade from the visitors to the Reeperbahn red light district outside, using a little, plastic, red, toy megaphone. We all found this very funny. He must be good with resisting the cold because, one night, he couldn't manage to work the key in the lock and passed out, drunk, in the stairway on the stone steps but was none the worse for it the next day. Silke played me Neu! '78 (I was overjoyed, I thought that only Neu! 1 and 2 existed.)

Howard and I took a flight back on new year's day. We were drinking cheap vodka from the bottle and by the time that we arrived by bus to Stamford Hill we were quite drunk.

A five year old girl on the bus thought my wig looked amusing, we all got off at the Stamford Hill crossroad, the girl, her mother and myself. I offered the girl some Turkish sweets that I had in my pocket, her mother, naturally, pulled her away, and I got quite upset and began to shout nonsense about how the mother was setting a bad example through her lack of trust. Ten minutes later and I felt ashamed of carrying on so.

When we got upstairs Howard made a little mini bar in the hallway with a sheet of glass, a couple of bricks and all the bottles of cheap spirits that we had brought back with us from Germany.

Because we had flown on an all but empty New Year's Day flight, British Airways hadn't bothered to use fresh food, I am guessing, and recycled cold meat from the day before (my vegetarianism lapsed for a couple of years at this time). Howard and I got food poisoning and we both woke up that night feeling so ill. I felt like I was going to die, the soft spoken Algerian students downstairs had decided to throw a party and the sub bass made me feel so very awful. The first time I rushed to the loo with my diarrhoea and vomit I discovered that the ceiling in the hallway had collapsed from a burst pipe, and I was treading barefoot on sodden plaster mixed with pigeon droppings, feathers and dirt. The burst pipe meant that the toilet would be blocked and we were both so ill for a couple of days. It was horrid.