I went to Leicester last weekend to see by brother. It was his girlfriend's birthday, and according to her he is improved when I'm around to riff off of each other.
It's a four hour drive, and my first solo trip up there. Six hours for me, I spent two hours lost in Leicester. City's a labyrinth, I tell you. I was especially annoyed to discover I'd driven past his place three times before I figured out what was what.
Arriving at midnight we spent three hours playing Lego Marvel on the Xbox and eating his girlfriend's birthday cake without her (improvements!). As a professional nocturnal I could have stayed up all night, but that gives him seizures, so staying in his room I had to have an early 3am bedtime.
We still weren't properly dressed come the next afternoon when his girlfriend came by (improvements!). We went out with the intent to go bowling but found all the lanes booked until midnight. We went to the cinema and couldn't pick a film we could all see. So we went to a restaurant and I ended up paying for most of it. We mooched on home.
And then prepared to go out. But first my brother had to be photographed in his underwear while I sat in the room wondering what in the seven hells was happening and why did it have to happen in my presence.
Knowing that there would be clubbing on the cards, I made sure to dress appropriately. Which turned out to be the same as I did three weeks ago.
I stood out a bit, but fuck, if I'm going out I am damn well going out properly.
First place was a pub/bar called Firebug. There I stood out for being sharply dressed, not for being oddly dressed. One tall guy in a sweeping black longcoat, pointy goatee and a million massive facial piercings came over to marvel at my hair. I occupied myself with a horrible quiz machine next to our table and a framed Doctor Who quote on the wall while we waited for another friend to arrive, and then we left for Walkabout.
Which was loud and boring that night, and also where my brother had to leave us because he had work in the morning and his bosses were losing patience with his seizure sick-days, which leave him too disorientated to find his way into his pants. Which left the two girls and I to go to a place called The Mosh.
I don't really know how to describe it. There were three floors, the basement being the fanciest and the one with good music, such as I could tell with the volume so distressingly loud. It is, however, where I started dancing.
I don't know much about dancing, so I developed some rules: keep your core moving, and never let either foot sit in the same spot for more than one beat of the current music track. This makes for and energetic style, though it seems I can go for hours non-stop (except for toilet breaks, since I don't do the Moist Fandango).
The girls seemed rather surprised, and after an hour of this other patrons seemed to start taking notice, which I found very bizarre. One guy came over to dance, tried to imitate my style and couldn't. Another tried to lift me over his shoulder for some reason, and was either too drunk or too weak to hold me successfully and dropped me face-first into a brick wall, which hurt. I smiled when I came up to assure everyone was fine, but afterwards I feared that may have been a mistake in case it encouraged him to do it again. Bodily lifting strangers up off of the floor without permission is not okay. I am almost certain of this.
The girls I was with worried about it for a bit, but I washed the blood off my hands and the night continued. Some other guys danced by and tried to match me, couldn't. People kept asking my name, I didn't find out why. A girl came over and said something I couldn't hear (I caught the words "really fun") so I just nodded and smiled like I do whenever people say stuff I don't understand. The next thing I know she's doing this wiggly dance right up in my personal space. This cramped my style a little bit, but she couldn't tell because she had her back to me the whole time for some reason. Weird.
Later some guy insisted I dance on some kind of bench by the wall, which was tricky because space was limited and I didn't want to fall off and face-plant again. He didn't really want to let me off, though I got away at the end of the song, because we were going home. The girls seemed worried about that, again for reasons I didn't really understand. The night had to end earlier than I would have liked because they had to go and I didn't want to be lost in Leicester again, especially without my car on a December night while drenched with dance sweat. We taxied home and I had to sneak in without waking my brother.
Two hours later his alarm went off. I don't know why, he gets up at seven, not five. I never did get back to sleep again, and I had to be at work at ten that evening. I hung around until he came back from work that afternoon to say goodbye, then left for my longest ever commute to work. It was scary because I was falling asleep, so had to sing and slap my own face to keep going, driving in the dark and wet as seventy miles and hour down the M1. Oh, and I got lost a few times. When I saw that the split road for the M25 was coming up (junction 6a) I was in the fast lane, so had to move all the way over. I crossed two lanes and watched the junction whoosh past. Goddammit. I came off the next junction (6) at Watford, planning to turn around and come at it the other way. I did, and was headed north up the M1 back to Leicester. And the first junction I came to was 8 to Hemel Hempstead! What the fuck? What happened to junctions 6 and 7? I've since learned they've no northbound access. Whatever, I'll just turn off this one and come back the way I was originally. Except that the sign posts seemed deliberately unintuitive to me and it took a while to find my way back back to the M1. Hose me down and call me P-chan, I was still going north! I didn't get turned around properly until I got back up to Luton (junction 10) I still don't know what happened to junction 9. I was a good fifth of the way back up that road to where I just came from.
I didn't get any better at it on the M25. I usually take the west side to Southampton, the east side confused me. I did the same thing twice. After five hours on the road I pulled into work. by the end of my shift I'd been up 25 hours. Also I couldn't sleep, so the total was 30 hours up on three hours sleep the previous night. Hooray!
