Sunday, January 02, 2005

Dinner at Shmo's

We had a great time at the New Year’s Eve party. It was hosted by Robin C (who we know through the Chorus) and his partner Paul at their flat in Clapham. There were a few other Chorus boys and their partners there along with Robin and Paul’s two flatmates and a couple of other friends.

It was a good night all-round. Plenty of food and drink and not so many people that you can’t keep track of who’s who or find a space to sit. We entertained ourselves with watching the Musicality final show (the one where the winners were actually performing the lead roles in Chicago) and played a drinking game called ‘I’ve Never’ (Someone states something that they’ve never done and everyone who has done that thing has to take a drink.) and later moved on to the simpler ‘Truth or Dare.’ Good fun and – surprisingly for a group of gay men – nothing too outrageous. We had to leave a little before 2am to catch the train home though, which was unfortunate as it felt that the party was just getting going.

Yesterday started late. We slept until eleven but weren’t feeling too bad when we finally emerged. Still, it was a lazy day. Brett headed out to pick up his comics and did some shopping on the way home. I stayed in, published the photos from the party (they’re here if you’re interested) and started tidying up the data on my computers ready for their annual archiving.

Rod and Jess came over in the evening and we went out for dinner. We had originally been invited to dine with them and Bruce in Forest Hill on New Year’s Eve, but had already accepted the invite to the party, so made a date for tonight instead.

Not many places were open in the Village so we went to a place called ‘Jo Shmo’s’ which had a kind of ‘modern ethnic’ décor but a Tex-Mex Diner kind of menu. Unfortunately it was clear that the regular staff had booked New Year’s Day off as holiday, so we were left with the new recruits and temporary staff. We had a very polite, but very nervous waiter take our order and then carefully repeat each item to us. They served the starters with the main course, knocked over bottles of beer, forgot the dessert menu and couldn’t get the credit card machine to work for a while. We didn’t leave a tip, but the food itself was fine and we had a bit of a laugh about it.

Something else we had a bit of a laugh over were the toilets: At first glance it looked like there was a floor-to-ceiling mirror behind the sinks but in fact there wasn’t, you were looking in to the ladies toilets. On closer inspection there wasn’t even any glass there – you could step through if you wanted to! I suppose there was nothing inappropriate about it, as there were no urinals just totally enclosed cubicles but it was still very bizarre.

We came back to our place for coffee and played poker for a couple of hours. R&J got the hang of it very quickly and Jess finished the night with the most chips, closely followed by me. Brett, for all his card-sharp chatter, was very nearly bankrupted. Good job we weren’t playing for real money!

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