October 2011

Summer lingered in the first weekend of October and our friend Mon was having her Going Away party - she was going to be going back to New Zealand in a few weeks. She had managed to hire Z/Yen's boat - The Lady Daphne. It is a beautiful old timber sail boat. The weather was perfect - hot but not too hot, and no wind. We left from London Bridge Dock and sailed up towards Tower Bridge.






 Excitingly, it had been organised for Tower Bridge to open for us! Tourists lining the banks of the Thames and standing on Tower Bridge thought it was a fine spectacle. For one we were the tourist attraction rather than the tourists.We sailed Canary Wharf, Greenwich, and the O2, and then the boat turned and we headed back towards St Katherine Docks.

We docked at St Katherine's Dock then went to the Dickens Inn and had fun singing along to all the cheesy anthems.
Next weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving! Jen had organised for her Canadian buddies to come round to our flat for a proper slap-up Thanksgiving. Amazingly we managed to get hold of a turkey: Bob, although Jen and I did have to traipse across the city to get it. We cooked Bob, and had roast vege, mashed sweet potato and all the trimmings.



On Thursday it was Rob's birthday. We all went to B@1 for a few cocktails, then had Chinese.





Koda and Bec's were leaving in a few weeks, so Jen and I had organised a surprise leaving party for the Saturday. Storm was recruited to take them out for the day, then Jen had managed to get hold of their friends from school and so they and the rest of the crew waited for Storm to bring them home. We went to the Railway afterwards where Brett coerced Becs into doing shots. The next day was the Semi-Finals in World Cup rugby. We went to the Yahoo to watch it with Brett, Bryce and Matt, all of whom were on varying scales of still drunk to hungover. New Zealand thrashed Australia, then we were off to the Rocket to celebrate Storm's birthday brunch. She had made an enormous Red Velvet cake which was divine.

Next weekend was the rugby World Cup final!! We watched it in The George on the Strand with Georgia and the gang, and Debs and Mike came up from Wokingham. After that we went to a little place "round the corner" (not really just round the corner...), that had a variety of different ales and flavoured beers. Unfortunately I was starting my massive cold of the year so wasn't feeling great, but we still decided to go to Covent Garden and have a look around with Mark, Marcella and Georgia. We had a yummy pie and mash at Square Pie and then went to Kopapa in Seven Dials. Rob and I had tea while Georgia and Mark had cocktails...

I had to take the next day off work because by then my cold was in full force, and Rob was sick too so we couldn't go to Mon's final leaving dinner. We had tickets for Ash on Tuesday night which I had been looking forward to for ages but we ended up leaving early because we both felt unwell.
There was also a big weekend coming up. I had work drinks Friday night at Sketch, and we spent a fair amount of our social club money on cocktails.

Halloween was the next night. We went to the Grand in Clapham with Alicia, Maryanne and Jen. We were supposed to go to a house party at Adam's afterwards but I was still sick, so we went home instead... And that was the end of October.