Palfrey's life

Life in the crazy offline world appears to be working out quite well so far. I've got some work done, and I've managed to see some old friends from high school for the first time since Xmas. First off, I got bored and ended up calling Ben on Sunday, and wandered down to his new place in Northfields. Ben, despite his normal slacker self (he's still smoking *way* too much dope), has managed to organise himself into a mortgage and a fairly steady job. The mortgage in question is actually in his Mother's name (for purposes of not getting fucked over by the building societies), but apparently he's paying all of the interest payments here, so it's pretty close to being entirely his mortgage. As part of this house situation, Lizzie, another old friend is renting one of the rooms from Ben. This is a little on the odd side, as Ben/Lizzie used to be going out for quite some time, and then later on they weren't but it was hard for outsiders like myself to be able to notice this, as nothing changed. Everything appears to be still the same as several years ago - Ben stoned off his nut in his living room, Lizzie around a lot - only now there's a mortgage. Scary.

Today, I decided to go on a bit of a London wander, and started with meeting up with my mother for lunch (she works for a law firm in Gray's Inn area). Then, wandered around a bit, saw Spitalfields market (what there is of these days with the rebuilding work), took in a bit of the new British Museum (but concluded that's one for another day), and was heading for Covent Garden when I ran into John. I had heard vague rumblings from Ben about possibly meeting up that evening for some food, and had even spoken to John yesterday about this, but nothing had really been confirmed, and knowing the nature of the plans, I was planning on calling them about 5:30 or so and finding out what had been planned. Instead, I run into John at 4, while he's looking for Ben and Alison to meet up for a drink with them. We end up at the bar over this 'old cornish pastie' shop thing, and generally have some fun. John is a bit depressed with the bar work progress at the second, but he's getting on reasonably ok. His sister is about to get married and move to Dubai to set up some sort of subsidary section of the University of Leicester Psychology department (who she's a lecturer for right now). Alison is about to go to South Korea for a year on a TEFL thing (sort of following her boyfriend). She has to go about half way through all of this unfortunately, due to other commitments.

I managed to briefly engage in conversation the random girl sitting alone behind us reading something that can be broadly described as one of those self-help guides for women looking for men. Apparently it's not quite as bad as the title (which I've forgotten) might indicate, and is in fact somewhat funny. Admittedly this whole little thing was a) done right at the end of our time in the bar (in case of extreme bokkup) and b) not in any serious vein, and more a matter of, "let's see if I can do this" and on part of my general "build the self-confidence" program, but it appears to have worked quite well in that way. Never thought of scottish accents as cute till now... Anyone else able to tell I haven't seen a reply from Caroline to my "here's a few ideas about what we could do" email sent on Friday?

Ended up in Wagamama's with John and Ben, being served by a waiter that was according to Ben's professional opinion on a lot of speed. He certainly was chirpy. Adventures with noodles, and some attempts to eat ice-cream with chopsticks ensue. More conversational blah, lots of echos to our old crazy times. We end up scattering after this at the horrifically early time of ~8 with both John and Ben needing to do lots of work tommorrow.