Keith cooked me mackerel. He removed it from under the grill. “When I was living with Karen, I wasn't allowed to cook mackerel,” he revealed. “Oh, really?” I replied, barely looking up from the rather delectable Dm7 chord I'd formed on his battered acoustic guitar. “Why's that?”. Keith handed me a plate of pungent fish, garnished with some cos lettuce and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. “Because it f*cking stinks.”

Our trip down the Victoria Line to Faded Glamour was swift and painless. We exited the tube station at the same time as who enticed us to that pub behind the Union Chapel for a pre-club drink. I went to the toilet, where a big poster revealed that tonight was St George's Night, and that there would be an auctioning off of Arsenal memorablia for charity. “Late Bar” it proclaimed at the bottom, crossed through with marker pen and annotated with the words “No Late Bar, Because Of The Government.” Throughout the poster someone had, presumably while having a piss, corrected various bits of grammar and punctuation. “ENGLAND'S” had its apostrophe scored out, with neat handwriting saying “no apostrophe needed with capital letters.” I've no idea if that's true or not, actually, but one thing is clear: Lynne Truss is clearly becoming some kind of guru.

introduced me to a girl who had bought the last Free French album purely because the cover looked nice. And she liked the music thereon, too. This put me in a fantastically good mood.

Over at Faded Glamour, things were peaceful but starting to get busy. “I'm a bit nervous,” said Shirley. I asked him if I could put my bag behind the decks. “Of course,” he replied, ever obliging and accomodating. I chatted with various people, including Darren Hayman, once of Hefner and now The French, who I had been in email contact with in the past regarding his disgraceful use of the name The French when I'd already formed a band called The Free French. “You know there was a band called Free, as well, don't you Rhodri?” said Keith, pointing out the absurdity of my complaint. Dee regaled me with tales of life after The Observer, Jennifer told me of her two book deal, and I remained unjealous and reasonably happy with my plodding career. After several drinks, and an amusing incident where I greeted my ex-wife and then held out my hand for her boyfriend to shake, only to remove it at the last second – classic – I went to fetch my bag.

My bag had gone.

Now, people who know me will be familiar with my “flustered and upset” mode. I tend to stamp around and swear a lot, while moving my arms up and down like some kind of hideous flightless bird in jeans and a stripy shirt. “Calm down,” said Shirley, who hates this kind of thing. In the nick of time, in walked Delia with my bag. It had been found upstairs. I looked inside, my wallet wasn't where it was; it was in a different pocket. And it was short of £20 and a Barclaycard. It's like Wednesday all over again, I thought. I slumped on the floor in self pity, only to get up again immediately to ring Barclays and cancel the card. Unfortunately, Barclays print the number you have to phone on the back of the card that has been stolen. Stupid idea, that. They should give you a seperate card, or something. 118 118, then.

I walked down Upper Street, talking to someone at the bank who re-assured me that the card hadn't been used and that he'd put a stop on it. My pace quickened and my step lightened, as I realised that I'd had my Nectar card nicked, too. Fantastic. Obscene tool of targeted marketing that it is, I'm now wondering whether the person who nicked it has erratic and unusual spending habits which will cause me to receive mailshots for yachting equipment, Guatamalan porn and lace doilies.

Tired and emotional, I got on the bus outside Angel tube station, and sat waiting for it to whisk me to the night bus hub of Trafalgar Square, and thence on to Tooting. I sat at the bottom of the stairs, by the exit doors. Two teenage girls ran down the stairs to get off, and as they went past me, one deliberately smacked me around the head and my glasses came off. I thought they'd been knocked to the floor. “Where's my glasses? I can't see without my glasses!” I said, in the manner of Velma from Scooby Doo. No-one replied. Typical bloody Londoners, I thought. I started scrabbling around the floor, when I heard the girls came back onto the bus, throw something on the floor with a smash, stamp about a bit and then run off down the road. “Were those my glasses?” I asked. No reply. “Hello? Were those my f*cking glasses?” Someone murmured in the affirmative. Brilliant. I am hopelessly short sighted, and in the space of 5 seconds London has now become a mass of large blurry objects, through which I have to navigate by touch and smell alone. I am immensely pissed off. I started to bellow an extended rant against the youth of today – and 15 year old girls in particular – punctuated with colourful language that turned the air a deep indigo. “Would you like me to call the police?” asked the driver. “What's the f*cking point?” I shouted. So he pulled away. Fair enough.

At Whitehall I was desperate to get into the womblike interior of a black cab, but I “couldn't see f*ck all”, as the old hymn goes. All the cars looked like massive Rorschach Blot Tests. I beseeched a passing stranger to hail a cab for me. He had no luck. “Where are you going?” he asked me. Tooting, I replied. “Look, there's an N155!” he said, pointing somewhere or other. I had no time to say “Where??” before he'd taken me by the hand, and like eloping lovers, our clammy palms clasped together as one in the moonlit beauty of London's West End, we ran. “Come on!” he cried, as I kicked someone's bag into the gutter, banged my knee on a lamp-post and abysmally failed a passing optician's eye test, which he'd thoughtfully handed to me as I galumphed past him. “H… T… er… C?”

We made it. The stranger guided me onto the bus. “Oh, thank you, thank you, young man,” I said, looking vaguely in the direction I thought he might be standing. “Will you marry me?” “Er, no,” he said. “Bye then.”

I got home at 3.40am.