I'm horribly overworked, at the moment. This is now my alloted lunch break, which, let me tell you, required immense will power to allocate. I might give up working for Lent, and go and spend several days and nights in the wilderness (Streatham.)

On Tuesday evening I accepted an invitation to the launch of “London's Most Exclusive Cocktail”. This is obviously the most meaningless excuse for a gathering of journalists you could ever imagine, but they'd gone to some lengths to encourage people to attend by printing the invitations on what appeared to be bits of leather. Send me a bit of cow hide with my name on it, you know I'll polish my shoes and come running. So. Most Exclusive Cocktail. What DOES that mean? If they mean it's the only one in existence, well, I can easily compete with my newest creation, a Marmite and Pea Daiquiri. If they mean that it caters for the wealthy, well, what they probably wanted to launch was the Most Expensive Cocktail, but realised that they couldn't actually afford to make it. Anyway, as we came into the bar, this Exclusive Cocktail was on a small plinth at the entrance, but of course we weren't actually allowed to drink any of it. We had to make do with small glasses of red liquid that were brought around the room on trays, and could well have been poured from a big jug of Innocent Smoothies, so low was the alcohol content. Although rounds of Innocent Smoothies would also have been too large a financial commitment, so what we were probably drinking was some refreshing Robinsons Summer Fruit squash. From the faces of the people in the room you could see that many of them had wished they had brought a hip flask. I stood with Jenny and Liz looking at this Exclusive Creation. The cost of buying one, apparently, was “between £1,000 and £4,000″, depending, presumably, on the optional extras that you might want with it, like a side order of G5 Macintosh computer, or a new bathroom suite. Our hostess urged the assembled throng to purchase one. Everyone just looked at their watches, mumbling.

Since then I've sat in a room, typing out words. My 15 minute lunch break has been spent typing out words. It's all beginning to blur into one repetitive, Groundhog Day-type experience. What I should do is learn some new words. If anyone has any new words they could suggest to me, I will do my utmost to incorporate them into these Islington pub reviews I'm slogging through.