We had an assignment to check out a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb on Friday evening. It's a couple of hundred yards from my old halls of residence, an area which in 1989 was barely able to support a newsagent and a chip shop, let alone a buzzing nitespot. Anyway, we arrived at 7.30pm and it was rammed solid with loathsome young media types; as slightly older media types we obviously found this appalling. We decamped with Will & Ruth to an upmarket Greek snack bar around the corner. They sold bottles of palatable Greek beer, which, in a stroke of marketing genius, had retained its original name of “Marathon” and had not yet upgraded to the more modern equivalent of “Snickers”.

Then to The Wenlock Arms, a truly bizarre pub off the City Road. Friday nights at the Wenlock promise “live jazz”, and the jazz is delivered by 3 elderly gents on banjo, piano, and trumpet muted with a cloth cap. Spirits and real ales are dispensed by a toothless crone who has problems saying the word “ice” with any kind of clarity, and the mis-shapen clientele either holler at each other or snog each other with equal ferocity. We sat in a corner with a few pints of (cough) Village Idiot. Ruth chose this moment to reveal that she and Will had had a freebie staying at Claridges a few weeks previously. “I took some photos,” she said, taking out a cute pocket-sized digital camera. Jenny scrolled through the pictures, studying the thread count of the linen, gasping at the decadent wallpaper and swooning over the fixtures and fitttings. Then came pictures of the bathroom, at which point Jenny noticed, reflected in the chrome taps, that Ruth had taken all the pictures while completely naked. She handed the camera back to its red-faced owner. “No, you're in great shape,” re-assured Jenny.