The arrangement of an evening out next Tuesday – Christmas Eve Eve, if you will – prompted me to check my ticket for travelling to my ancestral seat the following day. I found three bits of card in the envelope with various details of the train I was to catch, which seat I was allocated and so on, but no actual ticket. They all said “Not Valid For Travel” thereon. This was useless for me, I needed something that was actually Valid For Travel. Rang up Q-Jump, one of the tiny fragments of our once mighty British Rail. “Oh, I know what's happened. Too many chiefs, not enough soldiers, know what I mean?” said the bloke on the phone. Of course, I reported him immediately to his superiors, and he must have been asked to clear his desk at once as when I got to the Travel Centre at Waterloo last night to pick up the missing ticket, there was no sign of it. I had to wait for 20 minutes for some fax authorising the pickup to ooze out of a machine behind the counter. In that time, I had a brief chat with who had wandered in with similar problems, and found a moment to laugh out loud when a voice came over the speakers saying “Would the next customer proceed to consultant number 2, please?” Consultant???? Jesus. A big, booming voice saying “TWO” would have done just as well. I remember when passengers became customers. Ugh.

The engagement party was fun. turned up, much to my delight. Tim's band, Quartet Electronische, performed two sets, much to the bemusement of the majority of the attendees, most of whom were not overfamiliar with improvised electronica. One chap said to me, incredulously, “You know, if I asked them to play that last piece of music again, I bet it would come out different.” You don't say. Tim's fiancé, Becca, occupies a different social strata to myself, as was evident when I overheard one of her pals saying that their job was going well. “Yah, the day before yesterday we went on our Xmas office do, to Lapland. Mmm, we got up at 4.30am, and by the afternoon we were sleigh riding with huskies.” I, by contrast, had a paper cup of Merlot and a Fray Bentos Mr Kipling Mince Pie in Mornington Crescent.

There were lots of people there who had assumed sobriquets such as “Twinks” and “Worm”. In an attempt to fit in, I introduced myself as “Bobble”. Not really.

Afterwards a night bus was prendre-d. Managed to fall asleep, despite a group of white youths across the aisle shrieking and mooning out of the window at groups of black youths loitering on the pavement. Woke up at Highgate Village, where I got off, along with the mooners. Tragic, when the moneyed classes feel the need to show their asses.