It's an odd feeling, waking up at 10.30 after a late night and turning on the TV to be met by the spectacle of several thousand people sitting in the sun watching SPORT taking place a few miles down the road. “God, these people must have all got up hours ago,” I thought. But they probably weren't drunkenly staggering around a branch of Costcutter at 2.30am, assembling an improbable basket of goods which included a flapjack, some Toilet Duck and a small piece of Gruyere cheese. I'm looking in the plastic bag right now. I've no idea what I was thinking.

The evening was spent in the company of 3 devastatingly attractive women in a gastropub next to the Greek Orthodox church on Kentish Town Road. I once went to a wedding at that church. It was extraordinary, all chanting men in robes and an odd game played with the bride that was a bit like pin the tail on the donkey. Anything but orthodox, in fact. Anyway, this pub has only recently opened, and old blokes who used to be regulars before it started serving chicken liver terrines are still coming in, buying halves of bitter, and shaking their heads sadly at the decor, the clientele, and the resident jazz duo – a South American female singer called Jodie, and a Japanese guitarist called Ping. Jodie and Ping.

It's a nice place, anyway, although it appears to stay open until 2 which, as ever, plays havoc with the normal British drinking habits of getting as much down your neck as fast as humanly possible, and I'm now suffering slightly as a result. In the restaurant area we were served by a slightly flustered waitress who greeted every request with raised eyebrows. After she'd done it again in response to a request for a green salad, you felt like saying “Why? What's wrong with it?” At the end of the meal she did it again when we put 4 debit cards on the table, as if this perfectly normal method of payment would be enormously problematic for them. As it turned out, it was; teams of employees brought our cards, pens and debit slips out in relay, one at a time. Odd.