When too much is too much

French Guy's friend's party was actually much less stressful than I expected it to be. I guess it can be put on the account of the incredible amount of pills/powders/smoking substances present...
That, and the absinth being introduced to us girls as "sambuca".

Yeah boys, right. I wasn't born yesterday.
And I know sambuca. It is my predilection drink on a long clubbing night. Believe me, I know.

So I stuck to the wine, and tried to keep my friend Fiona away from the absinth and the rest.
I miserably failed and spent most of the morning leaving panicked messages on her answer phone because I didn't know where the heck she was... (she's a tough girl though, ok, completely crazy, and happened to be in the flat below, rocking that cute Swedish boy's world. Good for her!)

The thing is, I know absinth as well. I don't wish to know more about it.

The first and last time I touched the liquid was two years and a half ago. It had been handed to me in the form of two double-shots by the then-manager of China White as a "baptism" everyone was supposed to go through to be officially part of the creek.


Back then, Stella and I used to refer to the club as "our second living room", being there at least on a weekly basis. After closing time, we'd accompany the staff/creek to their infamous after-parties, usually in the basement of some posh restaurant or some amazing flat in Mayfair, where we would spend hours spraying eachother with Moet&Chandon...

Glamourous lifestyle, you might think. Especially when you just turned eighteen, and you still naively think that being greeted by your name and a vintage bottle by a handful of promoters in every VIP room across central London makes you someone.

(Well, you then have to find a plausible explanation why you thought the champagne your parents proudly cracked open for your graduation tasted like shit...)


But Stella and I, even if we still are occasional users ( dinner+cocktails at Soho House are always welcome...), gradually grew out of our posh-nights addiction. The fact that those clubs are mostly full of very-old-very-rich(understand very-well-fed)-very-creepy gentlemen and skinny aspirant models on the look out for sugar daddies certainly helped... Yep, that, and the ridicule amount of cheesy commercial music played there.


On that particular night I somehow lost complete control of my muscles and my "friends" had to litteraly drag me off the middle of Regent Street where I was lying down, unable to stand on my legs (not on the pavement, in the middle of the street. Thank God it was 4am and the traffic quite light...). NOT a good look.

Now, I am a control freak, meaning no matter how trashed I'll be, I'll never do the following:
-get into a fight
-follow a dodgy someone home
-get into a car driven by someone drunk/on drugs/I don't know (I remember a three-hours-long walk back to a hostel in Spain, ON MY OWN, because all my friends had jumped into a random car passing by)
-take class A drugs (appart from the very occasional line of coke)
-have sex with someone I wouldn't want to have sex with while sober
-do something unnecessarily dangerous and stupid (I once sat on my housetmate to prevent him from breaking his neck by climbing all the way to the bathroom window because both of us had forgotten our keys on the way to the pub)
-take an illegal cab if I'm not with at least one guy
-abandon a girlfriend somewhere when I know she's not able to take care of herself anymore.

Try me if you want, I'll just never do it.


Needless that little adventure scared me shitless off absinth for life.

Hence my restraint last night.
Sorry guys.
I must apologise for not being among those walking stark-naked in the flat.
For not being amoung those whose passed out bodies were not so discreetly pushed behind the sofa or under the curtains.
For not participating in the happy chemicals-swallowing.
For not being the one who redecorated the kitchen with the content of my stomach.
For not going to the street corner to meet someone's dealer (being amoung the rare still fully-clothed ones didn't oblige me to do that).


But I hope you still appreciated the way I diplomatically convinced the angry neighbours not to call the police. Twice.
And I know you certainly enjoyed our little perfomance. But you ought to know no-one can appear naturally that skilled; Fiona and I went to a few pole-dancing classes, back in the day...
I still have one question, though, what was that inviting pole doing in the middle of your living room?