Last weekend went from very good to bad to worse.

Saturday was almost uniformly great. Military precise arranger of gets-together Dan had spotted, in the Pelican (the Corpus magazine for old members, which I receive, but always bin) a formal dinner for old members for the night of the 9th. Not only did he suggest we all turn up, he also booked accommodation in college and provided a preliminary itinerary of the weekend. Sounds daft on paper, right, but it made everybody's life substantially less stressful, so the guy is justifiably owed.

Since I was going to be in the area I arranged to meet fellow Everythingian Deb in Newmarket early on Saturday afternoon. We had been walking through the place and she was pointing out buildings with big statues of horses in front of them for a full half-hour before the connection between Newmarket and horse racing finally hit me. They do a lot of horse racing at Newmarket! Yeah. Who knew. We "had a coffee" in the metaphorical sense, in that I had a Coke (which was served alongside a glass which steaming hot from being recently dishwashed, which therefore I elected not to use) and she had hot chocolate. Second-hand book shops were scouted. The notion arose of marketing reading-and-writing-using-letters in the same way that kids are currently sold Pokemon. "Collect all 26!" I bought Hawking's The Universe In A Nutshell for a very good price indeed if you care about the state of a hardcover book's dustjacket as little as I do. She recommended several books to me which I did not buy, because I'm really bad at following reading advice. I persuaded Deb to buy The Time-Traveller's Wife, which is actually a very good book indeed, a time travel romance (though a little more romance than time travel). Got back to the station JUST as my train was arriving; I bolted for it, and then spent several minutes sitting sitting waiting for it to pull away.

Upon arriving in Cambridge I caught up with the people I had originally arranged the trip in order to see: Dan, James B., Julian, Abby, Rob, Ching and Mike, the latter of whom turned up briefly for pre-dinner beers at the Bath House.

Rob's company now has an office above the fudge shop in King's Parade, which is about the most dazzling possible placing in Cambridge; sixty seconds from Corpus, sixty from the Square, right over the road from King's, what more could you ask for? Fudge? Rob's company-- well, his other company-- well, you know what? I never quite figured out the relationship between the two companies-- is my web host. I asked him whether the 200,000 or so hits in 48 hours had been cause for alarm in any way. He reported that their ISP did not appear to care in the slightest, and had in fact failed to invoice them in more than a month. Fun times! Sign up with them, do.

We bought booze for afterwards. Thresher's had been closed down earlier that day. Sainsbury's was crowded beyond belief. While in Rob's office, changing for the dinner, I realised I had forgotten my smart shoes and was going to have to rough it out in dark grey trainers.

Pre-dinner drinks were in the Master's Lodge. I haven't been keeping careful track of this but it appears that Corpus has ricocheted through quite a few Masters in the last few years; currently it's Oliver Rackham, and quite frankly I can't think of many better alternatives. The guy is one of those guys who was born for Cambridge University and will never leave. If you ever attend Cambridge, you will meet people like this. People who will still be there in sixty years' time. Look out for them. They're there.

Our group of seven were the youngest in the gathering, by a substantial margin. No other old members of our generation had turned up. Only two other old members had turned up at all, a pair of guys who matriculated in the 1950s. We were all placed together in the seating arrangements in the main hall, with no specific names beyond "old member" given, so that we could arrange ourselves. How thoughtful.

Dinner was unexpectedly excellent. Corpus hall is usually closed on Saturdays, so I don't know if an entirely different set of catering staff had been brought in or what. Pastries with mushrooms to start, very nice, then a fish course of brill (which I am reliably informed is actually the name of some kind of fish), also very nice indeed, followed by roasted pork and something the uncharitable would describe as mashed potato, but I would, again, describe as very nice. Dessert was the only let-down from my point of view; it seemed to be a square of white caramel/cream with the consistency of ice cream, but it was filled with nuts, and I'm not allergic to nuts, but I don't like them. Wine was provided. The white was nice, but I dislike red, so I couldn't tell you if it was much cop.

After dinner we were all going to hustle through to the OCR (or is it the NCR?) for coffee but no! No, we (all the old members) were hustled back into the hall to be served separately. So we chatted to the guys from the 50s for a while. They were all right. We decided we'd conducted ourselves well and formed a good impression (this was the first dinner of its kind, but is supposed to become a regular thing) so we thought coming again the following year would be a decent plan.

Nobody spotted my shoes. Success!

So eventually we retired to the bar where a bottle of port was bought. The bar is moving to a new location, apparently, so a drink was necessary, but I don't drink red wine and I don't drink coffee and I don't drink port so by this point I was becoming dangerously sober. In retrospect it was probably for the best. Abby's friend Paul turned up.

As planned, we then moved to "the boardroom" - Rob's office's meeting room, where we'd stashed the alcohol - and I, for one, embarked on intaking a truly heroic quantity of vodka and Red Bull. When the Red Bull ran out I moved to coke (i.e. cola). There was ice, which really goes a long way to improving such a drink, I feel. A drinking game was embarked upon, entitled "21", which was highly amusing to a point, while Rob dragged out an old CPU, plugged it into the projector and spent an unholy amount of time sitting on it, cursing, trying to get it to render MP3 files as audible sound.

Dan seized on the conference telephone in the middle of the board room table and initiated a conference call with Christorian - completely unseen by me in years, I think - and we arranged to meet him at the Van, which, as I have said before, is a collective term for three distinct establishments in Cambridge, only two of which are actually vans. It was a Saturday night at 2:30am and all three establishments had the longest queues I'd ever seen. Christorian eventually caught up with us at Gardi's. He had come from a party where you had to dress in bad taste, so we tactfully removed the photo of Madeleine McCann he had pinned to one of his backpack's straps.

So this is now Sunday morning and Sunday morning is where it gets bad. We toddled back to the board room and I expressed a desire to go the hell to bed, so I collected my bag of stuff and set out, taking with me the guest room keys I had earlier collected from the Porter's Lodge. Leckhampton House, and Cranmer Road, where the guest rooms were located, is about half a mile's walk from Corpus. My room was Cranmer Road number 25, room 3. Never having been there, I walked down Cranmer Road counting the numbers until they ran out at number 23A. But the road bent around to the left, so I followed it between some hedges and then past a squash court and gym (I think) and found a detached house behind the Leckhampton student block with a number 25 on it. Great. Tried the keys in the lock: didn't fit.

Found a side door. Nope, didn't fit that either. Wandered around for a while. Found my way to the front door of Leckhampton House and tried to use the master key to open that door. No dice. Checked what it said on the plastic tag on the keys. "No. 17 Top Lock Frey Dr 98".

Phoned the Plodge. (It's manned 24 hours a day.) I was informed that the Leckhampton key system was completely separate from the Corpus one and so I would have to ask the Leckhampton site manager, not due in until 8am Monday. No other guest rooms are available. At this point it is 3:30 in the morning. It is very cold indeed. I am as tired as I can ever imagine being. I have walked a long way carrying a lot of stuff and I want to go to sleep. There is no bed for me.

So. I phone those of my friends who are still drinking/partying and slog all the way back and meet them outside Rob's office. And then I slog all the way back up to Leckhampton and sleep on James B's guest room's floor. Not on any kind of sofa or soft surface, the floor. I get one pillow which I elect to shove under my chest and head, and manage to sleep for about four broken intervals of one hour each. It's not the worst night's sleep of my life, not even the worst in recent memory, but when I wake up on Sunday morning at 8am I decide that I am tired and hung over enough that the one thing I desperately want to do right now is go and catch a train and go to sleep on it instead.

(It was my fault, being hung over. Didn't drink enough of my patented hangover cure, water, the previous night.)

So I missed whatever happened on Sunday. Sorry, guys. I just needed to recover. I was in a bad way and a bad mood. I went and waited for the train home. The weather last weekend was spectacular for the season so I was able to slouch on a bench in the sun at the station for a while, which was pleasant. Dropped two quid and change on Nurofen, having foolishly forgotten to bring my own generic painkillers (tuppence a pill). Oh, and one other thing. I'd lost my return ticket (price: £26.15) so I had to buy a new single to get home (price: £21.85). If that abomination of a ripoff doesn't sour an entire weekend for you I don't know what does. I used to stick up for rail. Really. Now I only use it because it's my only means of transport.

On a bittersweet note, I've since found my return ticket. Anybody I know in Cambridge reading this fancy a pint one weekend? It's good until 8th March...

I am currently drifting through Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, who is a very annoying writer because every paragraph, every sentence contains four words that I do not understand and it feels like he's doing it just to emphasise quite how much smarter than me he is. I'm reading it mainly so I can read The Da Vinci Code afterwards and laugh at its comparative inferiority. Does that make me a bad person?

Next weekend is the Alphabet Pub Crawl. It's going to be gigantic.