Right!

I have a whole HEAP of catching up to do here.

Let's start out with the Monopoly Pub Crawl 2007, held on 4th August - which is two very crowded weeks ago, now, so bear with me if I can't remember all the antics exactly perfectly! This is the second MPC I've attended: you can read about the first here and check out my extensive advice on the subject here.

We gathered at Elephant & Castle tube station as previously, at 10:30am - a cunning ruse intended to make an 11am departure more reachable for those members of the party who were inevitably going to turn up late. Making appearances right from minute one were myself, American guy Dave, James R., James B., Julian, Mike, Elliot and Abbie - claiming her hair had always been red and that she'd dyed it brown throughout her undergraduate degree. A likely story. Actually we weren't at the Castle itself but the first bus stop - horrifyingly difficult to pin down. E&C is a mazelike pentagonal roundabout with multiple bus stops and Tube entrances. Tedious! Lucky I was early. Actually I'd had to get up unusually early for a Saturday in order to get to London in time at all.

It was a sunny, sunny, very very hot day. I'd specifically aimed to be carrying as little as humanly possible. I think I'd succeeded. Abbie was nominated to fill the absent Mark's role of making lewd comments throughout.

As we orbited through the first and most distant pubs from the centre it was revealed that Dave wasn't going to start drinking immediately and that James R. was drinking at only every other pub, which threw off the whole "group buying" system we had employed successfully in previous years. I have no idea whether the amount of money I spent matched everybody else's. Anyway, I won the first few rounds (finished my drink first) - building up points in advance for the tougher later rounds. Although, naturally, nobody manages to keep score all the way through.

Elliot was drinking tequila. That boy's going to go far.

At Fenchurch Station - like three pubs in, I think, worst music IMAGINABLE, nyarrrrgh - Chrismo and Jenny arrived, along with Mike and Dave. Dave had managed to get lost. Mike - the Man with the Plan, the same paper as last year, in fact - had had to go and find him. Eventually Alex turned up too. You know what? It gets a bit blurry. People were turning up and leaving all the way through. Elliot's acquaintance Megan appeared later, too, as did (much later) a friend of hers named Armando, and another guy I don't know (but I see from the pictures here) named Scott. But this was the post-drunkenness point. Difficult to remember exactly.

Aldgate East station looked like a bomb had hit it.

I lost steam, like last year, around King's Cross Station. The half-mile foot trek down to the station (pub 10 or so) where there are invariably no seats is a difficult one. And by Bond Street (where you always find yourself with 45 minutes to spare, in my experience) I was doing... well, not too well, as eyewitnesses will testify. But I rallied. We were all old hands at it this time around. We were confident. For some of us, this was the fourth annual Monopoly Pub Crawl. I reached the end having skipped only three or four pubs altogether. Several people (the usual suspects) managed to drink at every pub. Rob turned up at Oxford Street to meet us at the finish. He claimed to have mixed up 10:30am and 10:30pm, with hilarious consequences. A likely story. I won Oxford Street too - let it be known.

Four quid for a vodka and Red Bull? I moved to spirits too early, and Red Bull is too expensive to maintain. This mistake will be rectified in future. In addition, I will stick with a single type of beer if possible to avoid having too many different things in my stomach at once. It's not technically mixing drinks, but it's still surely below optimal strategy to have a different beer each time. Also: never touch Abbott Ale. Ewch.

Pics here and here, if you have the relevant Facebook connections (i.e. know me, I guess).

So, overall: unmitigated success. We're really good at this now. But MPC is the ultimate pub crawl. What next? What next?!

Next: Belgium!