A Monopoly Pub Drawl! Crawl, I mean.

I'm going to start this story a week earlier, because I've actually been to London twice in two weeks now. The first one was a party at Mike's family's house in Pinner. This party simultaneously celebrated Mike's graduation (he's a ChemEng, four-year course) and his parents' 25th Wedding Anniversary. Both these events had occurred months previously but it's all good, right? There were large arrays of people that Mike's family knew, and also two groups of Mike's friends - me and my lot, and his ChemEng buddies.

Mike's mum is a legendary cook. Chef, perhaps, is the word. She'd put out a stunning amount of food. Good food, also. Dress was "smart casual", but, seriously, what on EARTH does "smart casual" MEAN?! For me it means "you can never wear the right thing", apparently. Flah. Beer good. Slept on the floor in his living room with half a dozen others. Mike's house is lovely and has a huge amount of ornaments. Must be a nightmare to dust - my mum specifically doesn't have many ornaments, and those few in a glass case, for that exact reason. Still, everything was immaculate.

Anyway, that was a nice night, and almost entirely unrelated to my second London visit, from yesterday (Saturday) to today. For it was time for the third annual official unofficial Corpus Christi Monopoly Pub Crawl!

Some notes for a Monopoly Pub Crawl. The aim of the game is to visit, and drink at, a pub on each of the 22 streets and 4 railway stations listed as properties on the UK Monopoly board, which is based in central London. Altogether that's 26 pubs. Some streets simply do not have pubs on (Vine Street being the most obvious of these - it's short dead end which leads to some random loading bay, it has NOTHING of note on it, let alone a pub) so you need to pick a nearby pub instead. Also, visiting the pubs in the order in which they appear on the board takes a huge amount of travel time and a lot of pointless doubling-back, even if the four stations are ignored, so pubs are visited in a more convenient order instead. We used this as our Bible. Even so, you have about 12 to 14 hours to play the game, or roughly 30 minutes per pub, including travel time. A permanent eye on the clock is necessary.

This was, as I say, the third attempt. August 2004's crawl is documented in photographs here. Mike, Chrismo, Julian, James B and James R were those present - I believe there was a reconnaissance run the week before, and I am certain that they did not successfully complete the whole tour, although I don't know the precise number of pubs they did manage to visit. August 2005's crawl, which started out as a recce and morphed into the real thing, is well-documented here. Elliot, Mark and Ching and a guy I don't recognise joined the original five, but again (and likely due to a slow start) they didn't make it, only 18 pubs visited.

So 2006 was The Year. There was no recce. The cast was myself, James R, James B, Julian, Mark, Rob, Rob's brother Alistair, Mike and Mike's mate Bernie, with Elliot and his girlfriend Megan (sp?) catching up with us somewhere around pub #10, and Megan departing elsewhere a few pubs after that. We aimed to start at Elephant & Castle tube station at 11am. I made it there right on the dot of eleven, having taken the train down from Nottingham at 8:35 that morning and slept the whole way there, but we were delayed starting.

Far too much happened on the run for me to specifically write down and record all of it. Certainly not in chronological order - the last eight or so pubs really blurred together for me, the places we were visiting doubly so since I was blindly following Mike, the guy with the directions. My highlights of the adventure include:

• Wandering around for about half an hour at the start of the run, unable to find any pubs
• Running into another team of Monopoly crawlers leaving the first pub as we arrived - we later caught up and OVERTOOK these guys! Although they were doing pints to our halves, which is hardcore
• Fenchurch Street station's pub, which has a departures board inside it - I approve!
• The marvellous grandeur of Liverpool Street station's pub, which is formerly the ballroom of the Great Eastern Hotel, and hence huge, boxlike, and ornately decorated in gold
• The Angel, Islington, where James B spilled an entire half-pint across me - fun!
• Pentonville Road, with its comfy, comfy cushions, where I first began to fall asleep. Pub #6? Not good at all!
• The long and painful walk from there to King's Cross
• King's Cross Station, which we'd been to before
• Awesome selection of music at Euston Road
• FAR TOO MUCH SMOKING, man, it was killing me by the end
• Park Lane or possibly Mayfair, where I hit the wall and skipped the first of four drinks altogether - water instead. It was also here that my feet REALLY began to kill me. I blame not travelling light enough. Elliot and Megan joined us at Mayfair
• Switching to vodka with stimulating mixers around the halfway point
• All the pubs becoming increasingly crowded as Saturday night drew in
• Really starting to blur the pubs together around Bow Street
• Trafalgar Square being awesome. I think this was where Megan left us
• Dinner, a delicious slice of pizza snatched in... Leicester Square? I really don't remember
• Really relaxed and groovy from Regent Street onwards - totally together, totally focused
• Being left behind after nipping to the toilet just before everybody left Marlborough Street
• Elation at Bond Street, with 40 minutes in hand, realising that somehow we have made up about an hour and a half of time and we are likely to be successful
• An interminable slog along Oxford Street towards (allegedly) its only pub, at the far end
• Glorious, alcohol-soaked victory at Oxford Street! Cheers and handshakes all round!

There is more, loads more, but I just can't keep it all straight enough in my mind to record. Too many events in too short a space of time. Photographic evidence and other accounts will probably clarify the story later, but in the mean time, the most important thing is - we did it. WE DID IT!

Some final notes: we changed three times on the way back to Julian and James B's flat, which seemed pointless, and seemed to take an eternity (my feet were twin supernovae of pain by the time we made it). I found a blister on my right foot the size of a coaster the following morning, and burst it walking back to the station to come home. And lastly, at the time of writing I am about 48 hours without a decent square meal :)

Late breaking news: James B's gallery!