The other night I met up with my friend Benji Lanyado. He writes the Budget Traveler columns for the Guardian. Good guy. Once wrote an article about me back when I was at Gridskipper.. He lives in Stroud Green Road, a neighborhood in Finsbury Park that engenders great enthusiasm from its inhabitants. According to its Wikipedia, Ho Chi Minh lived there. This isn't true. It's also got a sort ofWilliamsboardian message server called The Stroud Green Residents Association. Anyway, highlights of the night follows: So after meeting up with BL, we headed to meet his friend Dan at a place called the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell. Probably the best fish and chips I've had here. (This was the second fish and chips I had here.) Benji and his friends (a man named Sim, a Brummie named Dan) taught me a new word: Rah which refers to, as per Wikipedia, someone "identified particularly by his or her wealthy, privately educated background, snobbish personal conduct, and expensive dress." Variations of the term appear as ethnorahs who are snobby wealthy and have dreadlocks and world music and rahvers who are rahs who listen to trance.
Later on we went to Punk, a club in Soho, for a night called Smash and Grab. The name comes from the idea that if you don't pull a girl by the end of the night, one is supposed to smash one, grab her and take her home. Peaches Geldof was there. Not an attractive girl. A Klaxon was there. A Metronomy was there too. Probably the only exciting bit (before I got wasted then it was all exciting) was three girls wearing matching spandex and jumping rope. They were Sim's friends and called the SkipTheatres, I think. They were great. As for the rest of the clubgoers, they seemed like a mix between LES fashion circa 2001 (off the shoulder sweatshirts) and kind revivalist disco. Pictures can be found Dirtydirtydancing, the London equivalent of LastNightsParty. The night ended with me drunk sitting on the top front seat of the 14 night bus, listeing to Panda Bear's Person Pitch
