Forgetting To Play Hard To Get

I'm on the bus again today as I'm out in Derby tonight. My legs are recovering, I could at a push have managed to cycle today, probably would have needed a thorough warm-up though. In fact L offers in no uncertain terms but I'm afraid I just don't have time.

Overheard a tennis joke on the bus. Why does the Women's Champion at Wimbledon kiss the turf after the match... hmmm, no, we won't go there.

At work, I fear the worst when the first email of the day is entitled 'Your Dog'. What trouble has he got me into now? Apparently he abandoned L this morning and legged it after a Belgian Shepherd. He isn’t terribly keen on Belgian Shepherd’s. She had to leg it after him. Well at least I suppose she got a good workout. Although now she's threatening him with the pet crematorium.

How refreshing. Lewis Hamilton who lost the F1 World Championship by one point on Sunday has announced that he is unhappy that his team, McLaren, are to challenge the result, after fuel irregularities by other teams went unpunished. He says, "I want to win it on the track. I want to do it in style; I want to win the race or be battling it out for the lead. Being promoted after other people have been thrown out is not the way I want to do it."

L keeps sending me snippets from the newspapers. She must be having a quiet workday. It's all gossip not news but then I suppose that's all they print these days. Unfortunately she starting to sound like Daughter, our regular Gossip Central.

After work I meet my friend from school in the Brunswick, where we have a couple of Railway Porters. Then we head into town for something to eat. On the way we pass Zanzibar, Derby’s premier nightclub, ahem. There are two huge queues stretching along the pavement in both directions. One queue is exclusively male, a collage of tracksuits, baseball caps, drongo trousers and an awful lot of slouching. In the other direction it's exclusively female, mainly bare flesh with a few bits of thin fabric draped randomly over their bodies, everything hanging out. Nothing over 15 in either direction, it must be a under 18's night. These two conflicting worlds will collide somewhere inside, like a car crash.

It almost brings back memories of where we’re going. Round the corner on Babington Lane, it’s the former Tiffany’s nightclub; no I’m not THAT old. Formerly Confetti’s, in my era, then Ritzy, then Eclipse, then McClusky’s now it’s a Chinese Buffet Bar. Yep believe it because it’s true.

I used to go to Confetti's on Club 16-20 nights, now they seem to be doing the same at Zanzibar but for even younger folks, not that we used to take any notice of the having to be 16 rule.

We enter the place and it's barely changed, the old bar on the right is still there. The balcony up top left where I chatted a girl up on my first ever night there is still there. My quest was spectacularly unsuccessful by the way. One of my mates did get off with someone and we all had to come back every week just so that he could see her.

The bar on the left is still there but now it's adorned with plates of egg foo yung and bowls of prawn crackers. The dance floor is in the same place. Just over there is the spot where one of my mates started a bit of trouble, a punch was thrown, he ducked, and another of my mates was sent spinning across the dance floor, wondering what had happened. Happy days, kind of. Now it’s as much as you can eat for £9 and it’s not even very good. It was always an awful nightclub but it's sad that it’s come to this.

I get the 8.50 Red Arrow home, which leaves, as is tradition, at 8.47. No doubt more lost revenue and pissed off customers for Trent Buses.

Get home. L and Doggo have been out running with Daughter. Blimey the whole family's going fitness mad, well not the WHOLE family of course, apologies to Son.

L orders me to bed. After I've been taken advantage of she tells me that she was stressed and didn't want to talk or be nice to me. She just wanted the sex. If only she'd have said I'd have played hard to get.