Total Tea

Last Saturday, I managed to redefine the term drunken blowout. This is no small achievement for a person whose feats of drunkenness include drinking all the grog out the boardroom liquor cabinet at work, while watching football on the flat screen telly, and singing nessun dorma on a table in a bar in Sydney, as a tribute to Pavarotti.

What marked last weekend's escapade ahead of previous outings, was the impressive level of self-unawareness I managed to achieve.

So what happened? Fuelled by a few glasses of red wine and half-a-dozen beers, I devised a t-shirt company with some friends and brainstormed a few design ideas. This sounds innocuous enough, unless you observed the single-minded voracity with which I pursued the subject and the irritation I displayed at anyone who strayed from the topic in question. For my friends, I'm sure it was like being in the accoutrement equivalent of hell's kitchen.

If we skip forward twelve beers and throw in a few tequila shots, we get to the zenith of Saturday evening's activities. I could describe the bar I was in, but you would know it would be a lie. On Sunday I thought I recalled the bar accurately, however, enquiries confirmed that no bar of that specification exists in HK (consensus is that my memory combined the features of three bars I visited). It was at one of these bars that I failed my test in how to make friends and influence people. Although threatening to punch a friend is an acceptable and common activity in NZ when out with fellow corporate blood suckers, it's not an endearing or even appropriate past-time for non-corporate blood sucker friends in HK.

So what's the upshot of all this? A challenge to myself. I am going to try to go three weeks without touching a drop of alcohol - It's sad that I know this will be very difficult to achieve.

Anyhow, wish me luck and I'll keep you posted on how I'm going.