What an incredible night. Lovely meal at Pinxto People (Spanish Tapas). Fantastic Entertainment from The Luke Rattenbury Trio (and nameless compare in silly red jacket!). Amazing clubbing experience at Koba (great DJing - except for two knobs called Good Looking - or was that Looking Good?)! And finally, great after party at Jon and Dans - did someone say Champ?!

I really, really, really am in one of the most privileged positions into which life could ever have placed me. I work with fantastic people! The now 60 strong company for whom I work contains 59 of the best friends for which I could ever wish. This week has undoubtedly been one of the best of my life - one I will not forget in a hurry. As I write this, I am on my way to Bath (blogging on my mobile baby!), to see my lifelong great friends, and spend my 5th night in a row getting sloshed and having fun! I think I may run up and down the carriage with glee!

Ah - I’d better shut up now - people are looking at me with the ‘is he watching porn on his phone?’ look. No - my blog is just pleased to see me!

What a week. It has been INCREDIBLE - and the real fun has yet to come!

After a day off from the crazy weekend - and a 10k run in 56 minutes on Sunday (get in!), I met Stu and Ben on Monday for a pre-christmas drink, nicely refreshed! So, so great to see them - I haven’t seen either for perhaps five months. It’s always great catching up with lost friends - which has essentially been the theme of this week; catching up with all my old friends before Christmas. For me, Christmas has become a time for friends and fun - none of this present buying malarkey - just good old fashioned making an effort to see people, going out and getting wrecked! Simple!

Tuesday, I went for drinks with Jane, Naomi and all the uni boys & girls, with Duncan and Caro too, to the FunkyFish as a prelude to being woken up at 3am by Tara coming to stay on her way back from Tenerife. Why oh why I drank quite so much and ended up going to bed at 1am is beyond me, but hey, I was drinking for the moment! Tara woke me at 4 - her plane was delayed - and we fell asleep at about 6 after a bit of catching up!

I got up 2 hours later, tired and groggy and spent much of yesterday in a none-too fit state to work. Instead of battling through my mountains of emails, Alex and I passed the day perusing the web for ski holidays and took an extended lunch break to buy Salopettes and a Jacket, as well as visit the high street travel agents. It really is incredible how expensive travel agents are - only one being able to offer us a single ski holiday under £500 - and that was to some nameless resort in Italy. Straight after work I went to meet Tara for a quick (free) mulled wine in Freemasons before heading out to see my long lost Physics champion Jeff. Mr Phillippson is back for pretty much one night on his whirlwind tour of the UK, before heading back to uni in Canada where he is studying for a Phd in the Physics of a heavy Rydberg System.

To cut a long story short - I stayed out late - again; far too late for a school night, and drank a lot of alcohol; again, far too much for a school night. I got home to find Tara asleep in my bed and therefore got very little sleep. Far too little for a school night. As a consequence I had to take some emergency holiday this morning to deal with my disgusting self-induced illness!

So - the big one - tonight is the night to challenge all nights out. Tonight is the Spannerworks Christmas Party 2006! And your host - David Coats!

We met Alex in the Atlas lounge who made the most spectacular entrance ever by falling off his chair straight into a nearby couple, spilling their drinks! We crawled into town, finally meeting Rosie, who had free tickets to FunkyFish. Adz and I put all our money together to make a kitty of £80 - but the drinks were £1.50, so we splashed out and got absolutely hammered. I vaguely remember walking home with one of Caroline’s friends, Emily (wow - I remember her name!), and waking up at about 7am with an absolutely pounding head to the sound of Australians cheering and the English Groaning to our impending Ashes defeat.

I finally dragged my rotting carcass out of bed at about 7.30pm with Leo calling to drag me into town. Leo is the most persuasive man ever - he really should be a salesman! I mustered up the strength to put on a polo neck shirt (couldn’t face the humidity of a warm Iron) and met Alex at his for a quick Vodka. We livened up quickly, the addictive yearning for alcohol that is a hangover, obeyed and quashed, and wandering into town to meet for the leaving party WITHOUT lameo Hassan (big girls blouse!) We met in The Office in the Laines and went on a mini-pub crawl through Brighton finally ending at the HoneyClub.

Now - I haven’t been to my 4-times-a-week spiritual University home for months - but I do know the Honeyclub is one of the best clubs in Brighton, hires only the best DJs and has recently been enlarged - yet I still found it a huge surprise that Judge Jules was on! I happily handed over the £12 entrance fee to experience my Saturday night warmer upper and entered the sauna! I’ll let This weekend’s photos do the talking - but hasten to add - it was an absolutely cracking night - well worth the money! My head is not sure of the value today though - neither are my ears, which have been emitting a high pitch whirring since 5am this morning!

I met the lads in Lambrettas and, as usual, we went on to The Lounge for late night drinks. Nick and I spiked Tantric’s drink with Balsamic Vinegar. Obviously, Tim noticed, but decided he would drink it for a dare. Whilst we chatted to a beautifully, intelligent and well-spoken girl called Catherine (from Melrose Grove - one of the skankiest streets in Bath!), Tantric was not being his usual Tantric self. I went to the toilet, as you do, and in falls Timmy through the door, a delightful balsamic brown colour liquid eminating from his mouth. Lovely! I think the lesson from this Tantric - Don’t drink Vinegar based cocktails

Saturday evening we started at a new bar - Gascoyne Place - which is really a restaurant with table service. I nearly got away without paying for a £20 round - I literally forgot and walked out only for the waitress to come hurrying after me! Amit’s friend Jim from Uni came down which was great as i haven’t seen him for about 3 years! We did a slight pub crawl around Bath, including the HaHa Bar - where Amit got kicked out for flicking the Christmas Tree, swiftly followed by the rest of us for singing ‘rock out with your cock out’! This Country! Finally we went to TheCube - one of Bath’s many underground clubs - where my sisters ex-boyfriend Joe was playing Solo Acoustic Guitar. We had a good chat - I feel sorry for him as my sister has buggered off to uni and predictably dumped him in the first term. Joe has a really bright future though as he is a great guitarist. Don’t worry dude - Women are all sl#gs - you’ll meet another, although she won’t be as good as my sister (family solidarity takes precedence - sorry!)

I arrived in Southampton at eight on Friday evening and we immediately launched into the action with our Pro-evo tournament. The turnout was poor - with only myself, Sean and Jimmy Smash contesting for the medals. Unsurprisingly, Sean won Pro-Evo (Pro-Evo King!) and I won the Bronze medal - I really am shite at Pro-evo - but it was enjoyable nevertheless - I even managed to score a goal! It was pissing down outside and, with an ample supply of Castlemaine, we decided we would stay in and do a big one on Saturday. We got out all Sean’s old games including Smash Tennis, Tony Hawk 2, Worms and Micro Machines from the PS1! We got pretty, err, merry shall we say - my face still aches from laughing so much!

Saturday, we HomeGym’d away our hangovers, went shopping, played Golf, went shopping again, listened to Saints win on the radio, played table tennis, played Pool, went to the pub, went clubbing, bought a Kebab and played Pro Evo again before sleeping! (huuuhh - Deep intake of breath!) I really can’t believe we fitted in so much! I won the Gold medal at Golf! Woo, didn’t even get a medal place at Table Tennis (sean took Gold again) and won the Silver at Pool (sean took Gold…again!) I gave myself an honourary Gold medal for being the only one of us to get chatted up in the Lizard Lounge! Unfortunately she (the infelicitously named Rachel!) was not particularly up for our choice of clubbing venue - Junk. Junk really was, well, Junk! It was small, hot and full of Scorsese look-a-likes wanting a fight - so I don’t blame her!

Sunday, we again HomeGym’d our Hangovers away (this time was so much harder), and waited for the FA cup draw to take place, between bouts of vocabulary enhancement and more Pro-Evo. Sean had to drive to Anna’s in Dorking so we cut the day short with a trip to PotBlack for some Snooker and more Pool (this time - I took the Gold medal in a very close play-off!) And so here ended the Southampton Olympics. Not quite the greatest show on Earth - but a better alternative to simple drinking. If there’s one good thing to come from my failed relationship (there is always one good thing!) thats meeting and retaining a friendship with King Prawn - champion of fun-weekend’s. I salute you sir! (Don’t become Arrogant Sean - you are not that resplendent!)