(diaryland) September 20, 2010 - 10:18 a.m.

I was actually awake after midnight for once in my life. It was my birthday.

It was kind of an emergency. Daniel rang while I was staring at a snoozing baby somewhere in Frankston. At that stage, it was nowhere near midnight. Daniel needed to talk.

I was kind of flaking out, so Paola took me home from the going away party of someone who I barely knew and I think I offended. She was going to London, and I said, "Oh, OK, so you're going to London like everyone else from the arse-end of the planet, right? Too predictable. Jesus." And she said, "I will see OTHER bits of the UK. I come from there."

I didn't exactly say what I just wrote, but it was pretty close to that, and it was certainly taken that way.

On the way home from that party, the Proclaimers came on the radio. Legendary. I had flashbacks to the time I danced to it in Jazz Ballet Christmas concert. We had to wear bike-shorts with alternating orange and blue panels. I will never forget those bike shorts.

I started watching D W Griffith's overblown, histronic silent masterpiece Intolerance under a blanket. At god knows when, Daniel rang again and demanded a jaunt to Lord of the Fries. Something about girl troubles. So we went to the city. It was hard to park, plus he kept getting distracted at all the chicks around with basically no clothes on. Distracted in a bad way, I might add, as in marvelling at their lack of appeal.

So Daniel bought his chips (my second Lord of the Fries encounter in as many days) and I had a token few while we stood outside Transport, some bar at Federation Square I had never been bothered going to. A guy we could see inside was going off to Can you Feel it by the Jacksons, dancing like his life depended on it, yet it was happening behind a table. Who dances like that behind a table, in front of a chair?

Then the exact same Proclaimers song came on. EXCELLENT. We went in.

After spending the next fifteen minutes not understanding a word Daniel said, yet pretending I did, we decided to explore upstairs. Before that, I had to down the bottle of cider that Daniel had bought for my birthday with my money (long story there). Technically, I should have been drunk, because I'd had most of a bottle of pink champagne earlier on. But I felt lucid.

A live jazz band was playing upstairs. They were wearing Baker Boy style gear, whatever that entails. I'm pretty sure that's the right thing to say. A young lady was pushed onto the stage area and started singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow in a semi-operatic voice.

We lounged around and talked about side cleavage or something, and then I was deposited home at about two-thirty, the latest I'd ever been up ever, except for all those times I'd been up for architecture school (which was sometimes at least five days).

The plan on making biscuits for my family party the next day fell by the wayside.

I now own bagpipes.