Mahinda’s Little World

Having been drinking until 5am on Friday night, waking up at midday and driving down to the Midlands was always going to be a struggle.

And so it proved. Bleary-eyed, I grabbed a bite to eat (i.e. grilled the last of the left over barbecue burgers), ironed a shirt and ventured south.

I HATE STOKE!

13:40 Left house.
14:20 Hit EVIL traffic on M6.
15:20 Traffic eased off.
16:00 FINALLY arrived in Stonall.

Must have been quite an accident, judging by the upside-down Land Rover in the bushes and what looked like scorch-marks on the white van. Eeek.

So, eventually got to Spitey and Helga’s house. Note that these aren’t their real names. They live in Stonnall, which is a bit north of Birmingham, not far from Lichfield.

A word of explanation. This was for a Hattrick Boozer. In short, Hattrick’s an internet football management game with a significant community aspect. There’s a whole bunch of us who meet up and go out on the lash, and it’s great. I’ll leave further explanation to the reference post which I guess I’d better write about all things Hattrick.

Anyway, I’d never met Spitey or Helga before. Also staying at their place were Andiell, Impurity and Whatang. Online names, of course. Real names of The Stonnall Six:

• re_spite (”Spitey”) = Alan
• Helga = Faye
• Andiell = Andi
• Whatang = Mike
• Impurity = Ben
• Mahindinho = Mahinda (see what I did there?)

Apart from Mike, these are all people whom I know from t’internet. A pretty good bunch, really, and about as far removed from your stereotypical internet geek as you could imagine.

Had a beer and headed to Brum, where we found the first pub, the Trocadero, and waited for others to turn up.

To cut a long story short, we ended up, via a couple more places (including quite possibly the most chav-infested KFC in the world, ever), at the Academy. There were 14 or 15 of us in all, and a good time was had.

There’ll be a write-up on the HattrickBoozer.Com (”HBC”) website at some point. I’ll add a link when it appears.

For now, all I’ve got is a picture of Andi’s girlfriend, looking a bit flat of a morning:

On Sunday morning, I woke up fairly late, to find the other three guests on their way out. Helga cooked me an absolutely great breakfast and I ended up leaving at about 1pm. I think.

I drove all the way down to the ancestral home, in Radlett, to pick up my beloved little Honda. Spent a couple of hours with dad and little sis, then started the long hung over drive back to MancLand.

Got back fairly late and chilled out in the living room for a while. Turned out that all five housemates were in, which is a rare occurrence indeed, so we all said our goodbyes to Stubie and gave him a card and gift. All very sad. But that’s covered in a previous post.

Stuart went to bed, early - well, there’s no point in breaking with tradition, is there?!

The rest of us then commenced Operation Clear Out The Fridge. There was stuff in that freezer that must have been there for years. We should probably have called the Antarctic Research Institute…but we just used a binbag instead.