Blah blah blah, something about it being my birthday this weekend so I was contractually obliged to go out on the pop with the lads from work earlier in the week. The plan was to go to bars that we wouldn’t normally go into, and it’s fair to say we certainly managed that. We went to:

The Trafalgar

In the centre of Gateshead, the Trafalgar is a pub that doesn’t really deserve to be on this list as we go there on a lunchtime quite regularly to play on the quiz machine. Having said that, it is unusual for us to drink there, so it just about scrapes in with a technical justification.

Trillians

Very much a bar for Rockers in Newcastle, this was only open until 6pm last thursday night, because it was then closing down for an hour to provide a gig for some AC/DC tribute band, which would have cost £5 admission. We left at six.

The Northumberland Arms

It’s next to Marks and Spencers and then down a big steep staircase, into the bowels of the earth. Well, it’s not that far down, and it’s not like the place is the pits, it’s just not part of the normal route. And from there we went on to…

Old Orleans

… for a rum-based cocktail called a zombie. The bar obviously tries to have somewhat of a New Orleans theme (pre-Katrina), and there’s a restaurant bit upstairs offering Tex-Mex cuisine. This one is probably too trendy for the normal route — not enough spit and sawdust.

The Goose and Garden

… had been on our list but it was too busy so we bypassed that and ended up in …

Some other bar

Which was up near to where the Hyena comedy cafe was, but I’ve never been there before, and have no idea what it was called. I was drinking Iron Bru Wicked by this point. Which is basically Iron Bru with Vodka in it. And is nice.

Tiger Tiger

Another trendy cocktails bar, where I drank … oh I dunno, something. Of course, by this point, Mr Hipflask had produced one of his famous hipflasks and had been passing round a cask strength Ardbeg single malt whisky between each pub to keep us all nicely warm on the long, three hundred yard walks between one bar and the next. After we’d finished in Tiger Tiger, we wandered down towards the Bigg Market but were enticed by some flyers offering free drinks into…

Idols

What can I say? It was impressively sleazy. All of the bar staff were female. All of the bar staff wore skimpy little costumes with furry boots (no, I don’t know why either), and every now and then a few of them would stand on the bar tops and gyrate a little bit. Which was all very well but it made it more difficult to get served because there were less staff serving, and that surely has to be some kind of tactical error. All in all, not really my kind of bar — but then again, that was the point — and so from there we went to…

Boom

This was a loud nineties bar with loud music, consistently playing loudly. ‘Nuff said.

Rafferty’s

From Boom, we tripped neatly along to Rafferty’s on Pink Lane — on the basis of “why the hell not” as much as anything else, and two members of our entourage dropped out there. And then on a whim I decided to head for the Pink Triangle to finish off the evening in one of the gay bars.

Some gay bar in the pink triangle. I didn’t notice the name, sorry

By this stage, there were just four of us left, listening to various people badly singing karaoke. Did I mention it was a karaoke bar? By this stage, we’d had a few drinks of course, so we started flipping through the song menus to see if there was anything worth singing. As per usual, none of them had Too Drunk To Fuck by the Dead Kennedys (which had been somewhat of a drinking marathon anthem of mine during my student days) so we had to shop around for something a little less offensive.

And then the other two went home, leaving just me, colleague-man, and the karaoke machine.

… and that my friends, is the reason why the last moments of my birthday night out with work were spent singing — along with colleague-man:

He thinks he is a flower to be looked at
And when he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight
He feels …The Kinks

… a dedicated follower of fashion. Indeed. Now can someone please pass me an aspirin?