So goodbye to all that.....

Chris and Bernie are embarking on a new adventure. Chris is now back in Melbourne, and Bernie has one last hurrah in Europe before she joins him. So last Friday Paul and I invited them to a farewell dinner at ours. But we had hatched a cunning plan.

Instead of dinner, we’d invited Lucy and Brock, Mark and Angel, Stuie, Clayton and Jari, Don and Derecks, and Andy around for surprise farewell party. Our cunning plan worked, Chris and Bernie were surprised, and we had some very pleasant drinks to say farewell. Geez, Chris and Bernie’s friends can drink some booze! I’m glad they’re not my friends…..

I spent most of the early part of the evening in the kitchen preparing food (matyrdom complex – who me?), so I was less tired and emotional than some by the end of the evening. Those of us who were so inclined went on to London’s premier polysexual club night, Fiction, where we danced (but not near that bloody Fire Exit sign) and behaved in a thoroughly hedonistic manner until the small hours.

It all seems very surreal – Chris came up for a curry at our local Indian on Monday night and I managed to catch his cold before he left (thanks Chris!). We said our goodbyes and that was it. So now he’s gone, 23 hours away on a plane. No more ‘Hello Chris, it’s Chris’, ‘Yes Chris, it’s Chris here Chris’. But we still have the lovely Bernadette, and she is coming to Sitges with us and bringing Lucy. Our very own Fag-hags! We can’t wait.

Saturday Night we had Mark’s birthday bbq, in deepest darkest South London. But we survived (note to self: drinking pints of G+T makes your head hurt). We caught up with some of Marks friends we hadn’t seen for a while, which was good. It was my first bbq at Mark’s parent’s, as I left London the first year I could have been invited, and then when we returned Mark was in Brussels, so he hasn’t had one in London for some time. It was a lot tamer than I thought it would be, but I suppose all his friends are middle-aged now, they don’t roll around on the grass snogging people anymore. Well, not at bbqs, anyway. Mark decided he wanted to go to The Two Brewers, so we went over, watch the obligatory drag show and had a bit of a dance.

Sunday I discovered why gin is called "a mother’s ruin". I put on a brave face though, and despite lots of tutting and asking how I was feeling today (I love it when people take the moral high ground), we managed to make it to London’s glitzy West End (right). Scoffed down some Dim Sum ( or Yum Cha – call it what you want – I don’t mind), then went to see the BP Portrait Award (or something like that) at the National Portrait Gallery. It was OK – I love the NPG, but I find the BP competition a bit crappy generally. There’s a lot of dross in there, and only a handful of the paintings I actually liked. So sue me.