Wake me up when the weekend ends - 21 June 2005

Experiencing the London Summer: alcohol, a massive Greenday gig, and and old friend

Day 1. Drink me up.

Summer in LondonIt's always a pleasure to meet people in London in the summer. Especially if the summer is so promising like this one.
They are saying this summer will be the hottest and meanest summer ever. Well, today, Monday morning, it's raining.
But walking around London, pretending to know places and restaurants and museums and the best bars to pull birds and generally showing off my incredibly tour guide skills has always been a pleasure.
When Giambattista decided to come over here to visit London and to see the Greenday concert, I was more than happy to help him. Damn, Giambattista is a long name for a short friend. Giamba will do from now on.Giamba in South Park

Giamba and OlafIn the last century (the so called nineties), me and Giamba went to high school together. He was the good guy with good votes, and I was the guy with a great talent for cheating at exams in order to get good grades.
He was the kind of guy who never helped anyone at the exams.
That's why 10 years ago I took him to see one of the first Green Day's concert (back then they were the new punk something teen group band) so I could punch him pretending to pogo dance around him. The trip was long, the performance was awfully short, we missed the train and we slept in the station, in a cold winter night. Our differences were gone and we were in the nice limbo above "I vaguely know who you are" and just below "let's cut our hands join our palms mix the blood and be friend forever". Pretty much like everyone else in this world.Sideways

It was 10 years ago anyway. We were young, and back then I didn't even like Greenday, especially for less than an hour format they were known to perform every night. No interaction with the crowd, no empathy and just a lot of noise for fun (Basket Case was my only big hit on that tour).
But the tickets were the cheapest you could get back then, and if you were living with your family, didn't have a job, didn't have a rich girlfriend and you weren't involved in the local weed traffic at school, this was one of the few concert you could afford.

The good thing about Giamba is that while I completely forgot about going to a Greenday concert, he became one of the biggest fans of them in all these years, supporting them on each tour in every possible location in Europe. Some years ago he moved to US to meet another Greenday fan, and I think that, at 28, he's probably one of the oldest.Tequila night

BenjaminWith only two days to try to find the lost connection, I decided to take him on a Saturday tour of London.
London offers many museums, many interesting places, many attractions, but, really, who gives a fuck? Just get a book or look over an internet website before bothering me with silly questions.
Every time I take people around, I create glorious stories mixing dates and names from different centuries or updating my knowledge of the essential London Life that all these guys/girls want to know: the celebrities' lifestyle. So here we go. On my tour, you'll see the place when that TV presenter gave a BJ to some random punter in a drunken night (read on News of the World), and if you look at that bookshop, well, once Julia Roberts walked in. And by the way at your right you can see the Big Ben. Please take quickly your pictures with your digital cameras and let's move on to see the pub where Liam Gallagher used to get drunk, and let's drink some cocktails just to check it out.

Smelly FeetWith girls is very difficult to sustain a certain level of interests. They always want to get in some market. It must be a magic word for them. "Market. Let's got to the market. Take me to the market." Portobello, Carnaby, Camden, and so on. If I take them to the Putney market, they complain. So they have to go Portobello Road, or Camden Town, just to buy some second hand stuff probably wore before by a drunken crack addicted junkie face at silly prices.

With men, is all about alcohol, and women. If you don't have women, there is always alcohol to find some comfort. If you have a girl, well, alcohol is the only way to keep you interested when she's talking. And they talk a lot. And you drink even more. Simple as that. (Obviously this doesn't apply on me - I'm a gentleman). We need girls. Or alcohol. And some sport, just to redeem ourselves.

Tequila masterWe spent the whole Saturday eating, drinking, walking to digest, then eating and drinking again, walking and crawling and drinking and drinking. No shopping at all. As I told you before, Giamba is a short man, who firmly believes he can drink. He can't. He found himself lost in his train of thoughts 7 hours later. He even admitted he really likes A.C. Milan and not Inter. That's how drunk he was. I took him home to drink some home brewed stuff. He woke up the next morning.Guinness time

How many different alcoholic cultures can someone challenge in one single hot summer day? We explored the Japanese way, in a nice sushi bar, to move on the Irish way (Guinness, best beer in the world), mixing it with the English alcopops style (Bacardi breezer) and a classic British drink like Pimm's. We shall not forget the Long Islands. And the Tequilas. And the Jack Daniels. And the Limoncello. And Death. And Rebirth. All the good things that is worth fighting for. All the good things that is worth dying for. If I was a smoker, I would love to die smoking myself to death. I'm not. I will probably on the football pitch. I'm the Mick Foley of this sport. If alcohol doesn't kill me before. Or if some girl doesn't break my heart stabbing it with a 20 inches knife.

It's life, you know? Life. No, you don't.

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