In which a Good Time is had by All

I went out last night, to an acoustic gig in a bar in the perversely spelt town of Lyttelton. Here are some randomly collected bits of the evening.

I kick-started the night by deciding to have a little glass of wine while I was getting ready to go out (getting ready is dull and takes YEARS because sometimes I look like a hobbit) and then all of a sudden the whole bottle was gone! Whoops. So a good night was more or less guaranteed from there.

Arrived at the venue after a car trip in which I spoke at length on many uninteresting subjects.

The first thing I did, after some meeting-people bollocks (it was not really bollocks, they were nice people), was to trot onto the deck with beer in one hand and fag in the other, and launch headfirst into an existing conversation. (I have absolutely no qualms about doing this. It is the best way to meet interesting people, and if it turns out that they're not interesting after all, well, you can just wander off again.) So I got talking to this bunch of total strangers - who were nice if a little too hipster-trendy for my liking - and something got me onto how I wasn't expecting the gig to be much good because my personal opinion, which one day I will learn to keep to myself, of acoustic alt-rock-pop-folk guitar-and-male-singer music is not overly high. I believe, in fact, that the word 'wankfest' may have been used. A couple of times. So it turned out that two of the people I was talking to were acoustic guitar alt-pop-rock-folk-wank artists who were playing that evening. Nice.

I retreated from that and listened to the friend I'd gone to see play play - which was good - and then after he finished went to get another drink because my attention span for sitting and listening to music is not high.

I was standing at the bar when a dishevelled old man wandered up to me (it was that sort of bar, trendy kids mixed in with locals). He looked like a 60-year-old goldminer - little shorts, chicken legs with knobbly knees, half his teeth and one of those face-covering beards that somehow points straight ahead. He was also exceptionally drunk and wanted to know if I'd be his doubles partner for a pool game that was about to start. So I spent the next hour or so playing pool with him and a bald chap about the same age called Bruce. Bruce's main feature, apart from not having any hair, was that his face was really seamy. As in lined with wrinkles. Seamy wrinkles. There was also a guy who was maybe a little older than me and looked strikingly like Clive Owen. He was not overly intelligent or particularly good at pool but was nice to look at. Me and Old Goldminer Dude, whose name escapes me, won a lot. Then we went outside and were joined by a blond hipster with really bright red lips, like he'd been sucking on a Traffic Light popsicle, and shiny shiny hair. He looked faintly cherubic but was actually quite rude. There was also a chap with a Hulk Hogan-esque mustache. I am good at making friends!

Anyway, eventually the bands finished and the people I was meant to be hanging out with instead of random locals swept me up on their way out the door. I was well behaved throughout, if you ignore the constant stream of horseshit I was talking, which everyone acclimatised to within about 15 minutes anyway. I hope. It was a nice evening! Much more fun than I thought it would be.

And then there was a Romantic Encounter but he reads this blog and I'm totally not allowed to talk about it.


***


Whatever, Trevor. (Sorry, Romantic Encounteree Whose Name Is Not Actually Trevor, but if you were expecting total discretion you may wish to rethink your choice of ladyfriend.) I wasn't expecting there to be a romantic encounter (although I guess you can't really launch yourself at someone's face (which is what I did) and then play the 'surprise' card) but I think it was a good call. No haiku required, because I don't do that sort of thing on a first date. (Stop laughing.) I would tell more details, mainly because I have a couple of really good puns I could slip in (tee hee, sl- no) but that would be a little unfair on Not Really Trevor. Which is how I will refer to him from now on. I shall just say that, in keeping with the rest of the evening, I had an unexpectedly nice time. (That sounds like kind of a lukewarm compliment, but if I was being honest I'd make NRTrevor blush, and scandalise my dear readers, and that I could never do.)