Joel's Birthday

After spending the day recovering from the previous night's adventures, it was time to go out for my friend Joel's birthday. Joel is a dear friend of mine from my old college at Cambridge, Magdalene. Always one of the wittiest, funniest guys I know, about the only guy who can make me laugh nearly as much as my brother. He always calls me out of the blue, randomly, just to check in on me, and it's always a delight. So when he called a few weeks ago to ask me to come to his birthday party, I was only too happy to come.

I arrived at the Citte of York near Chancery Lane, to discover the most charming pub I'd never been to. With high ceilings, old fire warmers, and lots of little cozy booths, I can't believe I've never been to this place, and I shall definitely need to come back in the future.

I was greeted by a number of people I remembered from Magdalene, including Henry, this nice-yet-tiresome chap I know. Henry is I think the most classic member of the British aristocracy I've ever met. Educated at Eton, he was your classic wealthy safari boy in Kenya, before somehow ending up at Cambridge, where he mostly seemed to run around in black-tie, drink too much port, and fall asleep in big leather chairs in the middle of parties. Decades of aristocratic inbreeding had made him rather dull and thick, yet for some reason everybody liked him, sort of like some court jester we all hung around with.

Apparently after he left Cambridge, he got involved with Mark Thatcher's attempted coup in Equitorial Guinea, apparently due to his African connections. Luckily for him, he was too clueless to really understand what was going on, and the British government allowed his father to drag him back to England and keep the whole thing very hush hush.

When we were at Cambridge together, Henry always seemed like this lonely guy who was always inappropriately letching on women...although in such a pathetic (not scary) way that you always just felt bad for him. Amazingly then, at the end of the year, he actually met a lovely girl at our college and they are now married. So they were both there at the drinks, and I got to see them both.

Of course what kind of annoyed me though, was that I'd gotten a very funny card for Joel, but because Henry is so socially clueless, he kept trying to talk to me and made me miss Joel's reaction to my card. It kind of amazes me really that this man is married and I seem to have trouble getting dates. Seriously?

It was a good reunion of Magdalene people however, as of the 20-30 people there, absolutely every last one of them was from Magdalene. We had a good time teasing Joel about how he didn't seem to be good at expanding his circle of friends, but it was a good reunion of people I hadn't seen in years. There was the chap who had always been a clean-cut type, now growing his hair long and loose after time spent on archeological digs, the guy who was now in school to be a minister, and Archie, a big loveable rugby-type who insisted on apologizing to me for accidentally knocking me off my chair two years ago. Seriously? I hadn't even remembered the incident! (Although with a bit of prompting, Archie did manage to get me to recall the crazy drunken night in question).

Also interestingly, last spring I went out to a friend's farm in Wales, and there were a few other Magdalene people there. Yet, as I hadn't realised they knew the birthday boy, I was surprised to run into them at this party. Although given how the entire party was just Magdalene people, perhaps I shouldn't have been! It was turning out to be quite a Magdalene-centric weekend! And forgive me for getting slightly emotional, but it really brought back all of those wonderful warm fuzzy feelings about what a great college it was, and how much I had loved it.

Finally we reached the end of the evening, the pub people were kicking us out, and in my exhaustion I was glad to reach an acceptable point at which to go home. And yet at the exit, Joel wrapped me up in a big giant bear-hug, whispering in my ear in probably the equally emotional state that I was experiencing about how wonderful it had been that I had come, and how glad he was that we were still friends after all these years. Then lots of kisses, a few more lingering hand-holds, and finally we parted ways. It's funny how attached you can be to some people, what an important part of your life they are.