:: Funny old night in "London's Fashionable Shoreditch" ::

Met up with Tigger as planned, but instead of going straight to Bent (see yesterday's post for description of said utterly non-gay event), went to someone's flat. Lovely open-plan loftness, but a bit of a trial to get in. At a party last week, someone stole the handle from the main door to the building. Entry could only be gained by a series of precise intercom countdown manoeuvres - more difficult than getting into 333 on a Saturday night.
Despite our best efforts, the occupants were up for none of this going out and drinking malarkey, so Tigger and I returned to the Bent-o-Drome, only to be told that it was guest list only, but we could probably get in if we turned up in half an hour.
So off to a local pub - strange mixture of old school London boozer and Shoreditch chic: London Pride on tap, numerous obscure Czech bottled beers and a DJ playing some very creditable tunes. I particularly enjoyed the remixes of Tosca's Chocolate Elvis. Returning to 332 Old St, we blagged our way in saying that we'd been already and come back. The same dozy girl in regulation Shoreditch Twat/Hoxton Wanka fluffy boots was on the door, but she didn't seem to care. Efforts to ape the hospital/clinic theme were excellently and gruesomely realised, with signs pointing to the ward for the Terminally Sane etc. NHS information leaflets spilled out of wall-mounted racks and anatomy charts explained what Bent's music would do to you.
The big flaw in the blagging plan was that the free drinks should have been exchanged for tokens which we "would have been given at the door", so Tigger and I opted for the performance art in the operating theatre downstairs. Warning bells should have sounded as we passed a bin overflowing with bloddy swabs, but we still followed the legions of identikit people who turned out to be queuing for the loo rather than appreciating the art. The theatre was strewn with saws, clamps, stage blood and what looked like my Auntie's pruning shears. Next to an operating table stood a bank of 60s medical electronica and a defibrillator. Two manic doctors performed an "examination" on a patient whose senses were dulled by the Bent sounds coming from a pair of fat headphones. It was not clear what the patient suffered from. An attempt at proctology was not well received and attempts at defibrillation resulted in a miraculous self healing and rapid exit from the theatre. Giggling, we remembered a night at bAsTaRd when the performance artists, Barbra Rei, had handed out surgical masks and gloves: two of the masks artfully tied together had made an over-t-shirt bikini/bra. At this point of blissful reminiscence, one of the gurning medicos approached proposing radical surgery. With a quick flash of Tigger's war wounds, we fled to the safety of Old Street and a bus ride home.