London, SW4

Once again the bank holiday weekend has chewed me up and spat me into an oblivion of regret. Landing back in London on the Friday, already carrying a hangover like a soldier carrying the bloody corpse of a best friend, I was immediately sucked into a lifestyle that whilst I miss with every fibre of my being, would have left me either dead or a pair of sunken eyeballs sitting defeatedly in amongst a vaguely human shaped mess of rotting, yellowing flesh years ago.

Comparing the drinking cultures of Londoners and the Swiss is like comparing a tennis shoe to an exclamation mark. If you put the two next to each other it wouldn’t be so much a case of unrecognition as it would be an inability to register each other, like alien worlds that develop a certain form of perception, they just wouldn’t even know the other was even there.

Working in London city, alcohol is treated with roughly the same importance as oxygen. There was a bar in the office and the beer was free. Thursdays are the office drinking days, regardless of family and other such irrelevances. On my first day in the office in Switzerland, in a local restaurant, I asked for a small glass of wine at my welcome lunch. I may as well have grabbed the waitress and raped her on the table, slapping her arse whilst screaming the national anthem for the reaction the request got.

South West Four festival was on Clapham Common over the weekend, and it reveals the drug culture of the place like a flare gun in a bat cave. Clapham is basically a place where university students go to die in their current form and grow up into the surface level, tenuously respectable grown ups we all fear we’ll become when in our teens. Suddenly though, at this time of the year, at around 11am every single late twenty something stumbles into local bars and inhales cocaine, booze and ecstasy with a ferocious enthusiasm. Every trip to the bar for another round of drinks means another two or three best friends, as people turn and ask if you are off to the festival, which your planet sized pupils and twitching, eager smile would have already revealed to every sober person on the planet. And then you fall into a conversation which concurrently covers both your upbringings and the last 5 years of life, before, a minute and a half later, the drinks arrive and you leave your new soul mate to return to the group, who will now be in a conversation a world away from the one that was being shoveled out when you volunteered the round.

The festival itself is an awesomely confusing mess of mud, filthy techno, fairground rides and non sensical chat. The hours go by as seconds, and before you know it it’s all over; and you are sitting in a near by pub talking with passion about the importance of chair legs.