Night Hike

It seems my brush with dangerous home-journeying following excesses of partying and partaking has taught me nothing. At the end of spring, a college friend was throwing a belated flat-warming at the pad he shared just over in Archway. I took the bus there with some friends from West Hampstead and we even helped out some lost-looking New Zealanders, pointing them in the direction of the house party they were trying to find and agreeing that if either party, theirs or ours, proved boring, we would swap over.

The college contingency was thankfully small and we were able to stretch ourselves a little, getting to know ex-girlfriends of work-colleagues of flatmates of friends. We chuckled at the American frat-party style white-rimmed red cups on offer, until someone mentioned the unutterable words: beer pong. Far be it from this blog to turn into some binge-drinker’s guide to banality, I will go so far as to say that a combination of my poor throwing skills and our opponents’ accurate arm saw me swigging back large servings of beers and ciders. For those with class, beer pong involves lining up two sets of cups like bowling pins at either end of a table, with teams taking turns to throw a ping pong ball into the opponents’ cups and thereby forcing them to drink the contents. Hardly relative to London or exemplary of my time here in itself, but what happened next smacks of my ridiculous lifestyle.

Towards midnight I was verging on worse for wear and thought it best to make an exit for the sake of all involved, more as a precaution than anything else. The girls were being slow to galvanise and I soon caught wind that maybe they had not finished conversing with some of the chaps there. I was too late for buses and assured the host that I was happy to walk home.

Archway to Belsize Park should not take long – maybe half an hour.

I don’t think I got home till half past three, which means I spent hours wandering in some sort of twilight abyss. The bus route I planned to follow eluded me and I kept just taking right and left turns at random, at one point reaching Kentish Town and realising I’d gone too far south by a long way indeed. I may have staggered through estates and trespassed through gardens, tripped over kerbstones and bumped into lampposts. My feet were sore and I was very tired the next day; my attempt to get to bed sooner had failed entirely, with my friends possibly speeding past in a taxi while I hiked on. “Yeah you seemed oddly determined,” the host had said later, “but I thought I’d better just let you get on with it.”