Up all night

My head aches. My eyes are puffy and red. My hair is matted and my skin is greasy and stinks. I'm sleep deprived. I'm hungry, but my stomach doesn't want to consume anything. It's dark outside - it was light when I went to sleep. My mind is still trying to comprehend the night I have just had.

It's not drink. Sure, I had a few whiskeys, and the beers were flowing around the Irish house party in South Kitsilano. Merry is the word. I love the Irish. With all my penny pinching, itineraries and travel plans, I think a good ol' knees up was exactly what I needed.

I had been planning to go to Whistler this weekend, but there had been a landslide that devoured the highway between there and Vancouver. The clear-up is still ongoing, so I have had to reschedule for a fortnight from now.

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. My new pals from Computershare have reminded me that it doesn't have to all be about museums, sightseeing and effort. Sometimes just enjoying yourself, with a bunch of other people enjoying themselves, is just a fruitful.

I'm not too bothered that it wasn't Canadians that I was mixing with, either. With 90% of the party being Irish, I was launched into another culture that I am really quite clueless about. At times I struggled to understand a word of what was being said, and at others, people gave each other jibes about places I had never heard of. But it was fun!

I didn't go to sleep until 7am, and even then, I was on an unfamiliar sofa. That was after the music, the attempts at French as I tried to translate the slurred Irish babblings for a Quebecois man, and the brilliants singalong we had when one man broke out his acoustic guitar. I'll be honest, for a lot of the tunes I was murmuring half-words as I hadn't the faintest idea what they were.

The bloke on the guitar was fantastic. He even sang a song that he had wrote, about his time on Bondai Beach. I don't think I could imagine this happening with a group of English people. In a way it was disappointing, and at times I felt like us English are missing a trick when it comes to having fun. Live and learn, I suppose.