Ha-ha, fooled you!

Yesterday Soph and I drove in to London, parked the car at Queensway and caught the tube to Mile End where we met Ash for lunch.

Ash is a unique guy. Genuinely talented and blessed with an abundance of creativity, Ash chooses to spend most of his time working in the public sector; providing valuable services to some of our fellow humans most in need of assistance.

With his free time, Ash indulges his creative talents as a composer/musician of serious worth – we have shared just a fraction of his musical talent with our podcast listeners, under the names of artists ‘Warning! Heat Ray!’ and ‘Unsound’.

And he writes; as a music analyst/reviewer, Ash is one of the few muso-writers whose opinions – and writing – I hold in genuinely high regard.

Lunch, with Ash, was brilliant; that’s a measure of what a genuinely nice guy he is.

Later in the afternoon we went back to the West End, had a meal in an Italian restaurant in Berner Street, then walked to the place where we were to meet up with author Alex Marsh and renowned blogger Jonny B.

Alex Marsh and Jonny B are the same person, obv.

The occasion was an informal launch of Alex’s new book ‘Sex and Bowls and Rock & Roll’, or as Alex put it ‘Not a book launch, just a drink in a pub with a few friends’.

Sitting next to Alex was the deliciously gorgeous Catherine Sanderson (aka internationally renowned author and erstwhile blogger, Petite Anglaise).

So that wasn’t very intimidating at all, was it? Jonny B and Petite Anglaise sitting next to me.

Erm, yes. I may have slipped in to idiot mode.

More people arrived.

Mike Atkinson (aka influential blogger/journalist Troubled Diva) was followed by a pair of very high-profile internet characters: bloggers, writers and podcasters, Cliff Jones and Mr Angry.

Then the gorgeous Girl With A One-Track Mind rocked up.

The very lovely (he once did me a favour by personalising a copy of his book for Soph) Andrew Viner followed on behind.

And there were others!

People whose names I can’t remember; intelligent, articulate people who said bright, witty (if not outrageously funny) things.

It was a fun, funny evening.

We bailed out, leaving the survivors to carry on, around 8pm.

By the time we got home, watched Big Brother drank tea and fell in to bed it was midnight.

This morning Soph and I are teetering around the house like a pair of newly-dead zombies.

Why teetering around the house? Because we are not the grown-up people we pretended to be on two occasions, in front of all those folk, yesterday.

We are a pair of kids  who went out and successfully hoodwinked them all into believing that we were grown-up.

Ha-ha, fooled you!

But not only was it really nice to meet everyone – from lunch with Ash to to the afternoon/evening’s meeting with Jonny B and all of his friends – it was very pleasant to meet such a thoroughly nice group of people.