On Saturday night the ND celebrated Gayle's birthday. In York. As with all ND nights out, it was eventful. Becky, Corinne and I all arrived in York Station and in a start as you mean to go on moment ended up in the pub before catching a cab to Val's. Then we lounged about at Val's before eventually deciding we should really get ready, whilst blasting McFly out of the stereo. One cab arrived and then five minutes later when the other one arrived, me and Val had a phone call to say could we bring Gayle's thing with numbers on. We don't actually know what it's called, we just have an international signal for it, but then I'm guessing you can't put that into Google.
When we got to The Slug and Lettuce, we had to improvise since Val and I had not gone back for Gayle's number thingy.


After a stroke of genius from Becky and Gayle, the number thingy was labelled up with songs and when you picked the number you had to sing the song. This kept us entertained for a while, until we ran out of songs. Well, it kept us entertained for longer than the amusement that there was a cocktail called rocktail.


Next stop - the Evil Eye. We sent Corinne up for a reccy whilst we all ordered drinks and got told by Val's barman friend that he thought she'd hang around with classier people. It took us all of ten minutes to get a bed in the Evil Eye, as if we doubted our abilities, and then to ward off anyone who doubted our staying power, we sang McFly's Stargirl at regular intervals.


We made friends with a different barman and ended up drinking cocktails and shots* until they kicked us out at closing but not before we'd also made friends with a bloke who bought Gayle a drink [which we then all had to down whilst they tried to kick us out] and his mate who knew the lyrics to Busted and McFly and had a girlfriend but we were convinced was gay. We then wandered off in search of a establishment still serving alcohol, whilst continuing our singing at regular intervals. I think there may have been sparklers at this point. Well there were definitely sparklers at some point, it's just none of us can remember where exactly.


I remember everything we did, it's just the order is a bit hazy...unlike Gayle the next morning, "When were we outside Betty's?" We were indeed outside Betty's, we were also outside various drinking establishments that appeared shut. Oh and Corinne went over on her ankle prompting us to tell her she had a broken foot, which soon changed to a broken metatarsal. Becky carried Corinne's shoes and I helped Corinne limp down the street. I'm nice like that.


And then we came upon the fountain. Our fountain. The one that Val had told us we couldn't play in because there was a Christmas tree there. I thought she meant beside it, turns out she really did mean there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the the ND fountain. Obviously our notification of this disaster must have got lost in the post. Becky decided to climb the barrier anyway, half mounted the platform, then came back. Then she wanted something to go with her, I volunteered and was half straddling the barrier when Becky muttered 'police' and walked away. It always amused me that we've been playing in that fountain for three years now and we've only got caught by the police twice. This being the second time, and it wasn't even for playing in the fountain, it was for climbing the barriers. We decided not to bother trying our luck and instead wandered off to the kebab van despite our bitterness at the fact that they had apparently forgotten the camera. It amuses me, as well, how many random people we managed to meet in York on our nights out. There was the blokes in the Evil Eye, the random bloke on a bike who told us to climb back over the railings anyway, the bloke at the kebab van, the random weird bloke who implied that we weren't ok and we were forced to tell him that we were all university graduates and could indeed look after ourselves and the bloke in the taxi queue who was very concerned about Corinne's 'broken metatarsal' and told us we should take her to A&E. We informed him that if it was still bad in the morning, we'd go and probably get a group discount.




The next morning, we woke up with hangovers, various injuries and the discovery that Val had a basilisk in her pipes. That or Darth Vader.


*It had Butterscotch schnapps in it but unlike the Boro Jumping Jacks incident, it was not skanky. Plus it was called Shooting Star. That makes it cool.

Labels: birthday, cocktails, evil eye, mcfly, northern division, york