GIRLS NIGHT

MEET THE FUTURE LEADER OF THE FREE-WORLD: teehee! This is taken from a photo essay of Obama's college years, here

So I'm finally getting my head around the inauguration and have a better sense of what is happening when and where, which is good, because it was fast becoming this big unwieldy nebulous thing, a bit like going into the middle of London on New Year's Eve (something I've never attempted. Because I'm not mental), and I was tempted to just watch from the flat.

I'm still not sure exactly what I'm going to do that day, but do know where I'll be watching the parade - our downstairs neighbour Dan has invited me to watch from his office overlooking Pennsylvania Ave!! They're having some kind of reception there and he remembered that Max and I had mentioned back in the summer that we'd like to take advantage of his excellent location, so invited me (Max is working)! I'd stopped getting my hopes up that this might come to fruition when someone told me that all offices overlooking the parade route will be evacuated and closed by the secret service on inauguration day, but it seems that as long as I provide some security info, I'm in like Flynn! Yippeeee! I've also found a full list of inaugural balls, but can't work out how to get tickets - whether it's just a case of paying a bajillion dollars, or whether you have to qualify in some way or be entered into a lottery, or whatever. Hmmm.

Determinedly keeping up my get-fit regime, I went to an excellent 'butts, guts and guns' class yesterday - I like that I'm in a routine of going to the gym regularly, because for ages my membership was basically just a charitable donation to the gym, as I never actually went there! And today, I did half an hour on the cross-trainer, which I used to think of as an instrument of torture, whenever I saw skinny girls determinedly stepping way, while pulling their arms back and forth. However, now I really like it and consider it my one-stop-shop for toning up and getting stronger. Carlos says I should be doing 4 hours of cardio a week, which means hitting the machine after my two yoga lessons, in addition to my butts, guts and guns and kickboxing classes. Phew!

I'm sorry to hear that everyone back home is sick, either with extremely persistent flu or the puking virus again. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before people returning to the BBC bureau from trips home bring that particular joy to DC. In the meantime, I hope everyone gets better.

Tonight there was a screening of 'Lost Sparrow' (the film made by Brewster's friend Chris about the terrible tragedies in his family of adopted Crow Indians) up at the Avalon cinema. Max didn't feel like sitting through the disturbing film again, but Anne was up for going, so we went up there together and it was nice to see her for the first time since she got back from her Christmas break (I got a sachet of nacho dip and a beaded cuff to thank me for my work on the photo album. Does it make me a terrible person to be slightly miffed? I suspect so. But really - 12.30am on Boxing Day, people!).

There was a great turnout at the screening and I saw Katie and Becky from Alison's church, which was nice to recognise people at something I went to independent of a big group of friends. I'd heard Chris changed the movie quite a bit in response to comments given to him by a producer friend of his, particularly the fact that that he was too removed from the whole story and we never got a sense of how he felt.

I don't think the changes helped the movie and felt it wasn't as good as when I first saw it, though much of that might have to do with no longer being susceptible to the shocking power of the unfolding narrative. There was a Q&A afterwards and then Anne and I bussed home and Anne confessed that she really didn't rate the film, saying it raised more questions than it answered.

Max and I are really enjoying 'How I Met Your Mother', which has to be one of the greatest TV shows ever made. It's about a group of friends who are all around 30 and living in New York. Marshall and Lily met in Freshers' Week at college and have been together ever since, they live with their best friend Ted, who's an architect and in love with a new friend they made called Robin and Barney is a random legend that they met in their local bar, where they spend all their time.

So far, so 'Friends', but it's the most consistently funny sitcom I've seen and everyone in it is absolutely brilliant, particularly Jason Segel as Marshall and the sublime Neil Patrick Harris as Barney. Barney's opening salvo as he walked into the apartment in one episode was simply, "and his hair was perfect"!! This was also awesome (the subtitles add a certain je ne sais quoi):

We can't get enough of it. I think it helps that we're now at exactly the same age as everyone in the show (we were a little young to really relate to 'Friends') and all the situations they find themselves in are familiar to us.

Alas, none is more familiar than comforting a friend who's been dumped and tonight I had to drop everything and rally round as Emily told me the sad news that Brewster split up with Alison.

Emily, Katie, Becky and I all went round to Alison's for the quintessential girls' night: I baked white chocolate and blueberry muffins (they were a bit gross), there was wine, we watched the 'Sex & The City' movie and talked about boys and boobs. I was really touched to be invited, though obviously sad for the occasion. Brewster dumped Alison from out of nowhere when he was over for dinner the other night and Alison's devastated, because she feels like she did all that she could to be the girlfriend he wanted her to be.

It's abundantly clear to me that she's better off without him and that he has far too many issues to be in a relationship. A lot of what Alison told me about his moodiness and jealousy and stuff reminded me of how I was with my first proper boyfriend and I realised that all of us have been through this already, but learned in our late teens/early 20s how to function in a relationship. Unfortunately for Brewster - and crucially Alison - he's just learning these things in his late 30s and is going to be hard-pressed to find someone happy to stick around while he figures these things out. In the meantime, we're all rallying round to cheer Alison up and make sure she knows she's not to blame.

LAND OF THE NOT-SO FREE

MOST EXCITING NEWS OF THE WEEK: Tom and Bambi have booked flights to come and visit us in March! Yeeeeayy! I can't wait.

I had no option but to venture back to the snooty bike shop to get my mysterious self-deflating tyre fixed this morning. My bike was met with the same disdain as ever, but at least it got fixed (the inner tube that was taken out of the flat tyre was so flat it looked a bit like a dried snake skin). I asked them to look into why the chain keeps falling off, but it'd cost $20 to fix and I don't have that kind of cash right now.

In fact, that's very much the dominant theme in our lives at the moment - saving money in order to adapt to the pitifully weak pound. When we first got here, the dollar was 1.98 to the pound, so everything was basically half price. It didn't hurt that I also had a whole month of wages from London to fire through, with which Mr Gap was kind enough to oblige.

However now, the dollar is floating around the 1.4 mark - going as low as 1.38 sometimes - so not only is everything more expensive now, but the £1000 of Max's salary that we get put into our american bank account every month has gone from being just under $2000 to $1500 or so, and we really didn't have a spare $500 kicking around each month before, so are finding things a little tough.

But when I say a little tough, what I mean is we can't eat out to the absurd degree that we so enjoyed when we first got here, we're no longer able to afford two trips to the cinema of a weekend and are having to turn down invitations, like going to see 'Gran Torino' with Joe and Molly - we're going to wait for it to come on NetFlix instead.

Unfortunately it also means that poor Cindy only got a birthday present worth $3, hurriedly picked up on the way to meet her for drinks in a bar tonight. It's very convenient that neither of us are drinking, because that'd be another strain on our wallets.

Cindy's birthday drinks were at the 18th St Lounge - that cool place we first ever went for drinks when we arrived in DC - and it was nice to see her and Jim. They're keen to meet up and 'do' the inauguration together, which is great news, because Max will be working and Mat and Jo, who were going to come down from New York and be my inauguration buddies, can no longer come, so it was looking like I'd have to brave the crowds alone. Also, Jim and Cindy invited us to their Superbowl party, which is excellent - another American experience to tick off the list!

PANDORA'S BOX

LATEST RANDOM ACT OF ANNOYANCE COMMITTED BY MY BIKE: Max and I heard a funny noise coming from the hall this evening and, on investigating, found that the front tyre of my bike had suddenly let itself down and was completely devoid of air. Great. My bike sucks!!

Yesterday was pretty crummy, not helped by my feeling rotten due to it being 'lady time'. Ugh.

As you know, I've been feeling homesick lately and really wanting to work, so was left feeling pretty down after talking to the exec I was working for before leaving Britain, who was telling me about the success of the programme I would've produced had we not left, which was a Blackadder documentary I subsequently watched on the mega iPlayer and was amazing and just the kind of TV I want to make. And now he's working on a similar one-off about Fawlty Towers and again, I'd love to make that. I'm aware that not many of these talking heads/archive docs are being made, as they're not very cost-effective, but they're exactly what I'd like to be doing and it's so frustrating that I know one of the few execs making them, but can be of no use to him!

Meanwhile, Maxy was working on this very excellent piece about what Obama's priorities will be when he gets into power (not long now - wooooo!).

But yesterday started to improve when I discovered Pandora, a website playing free internet radio that you tailor to your own taste! You create different radio stations, made up of bands that you like - so I've got one 'station' based on Regina Spektor, Josh Ritter, Hello Saferide, Belle & Sebastian, Ryan Adams, Carla Bruni, Aimee Mann and a couple of others - and that station will play songs by other artists which are musically similar. It's part of the Music Genome Project, which aims to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. It's awesome and I'm discovering lots of new bands and artists through it.

Last night Joe (of Molly and...) was having birthday drinks at Bourbon and I reeeeally didn't feel like schlepping up there because I was still feeling like poop, but we went and I'm really pleased we did, because we ended up having a great time. We got there just as lots of people were leaving, so got to hang out with Joe and Molly a lot and also saw Joanna again and met a couple called Robbie and Kelly who seem really cool. They're getting married later this year, after Robbie proposed at the ice rink in Central Park, which is pretty good skills.

After a gruelling workout with Carlos this morning, I had lunch with Alison, during which she confessed that she's really really unhappy and that her and Brewster are having problems, which is really sad. I really don't warm to Brewster any more - I think he's weird and controlling and have watched as Alison's personality has been really curbed by his disapproval and firm sense of how things should be. It sounds like they're having no fun at all and that things with Emily have been made difficult by Brewster's conviction that she doesn't like him, so refusal to go to their house, which removes Alison from her usual milieu and circle of friends. Alison's at her wit's end and doesn't know how to stop Brewster being controlling and jealous and argumentative.

I'm always aware that I'm a bit useless in these situations, telling friends what they want to hear and not saying what I mean and/or have been saying to Max about the situation. So this time, I tried very gently to suggest that perhaps Brewster wasn't in the best place to be having a relationship at the moment and that maybe Alison would be happier by herself. It seemed to help and was so sad to see Alison at such a loss, because she's doing everything right but the situation isn't getting any better. I think it's tough, because right from the get-go, they've been a very intense couple, talking about marriage and staying together forever from very early on, so the inclination now is to do everything they can to stay together, when really it might just be a case of - 6-7 months down the road realising that they're not right for each other.

Tonight we had to take our Christmas decorations down which, while not as upsetting as Alison's predicament, was very sad. Especially when we couldn't get the tree out of our flat without shedding a bajillion needles all over the communal hallway. Ugh, it was so annoying. And when I tried to hoover them up, our neighbour came out and shouted at us for making too much noise (our vacuum is totally bust and makes the most deafening grinding noise while leaving more on the floor than it picks up) while his baby was trying to sleep at 8pm. By now I was very grumpy indeed and in no mood to be on my hands and knees, picking up individual pine needles by hand. But that's what we had to do. Ugh.

Then we headed out into the dark, extremely rainy night to meet Oliver, Zoe and Zoe's friend Tom at Bedrock Billiards, up on Columbia Road. The torrential rain did nothing to help my grumpiness, so by the time we were turned away from Bedrock Billiards because they wouldn't accept Max's ID (you needed ID to get through the door, even though we weren't drinking, and Max doesn't have a driver's licence, so uses 'UK ID card' he had to get for Glastonbury once), I was ready to explode and suggested we just give up and go home.

But Max, Oliver and Zoe persuaded me to stick around, while Max nipped home for his passport and I'm really pleased I did, because - once Max returned - we had a fantastic night discovering the unbelievable awesomeness of shuffleboard!

Firstly, Bedrock Billiards rocks. I'd heard of it as being something of a DC institution and passed it often, as it's just up the way, but this was the first time we'd been there. It's a basement pool-hall, basically, with pool tables and shuffleboard and table football and loads of boardgames. It's really dark and has an AMAZING jukebox and I can imagine whiling away many hours there.

Secondly, shuffleboard is the game of kings! I'd only vaguely heard of it before, associating it with old people on cruises. But it turns out to be a cutthroat combination of curling and boules that's very easy to pick up and extremely fun.

The way we played it - and I don't know if we were adhering to Olympic standard rules - was two people go head to head, each with four puck-type things. They take it in turns to slide one puck down the table, which is covered with weird silicone balls that convey the puck down the table on its smooth metal undercarriage.

There are three scoring 'zones' on the board, demarcated by horizontal lines - the closest zone is one point, then two points, then there's a small sliver of a three point zone right at the end of the board, but aiming for that regularly leads to the puck whizzing off the end of the table and no points being scored.

Like in boules, part of the strategy is to protect your pucks and to whack your opponent's puck(s) off the board and out of the scoring zones. There's some complicated thing to do with only the player whose puck is the furthest down the board when all eight have been played gets to score, and then only those of their pucks which are further down the board than their opponents' are counted. So if I'm in the 3-point zone and my opponent only made it to the 1-point zone, I get to score, but say two of my pucks are in the 1-point zone and the other slid off the table, then I only get three points. Geddit?

We were all pretty rubbish at first, with pucks flying wildly off the end of the table on regular occasion, but then we all started getting quite good, Oliver being particularly brutal in his whacking of his opponent's puck off the table.

Oliver and Zoe had a fierce rivalry going on and it's soooooo obvious that they fancy each other - they were like a couple of teenagers (in an amusing way, rather than annoying), Oliver stopping just short of tugging Zoe's pigtails.

FILMS 2009

WORST CHRISTMAS PRESENT I GAVE MAX: the adorable eggcups I gave him. Turns out he doesn't like boiled eggs. But I do! And very much enjoyed my first egg from one of the new cups yesterday.

It's really nice, we feel like real DC locals and have totally settled in to our life here. Having said that, I'm starting to get quite homesick for Britain - silly things, like our lovely bed and driving my scooter down Marylebone Road, as well as of course seeing friends and family. And it'd be nice to have a job and stake my own place in the world, rather than being an appendage of Max and not really contribute anything.

Having said all that, we've had a lovely weekend. Yesterday, we walked to Georgetown in sunny sunshine to see The Wrestler. We stopped off at Baked & Wired en route to the cinema, because Molly - having done extensive research on the subject - said that they make the best cupcakes in DC. And sure enough, they do! Soooooo good.

The movie was sooo bleak and Evan Rachel Wood and Marisa Tomei drove me potty, but Mickey Rourke was every bit as transcendent as the reviews have been saying and the line between fact and fiction heavily blurred in his portrayal of a washed-up former celebrity unable to stop making the mistakes that got him to the sorry state he's in. I certainly don't need to see anymore steadycam shots following the back of Mickey Rourke's head, as there were more than enough in the movie and there's an extent to which I got all I needed from the excellent trailer, but I'm pleased we saw it and would be surprised if Mickey Rourke didn't win an Oscar.

When we got home, we watched Breach, a film based on the true story of a young FBI agent (Ryan Phillipe - boo) assigned to spy on an older agent (Chris Cooper - yeay!) suspected of passing information to the Russians. It was fun to recognise lots of DC locations and the film was better than I was expecting.

After the movie, we watched one of the DVD extras, which was a 20/20 documentary about the real-life case, which revealed facts that the movie used, like the signals - like putting an inconspicouos bit of tape on a lamppost - that the FBI agent would leave all over DC to indicate that a package was ready for collection. It's going to make me see DC in a totally different light, trying to spot things slightly out of place that might be spies communicating with each other! The real defector was arrested on my birthday 2001. It's funny to think that I was having cocktails in an East London bar to celebrate my 23rd, while a crooked spy was getting arrested for treason.

This morning after church - where it is still very much Christmas, which I found funny - we had a webchat with Max's friends Greg and Jane and their rapidly growing baby Isaac, who's SO sweet. Then we experimented with a login to a souped-up version of the BBC iPlayer that Max has. It's awesome.

Computers outside the UK can't access the iPlayer, which has been a source of great frustration to me, until Max came home with access to a mega-iPlayer, which not only enables you to watch stuff on the BBC from the past 7 days, but from the past TWO YEARS!! And it includes all radio, movies and acquired shows!!

So we caught up on the sublime Gavin & Stacey, I watched a Culture Show special on Baz Luhrmann and Max enjoyed Charlie Brooker's outrage on Screen Wipe. Between On Demand and the mega iPlayer, I don't envisage us leaving the house ever again.

To complete our weekend of visual entertainment, we continued working our way through Tom and Bambi's list of movies with It Happened One Night, the first Clark Gable movie I've ever seen, I think (no, I haven't seen Gone With The Wind). It was absolutely fantastic - you must must see it. Claudette Colbert is wonderful and feisty and Clark Gable brilliantly rakish. I think we might go on a bit of a Frank Capra-fest now (he directed Mr Deeds and IHON, as well as Mr Smith Goes To Washington [starring Jean Arthur] and one of my all-time favourites - It's A Wonderful Life) and were interested to learn from one of the DVD extras that Claudette Colbert was a nightmare to work with and had to be coaxed from her trailer.

CHATTERBOX

GREATEST TRIUMPH OF 2009: I've fiiiiinally sent off the US election online strategy report - yipppeeeee!

The horrors of New Year's Eve and slight disappointment with our friends were totally made up for tonight by a really fun dinner party we went to at Joe and Molly's, just up the road.

It was great to get to know Joe and Molly more - they're so nice and laid back and fun - and the other guest was Molly's friend Joanna, who is a blast.

We all got on really really well and conversation flowed really free and easily, but it was one of those nights where I found myself talking all the time, becoming increasingly self-conscious about being boorish and hogging the conversation. So I made a conscious effort to step back and just listen and not jabber on, but then things just kept getting brought up that I had something to say about and simply couldn't keep quiet!

For example, Joanna is a physiotherapist and she mentioned that she quite fancies one of her patients, but that he's been in jail back in Texas. To stop us all picturing a big tattooed bruiser, she explained that he'd been arrested for selling encyclopedias door to door without a licence. My Dad spent a night in jail in Texas for the very same offense!! What was I going to do, sit on my hands and not mention this astonishing coincidence?!

Later on, we were talking about Bollywood and I kept quiet about how Kate had made for us a companion list to the one Tom and Bam had made for us of 50s films with feisty women in them. Kate's was the top ten best entry-level Bollywood movies, because she's really into Bollywood and it's something I'd like to investigate.

Anyways, later on we were talking about the movie Memento. Well it was all too much for me, because I spoke to Kate only a few hours earlier about the most recent Bollywood movie she'd seen, which was a musical rendering of Memento!

Fortunately no-one seemed too annoyed by my wittering and in fact we all became quite hysterical. I'd made a cheesecake for dessert, but had forgotten to put it in the fridge, so it was a bit gooey, but still lishy and Joe and Molly are very much looking forward to finishing it off over the week.

Before we left, we all went up onto the roof of Joe and Molly's building, from where there's an amazing view over Adams Morgan, including our building. There was a nice breeze up there and I'm thinking it might be awesome to sit up there in the summer, sunbathing but not getting as crazy hot as down near the pavement, so I'm pleased we made friends with Joe and Molly!

Of course, it's not just their roofdeck that makes me pleased - they and Joanna are just really fun, nice people and Max and I walked home really excited to've made new friends and really lucky to've found such fun people here in DC.

FRIENDSHIP LESSON #2

FUNNIEST US SITCOM ON TV RIGHT NOW: How I Met Your Mother. Fact.

Max had to work today and I could've embraced the new year, making footprints in its fresh (metaphorical) snow by branching out and doing something dynamic, but instead I spent all day on the sofa, watching a Bones marathon. I'd never seen it before, but really like David Boreanaz from my days as an avid Buffy fan and thought it looked funny from trailers, so gave it my first day of 2009. It's pretty good - sub CSI:NY, but better than CSI: Miami, I'd say.

Of course the first thing I did this morning was check out my new shoes, balk at the awful mess Emily's 'magic solution' had made of them and go straight to the Bandolino website to order some more while they're still on sale.

Max had gone to work, leaving me with instruction that I get Alison to pay for new shoes and I was all full of righteous anger and determination, until she called. She rang and immediately just poured profuse apologies down the phone, explaining that she can't remember anything that happened but that Emily had just told her (with no little glee, I would wager, as she was mightily miffed by Alison's absence from their party) and she's so mortified and embarrassed and got so drunk because the dinner with Brewster's friends was weird and saying that of course she'll buy me new shoes. To which I said...

"Don't worry about it! These things happen at New Year's Eve"

Noooooooooooooo!! What's wrong with me?! I'd just paid for a new pair of shoes myself, it would've been very easy to take Alison up on her entirely unprompted offer and tell her exactly how much I needed (which also really wasn't that much, thanks to the Bandolino sale). But no, I couldn't bring myself to insist. My righteous indignation had deserted me.

So if Friendship Lesson #1 is 'ask a friend any favour because they won't be able to say no', Friendship Lesson #2 must be 'even if you do something terrible to a friend, everything will be ok as long as you pre-empt any anger with profuse apologies'.

What an instructive festive season this has been!

HAPPY NOO YEAR!

MOST EXCELLENT MUSICAL DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: 'I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You' by Black Kids, produced by Bernard Butler. Hate the name of the band, LOVE the song! It sounds like Robert Smith doing disco! I defy you not to dance like a loon when listening to it, as I have many times in the past couple of days.

Maxy reluctantly went back to work on Tuesday, but excitingly has decided to stop shaving every day, so I have my husband back! Yeay!

Tuesday was also exciting because I found the Flight of the Conchords season 2 premiere online and it looks great - I'm so sad we don't have HBO, so have to wait until it's out on DVD to see it.

I'm also sad our New Year's Eve sucked so very hard.

I'm not a big fan of New Year's Eve at the best of times, because it rarely lives up to the great expectations heaped upon it and I always suffer a feeling of dread at the thought of an entirely fresh year stretching out ahead of me, full of potential just ripe for not being fulfilled. I know this year; I'm comfortable with this year; this year has gone well - next year scares me.

Anyways, this NYE was worse than ever before, and that's without any of the existential dread. Yesterday day was pretty cool - it snowed intensely, but weirdly not at the BBC. And I was also happy to get our mortgage all sorted out, cunningly switching to a tracker to make the most of the pitiful interest rates at the moment, so we're saving about £150 a month on what we're paying at the moment, and will jump ship to a fixed rate mortgage as soon as the interest rates seem to be as low as they're going to get. Gordon Gecko, eat your heart out! And while you're at it, give me a more up-to-date reference from the financial world!

In the spirit of tying up loose ends that are just so 2008, I tried to post the fabulous report I did about the online strategies during the election yesterday and, on my way to the post office, asked someone the time because our local post office was shut, so I was running to another one nearby to see if that was open, and the person I asked the time of turned out to be Molly of Joe and Molly! It gave us both a really nice local feeling, to bump into someone we know on the street, but then it got a bit awkward because it turned out they weren't invited to Alison and Emily's party that night. And things got even more awkward when the second post office I went to had also randomly decided to close early with no warning, so I'm still stuck with this stinking report!

We had three 'parties' to go to last night, each looking like it'd be slightly better than the previous one. Jean and Joe were due to join us for at least some of the evening, but in the end cried off, so Maxy and I mounted the party merry-go-round alone. I wore my FABULOUS new green wedge shoes that I love with a passion, but cunningly carried with me my trainers, to put on for the long walk between venues...

Party 1: the Listers. Richard Lister and Philippa Thomas are married BBC correspondents and live in a lovely house in Georgetown, where we were invited for a drinks soiree. We ended up being the first to get there, to enable us to leave early for our next engagement, and had a very nice time eating canapes and chatting to Richard and Philippa, who are really nice, and some other BBC bods who turned up. Mum and Dad called at the perfect moment (midnight GMT), giving us a good excuse to leave and head off through the bitter, bitter wind and freezing cold to our next engagement...

Party 2: not really a party at all, just swinging by Oliver's flat to say hello to him and his friend Emma, who also works for the Guardian and was down from NY. Oliver has never let us visit his apartment, because he says it's so awful, but we couldn't really imagine how bad it could be, so were pleased to finally get an invite. Unfortunately for Oliver, it's every bit as bad as he warned us it was - it's a bit like an office with a bed in it, because the ceiling is made up of polystyrene squares, the lights are strip lights and the blinds are those broad vertical blinds you get in offices. It's all a bit sparse and depressing, made all the moreso by the fact that the 'windows' are sheets of perspex that let the cold in. So we stayed for one and then headed off to what we thought would be the crescendo to which the entire night was building...

Party 3: Alison & Emily's. Or should I say, Emily and Angela's? Alison, Emily and Emily's best friend from childhood, Angela, invited us to a big party at A&E's house and, because Alison's always one for punctuality, texting me on the dot of when we're due to meet to find out where I am, we made sure we left our other parties early to get to their betimes. However, when we arrived at 9.30pm, there were only five people there. And Alison wasn't one of them!!

Turns out, Brewster had taken Alison out for dinner with eight of his friends, so we got to the party to find a rather put-out Emily, along with four other Republicans. Two were weird dudes from Alaska and one was Angela, who was actually a blast, despite boasting that her job in congressional affairs at the Department of Defence involved 'blowing people up for a living'. She's a larger-than-life Italian-American ball-buster who makes wicked good stromboli and stands for no nonsense, but clearly knows how to have a good time and doesn't suffer fools (unfortunately in this case, Alison) gladly.

So Angela and Emily were fun to talk to, but all the lights were on, there was no music to speak of - it was basically the worst party ever.

People slowly started arriving in drips and drabs, and we met a fun couple called Jo and Matt who it'd be nice to see again, but it was basically a really lame party and I was really sober (haven't drunk since October!) and grumpy that Alison hadn't thought to mention when I'd spoken to her the day before that she wasn't going to be AT HER OWN PARTY.

She finally arrived at 11.30pm, very drunk and clearly in no mood to acknowledge that it's uncool to invite people to a party you're not going to be at. She skipped over to say hello to me and promptly spilled red wine all over my fabulous new green wedge shoes!! Oh, and Matt's white trousers. Whatever. By way of apology, we were offered, "oh these things happen at New Year's Eve" by Alison as she skipped off to talk to someone else.

It'll come as no surprise to hear that I was livid and spent the next 29 minutes in the kitchen, trying to salvage my beautiful shoes, with the over-exuberant help of Emily who liberally sprayed my shoes with some secret wine-getting-out-of-suede solution that she made herself and seemed to be doing more harm than good.

I popped out at midnight to watch the ball drop and kiss Maxy and by three minutes into the new year, we were out of there and heading for a bus that we found on the corner to take us all the way home - the only good thing that happened all night.

We had far more fun by ourselves on the bus than we'd had all night, making me realise that as long as I'm with Max, things are lovely. It reminded me of my friend Morag and her then boyfriend, who unwittingly spent midnight one NYE on the tube, trying to get to the South Bank - I think Max and I would've had far more fun being stuck on a bus or a metro than at the worst. party. ever. Here's hoping last night doesn't set the tone for the whole year...