In this modern urban city life, people have many more friends than they used to. Partly due to the modern culture of larger workplaces, more sexual partners, and the ease and therefore frequency of moving house. Combine this with technology like mobile telecommunications, the internet, and answer machines, along with age old British sensibilities, and you end up with more friends than you can make a ten year epic TV series, basically about nothing, out of.

With so many friends (I count roughly 100 of mine according to Facebook), it means one has a birthday on average, every 3.65 days. 14% of previous LMU events are born out of someone’s birthday after all. Today (Sunday) is Anna’s birthday, and not surprisingly, she has 3 friends with similar celebrations around the same time. A big-ass joint event was in order they thought. Trouble with large groups of girls is, (in an ‘I’m not sexist but…’ kind of way) they couldn’t organise an orgy in Oceana. Individually sure, girls out-perform guys in every single way, apart from the penis contest. And even that sometimes goes to the underdog. But collectively - like the drunk girl at a party, large groups of girls seem to turn into wild, screaming messes with no self-awareness of any kind. This joint 4-way birthday was planned for last weekend, 3 months ago. With no location, time, or even a definitive date until a couple of days before, Akin and I stayed on the fence until the wind of decision forced us down.

Luckily (yet sadly unsurprisingly), 2 days before Saturday night, neither of us had any other plans, and so sheened down. Ramone was also there, but he’s cool so I don’t know what his excuse was.

The girls had planned to start off at Be@One bar on Great Windmill St at 8pm, until later when they’d move to Madame JoJo’s just up the road. Seeing as it was (originally) just Akin and I (and probably would be until the girls turned up after doing their hair until half ten), we arranged to meet a tad earlier around 6.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but men like football. Every single man likes football. Even men who absolutely detest the game, to the point of complete denial that it’s even a game at all, will openly claim they love the ‘greens of Ipswich’ or the ‘mighty peacocks of Durham’. We all at least know enough to get through a 10 minute conversation with another man. Because when you’re a man, the only common ground you share with others is not enjoying football, but having the ability and willingness to pretend you do. So Akin and myself get in the pub to watch the victorious ravens of Arsenal defeat the losing losers of Fulham. And what a game it was too! Someone scored a goal at one point. I didn’t see it, but I’m told it was very good (by a man who was pretending he knew what he was talking about).

After ‘the match’ we spent a half hour or so discussing how much of a wanker the referee was, and such had filled our quota of football based male-bonding for the night. On to the second item of conversation men will talk about should they exhaust football as a medium – girls. In particular chat-up lines, for chatting up girls. After what amounts to £300 of therapy talking about the epic-fail of the other week, Akin teaches me some moves, and we finally leave the pub with Be@One in our sights. With my new arsenal of weaponry, how would I fare? Well let’s find out.

True to form, we arrive at the bar around 8.15, and are left waiting, staring at the lonely ‘Reserved for Anna 8:00pm’ sign like it was some sort of disabled car crash! No less than one hour later, some people turn up and sit down. None of them Anna. All of a sudden, Ramone pokes his sexy head round the door, and moments later he’s instantly ignored as the birthday girl arrives. Be@One is quite a nice bar. As I’ll probably write in an up-coming My 2 Pints when I haven’t been anywhere else in a while, there’s no cider, just Italian/Mexican bottled beers at £3.50 a piece. Music’s good, but far too loud. And there’s no dance floor to enjoy it. Besides this, I don’t think I’d want to dance in there anyway as it’s hotter than Lindsey Lohan’s lesbian sex video.

By the time we got out of the bar and onto the street, my shirt was clinging to my back like a fat girl holding a half finished bag of crisps. But the night was cool, and I was plenty drunk not to notice my own smell. On we walked to Madame JoJo’s discussing what the rest of the night would hold. Ramone was out, he made that perfectly clear from the start. Now Ramone’s the kind of guy who when he says something, that’s it, that’s what’s going to happen. You don’t even try and convince him otherwise. Akin was also out, something about having to get a night bus, then £12 taxi back to his house in Poland (practically). But with Akin, it’s always worth a shot, so we jumped into the queue.

Whilst there, this young (obviously about 16) Japanese kid turned to us, and he says (in a better English accent than mine).

“Do you need I.D. to get in this place?”

“I’d think so” I started. And was about to go on to advise him just not to mention it, when Ramone grabs the arm of a passing bouncer and shouts at the top of his voice: “This guy wants to know if you need I.D. to get in here.” Akin and my mouths, along with the kid’s jaw simultaneously drop. Seconds after getting into the club, Akin and I (I managed to persuade him to pay the £8 entry fee and stay for one drink at the last minute) saw the kid at the cloakroom. Putting a supportive arm around the guy, I shouted congratulations to him, along with apologies for my friend, but the dosy bastard had no idea who I was.

As I say, Akin, still aiming for an easy tube back through to East Prussia, got off moments after downing a red bull, leaving me alone with Anna + friends. Now, Anna’s the kind of girl who, instead of introducing her friends to each other, prefers to just ignore large groups of them for large sections of the night. It was obvious if my night were to continue, I’d have to do some investigative work myself. It turned out there were two groups, one her school friends, and the other her work friends (neither knew the others were even there).

After introducing myself to just about everyone in the club with the line “Hey, how’s it going, I’m James.” And more surprisingly actually continuing a conversation afterwards, I got talking to a guy from Barnsley, bonding over the fact that no one down here could understand a word either of us were saying. Then later on, I finally clasped eyes on the first sexy girl of the night. Not just making eyes, but eyebrows, eyelashes, eyeballs, and her iPod at me, I moved in with my illustrious line.

As for the rest? I’m not one to kiss and tell (I’m not even one to kiss, never mind getting to the telling stage).