Cliffey's Birthday is the Best! Boomting!

We celebrated Cliffey's 20th birthday last night. It's not until tomorrow, but we celebrated it last night.

It was a strange assortment of characters who gathered at the house beforehand. I was Jesus; Sarah was The Devil. Soph was Christmas. JR was Chuck Norris. There was a CIA agent and a Colossus of Rhodes. Gaz claimed to be dressed as Cliffey, presumably from his best-forgotten Mariachi period. Cliffey himself was Top Cat. Hell, we had to leave behind a Chilean miner and a Dalek because otherwise our bunch of misfits would have been just too ragtag (also the Dalek had flu and her boyfriend, the miner, stayed behind to look after her).

We went to Lloyd's for some free entry pre-fun, and we were apparently prepared to pay a pound for it. There we rendez-vous'd with Mr. T, John Darling from Peter Pan, and...Tom in a Wales shirt.

Which presented a problem. Clubs weren't admitting people in football shirts, lest they provide the arena for some pissed-off Wales fans to have a scrap. So he rang his ever-faithful chauffeur Cihan, who took him home to get changed.

Meanwhile, the rest of joined the queue for the Welsh club. It was long, and this fact was only rubbed in my face by my chance meeting with Luke from uni, who had a queue-jump thingummy and could thus go straight in. Eventually we gave up and decamped to the Gatekeeper to rethink our strategy.

It should have been simple enough - just pick a different, less rammed club and take the party there. The problem was that several members of the party - most of them female, from Penarth, and dressed as Jammie Dodgers - were already in Clwb, and it proved difficult to coax them out.

So we went to Metro's, where the ceiling was dripping and Tarantino films were playing on silent TV screens, and hoped that Penarth folks would arrive sooner or later.

One of them did. Amy Harrison, the lone blue-haired police officer who had come all the way from Bath to wish Cliffey well, managed to conquer the Metro's door staff and join the fray; the rest did not.

Eventually Tom came back, too. He was now wearing a navy blue Hollister t-shirt and received a hero's welcome. Just as he arrived, a man in a Wales football shirt walked past.

Typical.

Joel.