CAN I HAVE THREE BEERS PLEASE
YES THAT WILL BE NINETEEN THOUSAND ENGLISH POUNDS

For three hours yesterday I sat within a five metre radius of Stephen Fry.

You may touch me.

So London was knackering, frankly. It's such a disgustingly big place. I'll start from the beginning but mostly I am really not dead.

7am

We're fairly early at the bus stop. I'd been up since 5.30 straightening my hair, but Chris doesn't know this and I lied about what time I'd got up so as to convince him that I'm not a complete ponce. But I am, and I'm sorry.

Anyway, strange things are afoot at this time. Despite the daylight there are peculiar happenings involving a large truck and a grid, and a great long tube that gets stuck down them by a man in high-vis overalls. He's sort of a spiritual relative of the Strimmer Men in my eyes, but that's for me to smile about and you to baffle yourself with.

7.40am

We're on the bus, which I suppose is alright. Firstly a brief note on Megabusses. Why they chose to use such a sinister fat yellow man as their logo will forever escape me. Look at him. He's horrible, and ubiquitous, staring down at drivers with his steely expression as if he's warning you that he'll definitely steal and eat your children if you have any, and should you crash into him he'll come alive and smash the world while humming ice-cream-van tunes and telling you about fuel consumption of Stagecoach's latest models. He's just so massively offensive; it very much hurts my eyes to behold him, let alone to then expect his drivers to arrive us anywhere safely. As Chris pointed out, he's like a nefarious version of the Fat Controller, and it's just struck me this instant to add that like Mario, every kindly character seems to have an awful doppelganger in a yellow costume.

'Come with Megabus or I'll rub my face on you'

Anyway, I eventually, having tried to allay our boredom by talking nonsense about things I can't even recall to write here, fall asleep and wake up an hour later in a blind panic because I'm dribbling and because my core body temperature has rocketed given my insistence on protecting my hair with a hat and my body with my exoskeletal coat. I take my coat off and sit back and slightly explode with rage at why my bottom must ache so.

10.45am

We get to London and all is southern and I'm quite excited by it in a secretive fashion and keep dancing embarrassingly about it and probably look precisely like I'm not meant to be there.

Unfortunately, by

11.30am

We are comprehensively lost, having mistaken various roads for other roads and having walked all the way out to 'Wapping' which constitutes an area of East London if you ask a local and constitutes a long way from where we're meant to be if you ask us. We saw some pirate ships though, and a bit of green water. At various stages we told London to shit off. At the very least this 'Wapping' we discovered ourselves in was pleasant enough to offer a few trees for our perusal.

Then a kindly post woman laughed at how far lost we actually were and pointed us towards a bus stop, which we ignored and got a tube instead of. Eventually we turned up at London Bridge and bemused at least three more people with our accents and/or requests for directions. Soon enough though, we got to the venue half an hour late.

12.45pm

On arrival and on being given name badges (ha), with our names on (ha) and having been politely shown a cloakroom (ha) and having had a wee-wee in a stupidly posh toilet (ha), it soon dawns on us that we're so hideously underdressed that we might as well have worn potato sacking and painted our faces with little childish willies.

We are given champagne (ha) and sort of lollop around a little, being stared upon by various journalists of varying integrities from the Times and the Guardian and so forth, all of whom are looking sharp and sharply bespectacled like real Londoners, unlike the pair of massive scruffs they seem to be raising eyebrows at. But, to quote Vonnegut, so it goes. I recall having a number of champagnes because my shaky hands are quite out of control and I'm really worried that I might start flicking people in their foreheads. We find some nice people with which to converse and then get ushered into the dining room, having tried our best to catch Stephen Fry's eye. Well I tried my best. I wanted him to kiss my face a little bit, in his wonderful purple suit.

We massively smash the world in the dining room by swapping our seat names so as to not split ourselves up. From our vantage point we can see the whole room and the whole plethora of famous people who are no doubt wondering who the buggery we are and why we're not remotely dressed in an attire suited to luncheon with Stephen Fry and other notable folk.

Soon we work out that there are at least four brilliant writers on our table too, and so we get hideously drunk on complimentary white wine and grin at each other like madmen.

It is barely 1pm.

The food is brill, the service equally. But being a quasi-socialist super-nob I feel horrendous about silver service and really wish they wouldn't call me 'sir' because I'm not a 'sir' in any sense, much less expecting them to organise my cutlery into a nice pile of politeness for me. It just makes me feel guilty and a bit sick, these poor people, I'd really like to save half of my pudding for them and tell them to eat it in the kitchen but you just can't, I suppose, not when Stephen Fry is sat five metres away.

I'm sorry, silver servicers. I hope you stick pins in the food of the people who are rude to you.

By this point I'm tremendously trolloped and find things funnier than they really are, and can't aptly explain to the BBC man what I do with my life, nor the Times lady, nor the Press Officer for the whole event. Mostly I just have a red seething face of acute embarrassment, and wipe my mouth every three seconds in case I've dribbled gourmet food all over my chin. I don't think anyone much noticed my plastic Casio watch or my unkempt chin though, possibly because Chris was sharing the scruffy burden and was anyway being congratulated on his nomination.

He didn't win, unfortunately, but such was not a shame as it transpired that Stephen Fry was as pissed as me, if his delightful speech was anything to go by.

He really stands and commands like a champion, you know. What a fellow.

And so we left and I took with me my name badge, much to the bemusement of the door staff who thought it would embarrass me somehow. I explained it was a souvenir and that I was quite serious, because I really was, and it was raining a bit and I told London to shit off a bit more and so did Chris, and then we champed our way, slightly less drunk, to the Docklands Light Railway via other places of local interest I've little doubt, and I quite liked it there because there was water and things.

I didn't like how Reuters put the stocks and shares in feet-high scrolling letters all over the buildings, though, nor did I like the excessive stairwells of London's underground and indeed the rudeness of some folk who, if they aren't bonkers to start with, have sillier hair than anyone of the not-London and certainly make me think of Chris Morris' unsung masterpiece Nathan Barley. Do you, like, hear me, you silly, like, twerps? SPEAK, like, PROPERLY. Please

And you will have my smiley face like this :)

Nevertheless Chris had issues on which to apply himself, and apply himself he did, and lo, it was time to go and eat some food and marvel at Canary Wharf and speculate about weeing on Barclay's Bank HQ and also listen to real Londoners being rude to bar staff and enjoy what's possibly going to be my last cigarette in a pub in the UK ever, realistically.

Then we were tonked in the mush by tiredness and braved the rush-hour tubes back to the coach station, and got on one, and read things, and slept, and were politely driven and went to bed after a fashion.

The conclusion.