The normal response to passing an exam may be to go out and celebrate near to where you live. Not quiet, by any means, you would normally make sure you remembered absolutely none of it, with no idea where you are when you wake up, why there’s blood all over your face or in fact why you’re now wearing a red lace thong instead of boxers. You trudge home, happy in the knowledge you celebrated spectacularly.

I, however, ended up going to Edinburgh, via Leeds. It was kind of pre-planned. Nobody goes to those kind of lengths on a whim. I didn’t just decide to go to Scotland, much unlike the original inmates of Australia, who went there because they had no choice.

I drank a lot of beer, but more jagerbombs than I could imagine. I’m pretty sure I spent about £30 in jagerbombs and managed to pass out. I truly and utterly fucked over all of caffeinekind and managed to do the opposite of what it’s meant to induce in me. I played god, kind of, and now I feel proud. Of course at the time I had no idea I had been so divine, and felt very much the opposite, as I deposited, what could have been a new life form spawned out of life giving abilities, but is more likely to have been the beer and a burger I had had as a meal a few hours before.

To wake up on a coach at 9am, seemingly without your bag and just a phone and a wallet is slightly perplexing. I looked to my left to see a girl with two buckets of sick alongside her and pen on her face. I decided that, she, like me, had had a good night, then she turned slightly in her stupor to reveal a wonderfully ornate and brilliantly drawn Hitler moustache, at which I point I decided she had outdone me in the fun stakes.

I went whisky tasting, which, don’t get me wrong, is lovely, but essentially, it all tastes the same. ‘You should be picking up the scent of bananas’ she says. No. I get the taste of whisky and the death and decay of the insides of my body, not bananas, and anyway how the hell do bananas get into whisky, you distill it and put it in a big barrel. At no point did you say they put half the world’s bananas into the barrel. Either, you’re lying to me, or illegally importing fruit. If you are doing the second option, why the hell did you decide to import fruit? There’s no money in it. Heroin? Yes. Not plums and kiwi fruit.

As I returned to London yesterday, once more I was presented with a wonderful Hitler moustache, this time, the person involved had tried to take the emphasis away from the moustache by colouring in their nose. An odd tactic, but surprisingly it worked. Then as I sat down next to a man with his hands taped to his balls I prepared myself for the hedonistic lifestyle of home. Students, eh?

It is Luisa’s birthday today, her 20th, and so we’re in the process of marking the occasion. I touched on celebrating being older in a previous post, and how it’s celebrating getting older, which we do every day, month, year, minute, hour, second, millenium, millisecond, and any other increment of time. Unless you’re Han Solo who is sure that a parsec is a measure of time. He’s wrong of course, but that’s because he was created a guy who loved the universe but was too fat to get to it.

Parties I see the point of. Being with your friends on a day that’s significant because your mother forced you out some moons ago on the same date is something everyone wants. The ability to get so very drunk that you forget how old you are, and the matter of looking old enough no longer applies, as the spectrum of appearance slides further down into just looking sober enough to get in, and further into the ability to look at all.

People always say the big birthdays are eighteen and twenty one, and I understand the legal and historical/political reasons for this, but why do these ages have to be celebrated any differently to the others. Unless you’re planning on running for MP, or becoming a full time chimney impersonator at the Marlboro factory, there’s not much to celebrate. I guess eighteen is the last of your birthdays before you leave 6th form, if you were that way inclined, and the ability to drink legally is upon you. Of course if you grew a beard because you hit puberty aged three, you’ll have been getting your mates served, and hooking up with twenty three year old women in foam parties since you were sixteen, but everyone’s different. I am reassured by the fact that women need not grow a beard to gain entry when under the age of eighteen, for bearded women are about as attractive as a sunday roast served in a used toilet bowl. Girls just need to develop a love for short skirts, getting their boobs out for newsagents and sexual favours upon overweight bald men in jackets outside wetherspoons.

Twenty one, as far as I’m concerned holds little worth these days. Maybe in a by gone age when it superseded eighteen as a marker of adulthood I could see it’s worth, but now it serves only to turn adults into children for one night only. The tutus come out the attic, and the bottles of wine come out the fridge, and last night’s lasagne comes out of your throat, all before anyone has actually turned up. 

This day also coincides with my 500th post on this blog. It’s all about markers these days. Not the pens that weirdos sniff to get high, but points in the longevity of something to remember. Perhaps it could be a pivotal point. An example would be, to touch upon an old friend, much the opposite than he who touched upon young friends, Gary Glitter, when he was put in prison.This could be a marker in his life perhaps.

People get older and as they get older they get more reluctant to celebrate parties, for their liver is shot, they have the worst STI of all; children, and their prime is well behind them. For now though, let’s just agree, that celebrating with a pint or seventeen when you’re young and in denial about the consequences makes so much more sense than people liking the xx, thinking Jimmy Carr is funny, or thinking that UCB is a university. Celebrate the past by striving to forget the near future. Amen to thee, Smirnoff, amen to thee.