by
neilduffen
@ 2008-04-14 - 22:48:43
''Where the fuck is the monopoly board??'' I blurted out.
We were stood in a takeaway bar in Dublin.
Martin was smashed, as were the other two guys.
I was annoyed.
It had been nearly 11 hours since we started our quest and up to this point we had done spectacularly well.
The Irish Edition of the Monopoly Board.
The point was to visit every square on the Dublin monopoly board.
That's right Binky, every square.
That's 27 bars in total.
And we had more or less done it.
We had started in 'The Wicked Wolf' in Blackrock (not actually on the board but a tactical substitution for Shrewsbury Road) that morning and he proceeded at speed around the city.
'Dawson's Lounge (or lunge as the natives call it is the smallest bar in Dublin and where we sunk our first shot of Sambuca.
'The Horseshoe Bar' at the Shelbourne Hotel another.
'The Porterhouse' another.
'The Temple Bar' yet another.
You get the picture.
Towards the end of the day we took a cab out to 'Colmans' in Ranelagh....and it was then that I noticed that the board itself was missing.
The board that had been signed by everybody who had swerved us a beverage.
The board that contained the details of all liquids drunk that day and where.
Somebody had misplaced it.
And I was a tad emotional about it.
Because I desperately wanted to present it to Martin as a memento of this great weekend we had had together, like we used to, back in old days.
Days when we would spend Friday nights getting trashed with friends and colleagues.
Do pub crawls around London, invite people along only to see them be destroyed and puking in a shop doorway.
We found eight ways to consume Sambuca and yes, that kind of discovery is not in the same league as discovering America or going to the moon, but it meant a lot us.
I wanted to frame it and present it to him, so he would be able to hang it in pride of place in his flat.
Just like I do.
Who knows when we would ever get the chance to do a weekend like this again?
He gets married in three weeks and me in September, he will be father maybe next year or the year after and his family will of course, be his priority.
And all that is cool, it's great that both our lives are moving onto the next chapter and I'm not complaining, but I just wanted to give him something small, something that said that we did this meaningless, pointless thing...
And it was great.
And we lost the fucking board.
