ministry of sound and winter snowman weekend

I left Catherine White quite early on the afternoon of our visit to the Tower of London as exciting things were to happen that evening that required some preparation.

Namely, Phebe and I were going out clubbing- London Style.

I came home and got showered and changed. I have been relying on the one party dress to get me through this trip. It is a black mini dress with puffy sleeves that are adorned with many silver studs. This dress is fortunate because it is quite stretchy but also fitted - which means that as i've fattened up over the last year, it has still fit me very nicely. It also takes me a fair while to do my hair these days- it's grown out of its style and I have to fully blow dry it then straighten the life out of it to achieve "average" hair.

Dressed up to the nines (but still wearing by Doc Martens - they're the only shoes I ever wear), we left the house and shivered our way to the tube station. Outside is not so bad in a double layer of wool tights, but in thin patterned stockings, it's not so much fun.

We were off to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, apparently the oldest pub in London (later discovered to be a lie) to meet some of Phebe's friends. We found 1.99 pound pints of some in-house brewed beer. It was my first experience of "warm" beer. I believe it was about 4 degrees- but it was an unpleasant experience. However it was so cheap that the temperate brew became the drink of the night and more rounds were in order.

That day, Phebe's brother Tom (and his girlfriend Lucy) had arrived from Australia, and it was fun to head out drinking together. At about 11pm, Phebe and I left for the Ministry of Sound. I have always loved the Ministry of Sound compilations - I have Annuals dating back to 2002 and have every australian release since 2008 (and there's LOTS of them). I was really excited to finally go to the birthplace of all this. Fortunately Phebe had some tickets for free entry.

I didn't really know what to expect - it's not a NEW club - it started in the early 90's before megaclubs really took off. We got inside, handed over our free tickets and handed in our coats. Inside, it was very dark and not much was going on. There was one main room with a really big bar and quite a shallow dance floor. Then there was another room "baby box" that was quite small but had some good tunes playing. Upstairs there was a chill out room with another bar and lots of seats. It seemed like a bit of a non-event, until we realised that the doors to the main club open at midnight. Surely, at that magical hour, curtains were drawn aside and the door to the main room was revealed.

The room wasn't as "tall" as the family, or even the met - there was no big open balcony or anything - but the lights were pretty impresssive - and the DJs were great Guiseppe Ottaviani was especially good. It was a "trance" event, but the music kept going to random house breakdowns. But it was still a great night.

At about 1, 3 of the housemates turned up, making it a bigger party and even more fun.

At 4 am we left and jumped in a cab home- Fortunately MOS is at Elephant and Castle, which is on the south bank of the river and hence a much quicker (and cheaper) ride home.

We roused ourselves at about midday and were shocked to find that there had been EXTREME BLIZZARDS that morning and that the whole of London was blanketed in 3-4 inches of snow. Phebe and I dragged ourselves out of bed and into several layers of clothes and then went down to the local cafe for eggs benedict whilst we warmed up for the day.

We then walked up to Clapham Common for some snowplay. THe place was packed with people out enjoying the saturday snowstorm (mostly families and Australians, however). We created a sensational snow man - who had devil horns, smoked a cigarette and was generally badass. This feat was even more impressive as we were constantly pelted witha barrage of snowballs from random idiots across the field. It was our proudest moment when, as we walked away from our "George", two girls started laughing at him and posed for photos with him. Our first ever snowman was a total success!

Phebe then made a snow angel but my feet were so frozen that I had to go and thaw out. As we walked home, we wrote funny messages on every car window that we passed/

All in all, a successful day!