Hanging out at The Ivy and The Groucho Club

So Jaci Stephens from The Daily Mail invited me to be a part of her quiz team at The Ivy Club on Wednesday night. I said that of course I'd do it, but then started to worry about how much I really know.

I went along and found the Ivy Club (it's just next door to The Ivy Restaurant) and I checked my bag and coat in. The place is LOVELY and felt very calming and classy. I had a vodka and tonic at the bar (nine pounds if you please) and waited for Jaci. There was a live pianist behind me and some very cute bar staff to look at.

Eventually Jaci turned up with her friends and we got ourselves a table. We all got chatting and then I saw Simon Sadler and his friend, the lovely and very handsome Piers Horne. I went over and chatted to them about Skiing and work etc before going back to join Jaci.

We did the quiz and it was great fun. In the first two round we were 2nd but by the end we came 3rd. Jaci wasn't happy, but as it was out of 11 teams I thought we did OK. Jaci proceeded to get us invited over to join the winning team and we all got chatting. The drinks were flowing and the chatting increased. I met a lovely lady called Amanda who looked like a cross between Caroline Quentin and someone else famous... it'll come to me later.

I got telling her about Dirty White Boy as we got chatting about Soho and ended up lending her the book. She promised to give it back to me when we came back to the Oscar Quiz on 29 Jan.

I met Duncan Ballantyne at the bar while I was getting a new bottle of wine and he was charm personified. I have to say I was terribly impressed with how nice and chatty he was.

Then Jaci and her new friends decided to go to The Groucho Club and so I tagged along. That's when things sort of got a bit too drunken for my liking. When I got there, Jaci asked if I'd taken anything as my throat had gone hoarse and I'd become very animated. I swore I hadn't but she didn't seem to believe me. I just had a sore throat because I had a cold coming on and I was animated because we were now on our 4th bottle of wine so I'd probably had nearly a bottle and half to myself. That's after the large vodka at the start of the evening.

So when it came time to leave (at 4am) we got our jackets and Jaci invited us back to her place on Great Portland Street. I briefly said hello to Maggot from Goldie Looking Chain, and said that I'd been one of the team of loggers that had worked on the Big Brother he was on and it had been lovely to log him as he was so nice... However, I was pulled out of the club by Jaci and the next thing I knew we were in a taxi back to Jaci's house...

Jaci's house is just lovely. It's a stunning loft space with a balcony from the living room and a huge bedroom. There is a glass roof and massive windows. We sat in the living room and drank champagne. As you can imagine, we were all quite drunk by that point and the conversation started to rotate around my sex life, which I wasn't comfortable with but chatted away regardless. I wish now we'd have found something else to discuss I have to say.

Anyway, it got to about 5.30am and Jaci had to go to bed, so our two new friends and myself decided to walk down to Balans for breakfast. We sat in Balans cafe and chatted over breakfast as the sun came up and the delivery people went about their business. It was just us and a young prostitute with her Polish pimp. She was quite sweet and he was quite fatherly, but not enough for us to be convinced he was really her father. His accent had a lot to do with that.

So my new friends left - one to go home and one to go to work - and I got the tube home. When I got in, Chris was in bed and so I crawled in next to him and spent the rest of the day feeling hungover, full of a cold and very tired.

Over, the next few days, my cold went global and I coughed and spluttered my way through a lot of tissue paper and self pity.