In which new cities are experienced

I got back from Leeds!

I don't know if I genuinely wasn't expecting to, but last night as we were walking back from the train station at about three-thirty in the morning I kept enthusiastically saying "I'm so PROUD of us, we've got back from Leeds." The enthusiasm must have been the remnants of the Red Bull I had around 11 pm, because I was fairly exhausted. We went from John's house (the one whose birthday party it was, though his actual birthday isn't for two more days, so we refused to let him invoke birthday privileges) via Wetherspoons to the train station to the York-Leeds train, where we took up an entire carriage and most of us completed the frankly ridiculous Train-Wine challenge (I had been provided with a low-alcohol-content, extremely disgusting bottle of Liebfraumilch for the occasion, but made little headway before dropping it in a trash can when we got off the train).

We skipped and pranced into Leeds, which does look very nice and should be revisited at a later date, and immediately headed into another Wetherspoons, where tears and recriminations erupted between two of the party attendees and everyone else did their level best to ignore them. (I was helped by the Wetherspoons toilets, which in my experience are always huge, clean, full of mirrors and dramatically lit, making them the ideal place for brief caffeine-fuelled dance parties if you've brought an iPod.) Having realized that we'd essentially sat on a train for half an hour in order to get from one 'spoons to another, we went to the Cockpit, where the air was thick with fog-machine smoke and everyone was dressed like members of My Chemical Romance. We danced until about two - the most unsettling part was when, towards the end when the music was getting cheesier, "What's My Age Again" came on and I realised that I am now the very age mentioned in that song (twenty-three) - at which point John started telling me that I had to be in charge and lead the troops, and I decided we should probably get to the train. (By that time one of us had been chucked out for fighting (it was more like "confrontational dancing", but the distinction was lost on the security guard), so it was about time.)

Outside the club I changed from my high-heeled boots to a pair of flats I'd brought with me, to many impressed comments about my foresight. I regretted it when we got to the station and, with a while to wait for the train, John and Gary snagged the boots and refused to give them back until I pried their fingers off. Long story short, we all piled onto the very last train of the night and were very pleased to see York again.

Now I'm going to go for a run and then, sadly, to a graduate seminar on Theory and/as Methodology.