Leave at 10PM

Yeah, you’ve put a pretty good session in here. You have three – no, four! – curled receipts from this pub (you do not remember the pub having such a dickhead name, but the top of all these receipts says ‘The Duchess of Granby"????) all for somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-seven pounds, and all you’ve really eaten are crisps and some nuts, so you really are, in the grand scheme of things, very drunk, but you’re up for it still, and someone mentions their place is nearby so you all go in the vague direction of that and stop by a shop first – the light in here is so fluorescent it’s like you’ve been born, anew, in a hospital, only instead of babies lined up in cots along the wall it’s obscure eastern European cans, and you pick up seven of them (four for you and three for "the fridge", you reason, though seven cans later you realise they were all for you, they always were) and 1 x big bag of Chilli Heatwave Doritos and 1 x tray of Cadbury’s Fingers (Christmas Edition) for some reason, you saw it when you were drunk and you had to have it, don’t question it just embrace it – and for some reason this stop off at the shop takes forever.

You linger outside, bathed in the yellow-neon glow of it while someone tries to pay for cigarettes on card and the shopkeeper directs them to a shady-looking ATM at the back of the store, and there’s this whole back and forth about how it costs £1.85 to take money out, and the friend threatens to walk down to the cashpoint near Tesco and come back, but you all know that’s not going to happen, that’s not the one, so begrudgingly he gets money out and pays for the tabs and it’s 20 minutes later now and your buzz is starting to fade a little, but you perk up on the walk with a can of Desperados (you panicked) and some throwback to a joke from earlier, and you haven’t seen this mate’s flat before and it’s up three concrete staircases that smell more and more urinal as you ascend them, and you’re starting to freak a little, and then you burst in and the lights are on and the place is warm and their housemate is there, washing their face for some reason and wearing pyjama bottoms, and you kick off your boots and cram six cans straight into the fridge still in their blue little bag, and settle down on the sofa for—