Below is the email I sent to a friend recounting my experience from the night of Friday, 19th November.

It’s about 1am, and I’m rather drunk but sitting at a tram stop in High Street waiting for a tram that won’t arrive for at least 17 minutes. There is a car pumping some rave-style electro crap but it seems that it will u-turn shortly and I will be free of such abomination.

The pedestrian crossing next to me is clicking, but apparently the traffic engineers saw fit to make the clicking mechanism on each length of this four-sided crossing click out of time with the others.

Let me tell you about my night, for it has been an exercise in chaos theory if ever I’ve seen one. Most of it is fresh in my mind, but for the sake of chronology, I’ve referred to my Twitter timeline for details.

It has been an excellent night. We got word from a client that we’ve spoken to literally every day for the past three months (either by email or phone) that he felt that we’ve not been contacting him enough. That was at 3:30pm. By 4pm we’d replied, and cracked open the beer. Within the hour we were two drinks in.

At around 6pm I left work (after much bitching about said client) and headed into the city. I arrived about 6:45, meeting a fair few people (all of which I’ve made through Twitter, though a lot of whom I’d consider friends) at The Lounge in Swanston Street.

I had a pint of beer, though it was not technically a pint as The Lounge does not serve pints, only schooners. The next round involved a jug of beer between three of us, and subsequent rounds involved the same.

At some point between the second and third round – before dusk, as it was still light when we left – we decided to embark on a journey of crêpe procurement. Though the jourmey was almost entirely taken for the sole purpose of making Tim jealous, these were no ordinary crêpes. They were exciting crêpes, crêpes filled with a literal slice of cheesecake (of which Tristan, Josh and Lindsey had one each) and blueberries with ice cream (that was mine) and ham and cheese (the savoury choice of Mark).

Upon returning to The Lounge, however, we discovered their crêpe policy (no crêpes allowed) and as a result sat outside in Swanston street whilst consuming them. During such consumption, we noticed a lot of people we knew missing the door to the venue they were intending upon, despite our presence outside the venue. We mocked them amongst ourselves, finished our crêpes, and headed back upstairs (except Tristan, he left at that point).

Once back upstairs, another jug of beer was purchased and consumed. Within the half hour of finishing said jug, Kath – who is convinced that “seakla” is pronounced “see-a-kla” rather than “see-kla” in the same way suziam is convinced that “suziam” is pronounced “suz-I-am” rather than “suz-ee-am”, but I digress – requested we switch to cider, and so we complied.

It was around this time that I became aware of @drunkadnrw, an excellent Twitter account set up to mock my tweets when drunk with such clarity and perfection that it could really only be @bobearth.

The next two or so hours are a blur, but I know that at some point Josh retrieved the chocolate coinage from my bag (there is none left) and my camera was at a similar time removed from my bag and used.

After two more jugs of tasty, tasty cider, during which I discovered Liv, and then she, Adam and Steph went home, I too decided to call it a night. It was around 11pm when I left, I believe. An appropriate end to an excellent night.

It was whilst waiting at the tram stop that I noticed the flailing arms of the rather stupefied bystander attempting to hail a taxi with no such luck. I asked him his destination, to which he responded “the man”.

“Really?” I responded, to which he replied “Yes, Prahran”. Time for a proper dialogue, I suspected. “Well, I live in Armadale, whereabouts in Prahran are you headed?” The details are not important; suffice it to say that we discovered he lives approximately 500 metric literal metres from my house. “The tram for which I await takes us almost exactly halfway between our houses,” and so we sat and waited for the number six to arrive.

It was at this point that I noticed his burger, fries and coke, no doubt purchased from the Hungry Jack’s across the road from the tram stop. Whist we waited for the tram we conversed, discussing how our nights had been. He ate the burger. The tram arrived.

Once aboard, he told me his name was Mo, but it was actually Beau. Within fifteen minutes or so he had spilled his drink all over the floor of the tram. He was convinced my name was Madryk. We carried on. Tom, who was sitting across from us on the tram, enjoyed our pantomime.

It was somewhere in South Melbourne that the evening’s events took a turn from bizarre to outlandishly crazy.

At a stop at some point between the Botanic Gardens and the Domain Interchange, a group of people boarded the tram. We would eventually find out they were housemates. Seven housemates; a Canadian guy and girl, two French girls, a French guy and two Korean girls.

They did not take much notice of us until they asked MoMo the time, which would have been fine, had he not spilled his chips whilst tilting his wrist to check his watch. The chips were lost in a river of Fanta (I had originally assumed it was Coke – Mo/Beau made a point of explaining that it was not).

It was around then that Beau/Mo realised that the two girls were from France, and started speaking to them in terribly conjugated French (Mrs. Lowe would not be impressed). I piped in, explaining that I’m heading to France in a couple of weeks to drive around the South. They told me the North is much more fun.

After ruining my holiday plans for a few more minutes, Beau-Mo received a phone call, which he answered in Japanese. The ears of the Korean girls pricked up, and whilst dancing around the river of seemingly ever-increasing Fanta sticky-fying the floor, they asked if he spoke Japanese, which led him to the logical conclusion that they themselves were in fact Japanese. The resulting three-language conversation was highlighted and summarised when one of the girls said (in English) that he “speaks alone.”

Once we had turned into High Street, we established that the housemates were going to Chapel Street. I told them they were headed in the right direction, and they invited us to come along. BeauBeau declined, I said sure, and invited Tom (the observer mentioned earlier) to come too. He happily accepted.

As we got off the tram at the corner of High and Chapel Street, it became clear that only a few people in the group actually realised that Tom and I were coming along. Once the others were informed, they started chanting my name as we got off the tram.

The Canadian girl told me they were trying to find the Irish pub with two levels (Bridie O’Reilly’s). She also told me that “Melbournian” is pronounced “Mel-bore-ni-an” not “Mel-bur-ni-an”. I told her she was wrong and that she was being obnoxious like an American. Then we reminisced about Corner Gas and all was well.

I’ve had experience showing immigrants to the pub (about six months ago Sam and I picked up 5 Irish backpackers on the same tram, also heading to Bridies) so we headed off down Chapel Street. As we walked, the French guy tried to guess where I was from, refusing to believe that I was born in a hospital about 7km away, grew up in a house about 4km away, and currently live about 2km away.

At some point in the 200-odd metres between High Street and Revolver, a straggler on crutches joined us. He had a broken leg, much the same as mine (he even had the same medical boot!). He was surprisingly nimble on his crutches until he was stopped by the bouncer outside Revolver. The French guy told me that the bouncer stopped him because he was either “too British, or not British enough”.

It was around this time that we lost Tom. It was shortly thereafter that we stopped to speak to a group of people in the street. One was wearing a kilt. When pressed, he told me (in a rather poor Scottish accent, considering he was of Scot descent) that they were out celebrating Uni graduation – the formal event was the reason for the kilt.

I then wandered off to call Sam to tell her about the events that had transpired. She’s in a car driving from Copenhagen to Amsterdam, so she didn’t answer her phone. I left her a long message, during which time the housemates started walking again. I gave them directions to the pub and told them I’d catch up.

I soon realised that I was really far away from them, and upon seeing a test sign decided it was too complicated to catch up, and that I’d rather go home to bed.

And so ended my night, after beer, crépes, cider, a neighbour, two French girls, a French guy, two Korean girls, two Canadians, an observer, a river of Fanta, a straggler on crutches, a guy in a kilt and a test sign.

I’ve had to finish writing this in the morning, as I was struggling to stay awake after an hour of writing it after I got home to bed.