Another year, another Christmas party, this time in an enormous marquee at Embankment Gardens in London. I’ve been wearing black tie so much recently that I’m beginning to feel like a waiter.

Matthew prepares for his first day at Vesuvio’s Restaurant

The party was pretty much your typical big corporate Christmas event, and was actually one of the better Christmas parties I’ve been to, but the entire night was overshadowed by the fact that we came out to witness a serious assault as we waited for our taxi. Basically, it was drunken partygoer vs. homeless guy, with drunken partygoer being pushed over and cracking his head open.

So instead of a nice, leisurely start to Saturday morning, we were woken up early by a Detective Constable wanting to interview us about the events of the previous evening. No doubt the staff at the Sheraton were not too impressed to see the boys in blue turn up at the door just a week after the whole Litvinenko polonium scare, thinking to themselves that another suite would be out of commission for a month!

Our witness statements prepared and our civic duty done, we decided to head out into Belgravia for some shopping. A block from Sloane Square (one of the most affluent parts of London), we came across this:

Not what you want to wake up to…

Canterbury may not be paradise, but there’s not a bone in my body that misses living in London.