Indi-huh?

The Big 30 Weekend.

So yeah i pretty much have awesome friends and a particularly amazing girlfriend.

Having booked myself and Neha into a swanky hotel for the night, I was pretty much in love with myself for maturing into a 30 year old man who can spend his whole day lounging, eating, drinking and getting naked with the girl he loves without resorting to the childish drunken escapades of his former, younger self.

But then we went for dinner.

Walking into the fantastic Pan-Asian restaurant, I immediately clocked the party of 20 morons dressed like wannabe-wizards in their stupid moron party hats with their stupid moron balloons. “Oh no,” i groaned, “there is a goddamn birthday party here - they are going to be SO loud”

I was right. Well, sort of.

“SURPRISE!” they yelled, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAMES!”

What. The. Fuck.

Did I feel like a tool? Did i ever. At least, after standing there with my mouth open for 30 seconds trying to figure out what in the seventh hell was going on.

‘A surprise party, for me?! That’s ridiculous. I don’t know this many people!’ I thought. But it turns out I do. And they are all wonderful people for showing up and giving me a great birthday meal that was organised by my spectacularly awesome Indian girl.

The photo above shows the aftermath of the cake. There is a tradition in India whereby the lucky birthday boy/girl has cake smeared on their face. No, i don’t know either - it’s probably some made up thing they do just to fuck with white people. But anyway, my cake was in the shape of a stripper’s torso - so i motorboated the shit out of it. The result is the Phantom of the Cake Opera.

Post cleaning myself up and dusting off 18 bottles of wine, we all drunkenly stumbled into the hotel’s nightclub and polished off $1000 USD of vodka, tequila and beer. That’s only $50 each - but in India that will get you a LOT of alcohol, trust me.

Despite the epic hangover we subsequently had a 5 hour boozy lunch on the following day, this time combined with my friend Nathan, for his 32nd birthday. There were 51 people at lunch.

I felt very loved.

So this is my private-little-public-post to tell everyone my friends are awesome in real life too, not just on the internet.

And my girlfriend Neha is amazing. AMAZING. 

/gush over/