I once had the neat idea to not book myself a hotel in London overnight and see if I could just wing it until the morning by any means necessary. I realised up to this point, every time I was in the capital I would spend an awful amount on even the cheapest hotels, you know, the kind of places where you see ladies of the night and the beds feel so barren you'd not be wrong for thinking the hotel owners sold the stuffing inside just to keep the business afloat.

By no means am I saying I didn't have good memories of these times, but once you've had a night in an £80 room outside St. Pancras with a £25 an hour woman, you realise it's an experience you only need once.

I think any night in London, in the right area, can be lively enough to get you to midnight without much thought needed. But this was a Friday - one of two nights in a week where you're guaranteed a 3AM finish in most central spots before you start having to paw at the tents of the homeless and beg to bunk up with a grizzly man on his damp cardboard platform. You haven't lived until you've done it.

Some people, I imagine, could thrive with this challenge. I am not, however, the type of man who can walk into a bar, flick my golden locks and have a 34 year old divorcée swoon into my arms and invite me back to her HMO for the night. I have a natural and healthy fear of women, as man grew to fear the devilish beasts of the jungle that sought ones destruction, I too have taken to this same concept albeit against the very thing my nature should be helping me spend more time with. All this is to say that my plan, from the very beginning, relied solely on me surviving without aide, relying on my own wits and survival skills and not the cunning nature of the women who seek my company.

So I did what any hunter-gatherer of old would have done when the hunt lasted into the dark hours, I made my way to the Casino. Casinos are great, man I tell you. Nowhere else in the world can you smoke a cigar, eat a steak, watch a depressed man lose £85,000 playing roulette, and wander around for hours on end drinking alcohol. (fact check before publishing... haven't I done all of this at home in my underwear at some point? Find better analogy)

I found myself waking up from a daze, wandering far off into the cold night. I stood in front of a building majestic, imposing, and yet I did not fear it. I felt the beckon that night of great purpose in my life, that the future shall hold much more than I could anticipate if only I dug down deep and rooted myself with foundations solid and wide. This event happened so-outside of any other memory this night, with no recollection of how I got there, how I got back, or if it was a hallucination, but vivid and tangible it felt.

It wasn't long before I was stood outside the infamous gay night club "Heaven", waiting in line with a bunch of fairies at the McDonalds after they had closed their doors (They're very strict about everyone being outside at 3AM on the dot, even if you need to use the toilets). It's one thing to be in this predicament, but another entirely when two men are clearly trying to invite you for a threesome, thinking you're one of them. No sir, I'm not a sexual deviant, I'm just some sleepy man looking for a 3am Chicken Selects meal. I would have told them this if I was a man of lower class, but I am not, so I took up their offer as I knew not how to turn them down without inciting a hate crime. I faked it all 4 times.

By the time I managed to sneak out, dawn was already well on its way. I got an early train back and spent the next hour watching a group of young lads urinate into their spent wine bottles and dare each other to drink it, and I knew in right then and there that life would never feel this good again.