After the weekend’s torrent of abuse and indeed excitement, you normally expect that to be the end of the fun until the following weekend, due to the pesky annoyance of having to go to work for a living to recoup your gambling losses and hiring of ladies of the evening.

Don’t look at the page like that’s not a problem you suffer from….

But that notion of wandering off home, heating up the ready meal of mystery and then watching re-runs of Thomas the Tank Engine, was dashed ever so briefly for something I never imagined would actually occur.

For those of you who have read the tome of knowledge known as Ooh Sometimes before, you will have read about “Gamers with Jobs”, a website dedicated to wannabe social-shut-ins who can’t get away with staying playing games all day because of other life altering commitments like family, who we all know only get in the way of having fun.

They talk quite well about topics of the day and more recently their obsession with Age of Conan, which in case you are wondering, the age is 12. (Hahahaha etc, I made the nerdy joke, I’m the king of you all….help me please, I need to get out more or less, whichever is better)

But a little while ago, because the planets were aligning and all the chickens had been sacrificed to appease the Mayan gods, a group of strangers from the website decided to venture down to the capital to meet up, be shocked at each other’s appearances, cry and then talk about digital happenings over nice warm beer.

Well, I was in the neighbourhood so why not?

Well, let’s examine that very point to start with. Why not meet up with a potential group of homicidal maniacs hell bent on introducing you to Mr. Knife and Mr. gun, leading to afternoon tea with Mr. Doctor or his brother, Garth Undertaker the third (body twice removed).

Let’s be honest, we’ve all heard the horror stories of various people hooking up on websites from around the world only to have their hopes dashed on living the next day, or at the least finding out that the person you were hoping to meet doesn’t in fact look like David Hasslehoff but more like Marilyn Manson.

That indeed is a far point to make, but remarkably as a result of being down in the capital for more than five minutes so far (the year is young), the prospect of meeting these people was a lot less scary than the strange fella I sat next to on the tube back from the center of town, who for some reason decided that the air was annoying him and decided to affirm his manhood by shouting at something we couldn’t see. Perhaps we needed the little kid from the Sixth Sense to join the dots together to make the bouncy castle?

So given that choice, it was fairly obvious what to do. Hide….no wait….

Having sat in the pub for a while reading the Evening Standard, trying in vain to blend into the background with the other socialites, who were in smart business attire, all pretending to be the IT crowd, I began to wonder if it was all made up.

Then I noticed a “touristy-looking chap” outside looking like he was about to cry because he was left alone. The dots were joined.

This chap went by the name of Vrikk, and yes if you change the V for a P, you have a misspelled naughty word. As time went on, others came to the place of drunken woe and in the end, there were 5 worthy warriors in the group, and well I can only go by the forum names;

Haakon7 + Wife (Sorry forgot your name!)

Vrikk

WanderingTaoist

and finally the proud Lord of Leisure of whom they had heard so little about. Now would be the time to educate, after all no-one expects the spani….wait that joke’s been done before somewhere….

It was rather strange, a feeling I had become comfortable with since coming down to London a short time ago. Here we all were, never seen each other before and only exchanged brief messages on a forum online, and we were talking like it was going out of fashion about well, anything.

Of course, for the first hour or so, you would tend to discuss differences in culture, such as everything smells like wee (I tried to find B.O. basher but never mind) and crying over the fact that money was in short supply. American dollars to pounds = not a good thing… And of course where would we be without talking about TV shows, gaming and of course politics, everyone’s favourite subject next to Jihads.

One thing which was gutting was that we ordered some food, and as a result missed out on the pub quiz downstairs. How dare they hold back from showing our utter lack of knowledge? They shall pay! (Hang on, who are they?)

After a while, Haakon7 and his lovely wife wandered back to Hampshire (I think, it was somewhereshire anyway), the three kings of road wandered towards the west end where due to a malfunction of the bladder, we stayed around “O’Neill’s” where further topical conversation was had, mainly about journalism, a small bit about my appearance on the podcast, how good was Peter Gabriel and the fact that Genesis was rubbish after he wandered off, the usual.

I suppose after the early fears mentioned earlier in the post, the one thing I took away from the evening, aside from the fact that man love was a beautiful thing, was that something as simple as an internet site (not counting the naughty dating sites) brought random people together and somehow you were able to have a brilliant time.

Of course they could have all been serial killers which certainly would have s**t all over my point, and that would have meant I wasn’t able to write here, but never mind.

Again, Monday night was another bonus off staying here, and it for the present time, the time spent in London town is going from strength to strength.