So there I was with Irvine Welsh...

One of the joys in life is the unexpected, unplanned, great night out. So often, the organised, planned nights fail to meet expectations, already built up in the mind to be more than they can ever live up to, never matching the memory of the last great one. The surprise of the random is always welcome and always occurs when least expected. Brighton is a magnet for these kinds of nights.

It’s been a tough week. Work has been a struggle but I’m still on schedule even though it’s been a fight. Fair too many people have been distracting me with ‘any chance you can..?’ type tasks. Not only do they eat up my time and are invisible to my schedule but they break up the concentration making my actual job take twice as long as I try and work out what I was doing, what I was going to do next and just how I was going to do it.

There’s a lot of pressure as we’re now in ‘alpha’, which means we have only several months before it’s literally game over. With this on my mind, finally having a good, uninterrupted day and getting things done, I end up putting in an extra hour on a Friday night, more concerned with finishing the levels I’m working on than getting home and going out. There’s nothing heroic about one lousy extra hour, all of us in the industry have our own horror stories of all nighters and seven day weeks, but given the toughness of the week I’m surprised by my dedication when normally I’d write the week off and nurse my wounds with liberal application of alcohol.

Another couple of tasks completed I decide to get the next train to Brighton. Slightly behind schedule but I reckon I can blitz the few things remaining on Monday and put in a few more hours so that I can balance the books. Plus, the last couple of office key holders look like they want to go soon and the train after that is in an hour. Not worth the risk and I don’t want to be getting into Brighton at 10pm on a Friday, dedicated or not.

On the train, my main concern is getting home, having a shower and getting changed. I send out a few tentative texts to see if anyone is around. A couple of responses, one no and a maybe. It looks like it’ll be a quiet night with maybe a chance of a couple of late night pints in the local.

Once showered, with no further replies, I decide to have a play on my new toys, my CD decks and mixer. Don’t ask me why I bought them but they are something I’ve desired for a very long time. I get so engrossed in trying to see if Pump It Up by Elvis Costello really will go with Run DMC’s It’s Tricky that I miss a text. When I finally do check my phone I discover that some of my ex-colleagues are across the road at my local.

I describe them as ex-colleagues only to give context to how I know them. I’d like to think of them as my friends since, without work, there’s no obligation for any of us to see each other socially but we still meet up and when work discussions don’t exclude me from the conversation we have a great time.

Amongst the crowd of friends are a couple of unfamiliar, female faces. I’m soon introduced to one. She’s down for the weekend and visiting one of my friends. I’m unsure of the exact details but it seems that it’s a date of sorts. We end up chatting about music and she asks me for my top five favourite bands.

Once upon a time this would be a bread and butter question for me. I was such a typical male, music, list obsessive that High Fidelity was a documentary, not a work of fiction, for me. Somehow that side of me has subsided, no doubt something in the water, and I name a couple of bands but don’t complete the list before we are both drawn into other random conversations around the table.

Several beers later, my synapses have finally fired up, I rattle off my five bands with ease. This impresses her no end as not only does she judge them as good choices but she comments that it’s rare that anyone ever gives her a definitive list. She grabs the other unknown girl at the table and excitedly tells her that I can name five. This seems like a cause for celebration and she’s introduced to me as her best friend.

She asks about my work and naturally I tell her. It never ceases to amaze me that people think that what I do is cool. I’ve had ‘real’ jobs in the past and would never want to go back to them but I’ve got one eye on getting out of the industry and am sure that if people knew the reality of our day to day, they’d soon decide it was far from the fun that they envision.

I throw the question back to her and discovered what a genuinely cool job is.

‘I do burlesque tap and dance and promote my own group.’

Making games doesn’t even compare. Her recent show ‘Burlesque Idol’ where a tie break situation involved contestants in bikinis and Mexican wrestling masks fighting it out in an inflatable pool filled with water melons and whipped cream sounds like a work of genius and it’s hard not to be endeared to someone who announces that ‘I haven’t performed in months, I’m out of shape and I’ve got to go to Edinburgh on Sunday and get my tits out’. We were all having a great laugh.

All except my friend on the date who had taken Dutch courage to new levels. After disappearing to the toilet several times for long stretches and occasionally lying on the table face down, he somehow got into a heated argument with his date. It never got too bad but he had to be taken home by a couple of friends and his date and best friend were left trying to find out the time of the next train to London.

It ended with the consumption of Cava, vodka, beer, kebabs and tunes back at mine. Typically drunk conversations and the pain of discovering just how heartbroken another friend who had come back with us currently is. No matter what you say or do, drunken advice will never help. I hope he works it all out.

Both girls stayed the night, the attraction of the 4am train long gone, and slept on the sofas, with more than enough spare bedding to make them comfortable. Jon, returning to find two strangers in his front room, woke me and I grumpily got up and said my goodbyes to our guests. They headed off to meet my friend for coffee and a chat, which I was glad about as if they’d gone straight back to London, all parties would have felt bad. At least this way they are still talking.

I’ve made breakfast, read some of the paper and plan to do a spot of shopping that doesn’t involve anywhere holding a sale. Plans are already being hatched for tonight, which means it can only lead to disappointment. Random is king.

It’s bright outside but raining. There’s a rainbow somewhere. That’s a sympathetic background if ever I’ve seen one.