the trocadero.

My friend Zoniel has been in Thailand for two weeks doing fasting and collecting coral from the beach and changing her hair. Zoniel usually has beautiful flame red hair but now she has dyed it a beautiful honey blonde. It looks really different but it still looks great and different. change is exciting anyway. I used to change my hair colour on an almost weekly basis (orange, green black, blue, pink, sliver, etc) and now I'm scared to do it in case it doesn't look right.
Zoniel runs a night with some friends at a club called st moritz in soho on Wednesdays, so she was there on Wednesday and drank and stayed up all night with people and then carried on drinking with Tom Beard around Soho throughout the day on Thursday before I went and met them in some pub on Berwick street. Tom beard has curly hair and dresses like a farmer and is friends with some people that I think are losers but that's okay because he has some kind of magic about him.
Zoniel is in this picture with the ginger hair and I am the one screaming (I do not know how to make a good photoface so I often just open my mouth big).


I had a Magners (I am glad that Magners has changed London into a largely cider drinking city) in there and tried to listen to them talking over the top of loud music and lots of loud people. I don't think that it matters that I couldn't hear much of what they were saying as sleep deprived drunk people usually just talk like loonies anyway. We went from the pub on Berwick street to Yo Sushi on Rupert street. I should stop going back to Yo! really because each time I love it a little less, especially since the firecracker rice went up from £1.50 to £2. It is delicious sticky fried rice with vegetables but it is a pretty tiny portion and there is nothing exciting about it enough to warrant charging two pounds for it. Zoniel poured the soy sauce into our dishes for it and it spilled all over the counter, oh that drunken soy sauce! I had three yasai gyoza (vegetable dumplings) with a dipping sauce, 2 crispy salmon skin ISO rolls, some smoked salmon rolls with cream cheese and cucumber and one of Zoniel's avocado maki rolls. We had to order them all because it seems that they have stopped putting the cheaper stuff on the conveyor belt. It's not bad food, it just seems to taste worse with each visit (I still go back though, it's tasty enough and easy and feels like it's cheap even when it isn't) but maybe that's because since I first started going there (3 years ago when I worked at the odeon and would eat my lunch there every single day) eaten superior yasai gyoza, sake nigiri, avocado maki rolls and stuff.

Since they had spent a large portion of their day already bowling at the Trocadero I was quite jealous and they were keen to go back so that was our next stop. We played pool (me and Zoniel versus Tom, he won) and they ordered an apple shisha. Being inside the Trocadero feels like being on holiday in a foreign country, it all feels much noisier and brighter and different to the London that I am used to. I guess we just stepped into another of London's worlds.
The trocadero....

When you go to the bowling bit to book a lane they give you this funny little black disc kind of thing with little red lights on it and then when your lane is ready it vibrates. This made me feel more like we were on another planet than just another country. The bowling shoes are the ugliest I've seen yet in any bowling lane and made my feet look like cartoon feet. I got a couple of full strikes but mostly I threw the ball and it careered off to the side of the lane and hit nothing. I reckon I could have got full strikes every time if I had the guts to take a run up every time and used the lighter pink balls, but I was scared of slipping and falling over and there was not a pink ball to hand every time. I think Zoniel won. The highlight of the bowling (more so than my full strikes even?) was how amazing my glow in the dark rib t-shirt looked in the crazy uv blue lighting they had in there. I GLOWED.


Tom has a friend called Coz (who is okay, not one of the previously mentioned losers) and his little brother has a band who were playing at Nambucca (this pub I used to live above) and Tom had promised to go and see them and the only way to get there in time was to take a taxi. He didn't have the funds so we went to the golden nugget casino, which Tom and Zoniel had signed up to be members of earlier, so that he could win the funds for a taxi. The man who took my bag and made me look into some camera had the funniest looking face that was big and fake tanned and he had funny looking wig-hair too. Smarmy faced. I told Tom before we got upstairs that I had a good feeling about the number 32. We went to the roulette table and he put a chip on 32, it won nothing so he put it on odds next and won some then I told him to try the 32 again but he didn't, the ball landed on the 32. For me this is proof that I should probably give up my job and become a professional gambler, I am halfway to being a psychic maybe. He won £14 which is enough to get a taxi from the west end to Holloway and like a strong man he stopped there and we left and I parted ways with them to go home and sleep.