The title doesn’t work quite so well as the Ides of March are apparently March 15th and I’ve already put up a couple of posts since then; BUT WHATEVER!

March was an incredibly busy month so it’s really just as well that I’ve already done a mid-month post and bits on the megagame as well, otherwise there’s no chance anyone would manage to read to the end of what would be an epic full month update.

Even just the last ten days of March were jam-packed; in that space of time I/we: hosted Dave/Emma/Anna, visited Jake and Shelly, had a work dinner out, played DnD for an evening, and had an evening gaming in a gaming pub in Stoke Newington.

Oh, and we hosted an epic (if I do say so myself) food-and-cocktail party!

So yeah, it’s really been a frantic month and it feels awesome writing this on an Easter weekend when we’re having four days of doing not much of anything. That may be an indication that we should try to ration this “social life” out a little bit better, but it’s hard to complain about having too many things on without sounding just a little bit hypocritical.

Some of the highlights.

Dave and Emma (also known as “our friends from the country”, as they’ve made the poor life choice of living outside London – children schmildren) spent a Sunday afternoon at ours chatting and gaming. It was the day after the megagame and to be honest I was still completely fried. I managed to win a couple of games, I think, which is shocking given that I don’t think I was yet capable of putting two coherent words together.

Work is still going well; nothing much new to report there apart from that, although we did have an excellent evening out at a nice French restaurant in the City.

We visited Jake and Shelly’s place for the first time; we’ve been meeting through a monthly boardgaming group for the past year or so, they’re a lot of fun. They also love their food – Shelly makes her own chilli sauces and jams, among other things – and that’s definitely something I can always get behind. They fed us some delicious food but I think it was just to hide that they were poisoning us with their deceptively-easy-to-drink shots of berry-infused gin. It may have tasted like ribena but the random guy I fell asleep on on the night bus home would probably have testified to its potency.

And then, yeah, cocktails. Cocktails and food, glorious food. We hosted it on a Saturday evening and I made the (in hindsight excellent) decision to take the Friday off so I could spend it preparing everything. So. Much. Fun. I’ve said it before, but give me some podcasts, a kitchen, and the freedom to while away a dozen hours and I’m a happy man. For the Saturday night I left the picture-taking in the hands of other people who had less cocktail-making to do so now I’m going to cheat and just post a bunch of those pictures!

(Some of the) Preparations

The Food, Served

The People

Quite a lot of fun!

And that’s all for now as writing this post has dragged on and on and it’s mid-April already! I did get distracted by writing the other stuff the last couple of weeks though.

I’ll leave you with one last thing. I’ve been spending the odd hour here and there on more stuff for my website (still haven’t reached the ‘make it pretty’ stage alas, sorry!), so here’s the list of recipes for the things that we served on cocktail night that were mostly pictured above. Feel free to sign up and use it/rate things – I won’t spam, honest!