As I’ve got a friend visiting for the weekend, I spent a few hours tonight trying to transform my house from its normal messy self into something more socially acceptable.

In the process – and in somewhat of a hurry – I took a bag of garbage downstairs.

Almost as soon as the door slammed shut, I knew I’d left the keys inside. Shit, I thought to myself.

But having been locked out before, I knew all I had to do was located the set of keys I normally keep at work.

The last time I locked myself out, it was beyond my control.

From time to time I sleep-walk, and sometimes occasionally I’ll wake up.

The last time I locked myself out was such an occasion. Thankfully I was wearing boxers, so waking up when the door slammed shut wasn’t as embarassing as it could be.

Still, I found myself at four o’clock in the morning wearing nothing but boxers, and locked out of my house.

A walk to a nearby phone booth, a request for a connect-call through Telstra (explaining the circumstance of why I had no money), and a lock-smith was at my door reasonably quickly.

I’m sure it’s not the first time he’d seen a man locked out of his house wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.

Ever since then I’ve kept a spare set of keys in a special place at work which I know I can access 24×7.

So I turned up at work, explained the situation, and the security allowed me in.

It’s just as well, because I have a mate visiting for the weekend. And his arrival pretty much co-incided with my return home with a set of keys.

“Meet you at The Dolphin”, he said when I explained my circumstance.

So, at about 11.30 I walked up the road to “The Dolphin”.

“Sorry, it’s after 11.30. We’re closing at 12.00, and no one is allowed in after 11.30”, the bouncer explained to me and several others seeking entry. Unlike the others who were reasonably pissed, I was stone cold sobre, and after the drama of locking myself out, catching a bus to and from work, to locate my spare keys, I was pretty desperate for a drink.

“I can’t come in”, I tried to explain over the phone, though it was too noisy inside to convey the information, and so i sent a text instead.

Finally, we met and made our way towards Oxford Street and for a drink at Stonewall Hotel, where the crowd remains incredibly young. Thankfully, in the group of people I was out with, one of them had his dad visiting from Germany, and so I didn’t feel like I was the oldest person in the room.

There was much music, stories, and vodka and sodas to be enjoyed. And then finally, off to bed.

All in all, not a bad end to a night which started off quite badly.