After arriving in my hotel, I decided to get out of my hotel and head down the street to a pub that looked like it was worth visiting.

I stood by the bar people watching, relaxing and generally enjoying a couple pints of bitter. The place was relatively crowded, though I was, once again, performing my usual trick of clearing out an area through the use of nothing but my presence. It’s so relieving to know this is an international phenomenon. As I soaked in the atmosphere, I was reminded that I had forgotten to eat again and I was quickly becoming very drunk. I headed down the street to an Indian restaurant that I had also passed by numerous times but never visited.

After backtracking to figure out how I missed a Tandoori that was on the same street as the pub (I was drunker than I thought), I sat myself down to some grub.

It was a very good, very filling and very pleasant meal, though I cannot call myself any kind of connoisseur of Indian food, having only had it twice before in my entire life. However, the most remarkable thing about this evening was neither the pub I’d visited nor the food. It was when the waitress came over a couple of times to ask me if I was okay. It was not so much what she asked, it was more the way she asked it. It sounded like she was genuinely concerned about my safety and/or mental well-being.

Each time I gave her the usual response of "Fine, thank you," which was a complete lie. In actuality I was a long, long way from fine. I was going to be leaving the next day after a long and very enjoyable vacation in which I was, for one of those few occasions in my life, allowed to do what I enjoy most: whatever the hell I feel like doing at the time. In two days I would be back at work wondering where the hell my vacation went. However, I guess the ending of my trip and the addition of a couple of beers thrown into an empty stomach had combined to make me look like absolute hell.

I paid my tab, I left a tip for no good reason and I returned to a bed that was soon going to be all too far away.