City Girl

by Kitty Yip Kee Wah

Can the Welsh be generally dismissed as either idiots or liars? Well, if you accept a sample size of one as represented by a guy from Criccieth, who tried to tell me last month that the most important day in March is St. David's day, then yes.

As any fool knows, the big deal in the third month of the year is St. Patrick's Day - not just to the Irish, but also for deeply insecure people who try to co-opt someone else's national holiday in a sad attempt to counteract the nagging feeling that they might not be the party animals they wish they were. It was in this self-conscious context that I found myself in Brown's on a Friday night. And then a week later on Saint Patrick's Day.

I had been duped the first time with the promise that Brown's resembles "a traditional English pub". Jazz Ya resembles an English pub more than Brown's does, and is significantly freer of the tragic-beyond-their-years thirtysomething officelosers that afflict Brown's.

My second attendance on the 17th of March I attribute to extreme inebriation and an inability on the part of me and my various companions to walk too far from Pink Loft, where we had just created a small scene merely by trying to leave. It was embarrassing enough when I tripped and grabbed a couple's tablecloth for support, sending their food flying everywhere. Imagine our collective mortification when the exact same faux pas was committed by three others in our group, in rapid succession.

After about half an hour after arriving at Brown's, I was well in to the process of drinking away the experience of being in the bar, when I bumped into a guy called Adrian, a friend of someone our office manager met in Hubei once. He launched into an account of how he'd been having a series of dreams in which Suzanne Vega instructed him on prudent financial measures, but I can't remember how that ended up, or why I didn't go home earlier.

Anyway, happy St. Patrick's! Alea jacta est, as they say in Dublin!