"Excuse me, but could you drop your large backpack somewhere else, please?" A (almost) christmas nodermeet in the East End

Every year, a couple of weeks before christmas, my significant other and I enter a large, widebodied plane, get out to have a 6 hour nap 14 hours later in some airport hotel on some non-descript Asian mega hub, just to enter another large, widebodied plane and arrive in some bloody freezing European country 13 hours later with a hangover, an acheing bottom and a craving for a decent meal.

I'm not particularly sure why I keep doing this, but I think has something to do with family. To soften the 2 weeks of the lovingly firm family embrace, I normally escape for a week to London's East End to provide relief work in a GP - surgery providing 3rd world medicine to their 3rd world clientele. This has 4 advantages:

• Some poor bloke in the East End gets 5 days off
• I get to escape from the tentacles of kinship with a proper reason
• After 5 days I realise how wonderful it is to practice medicine in Kiwiana
• and, most important of all, I get to attend a nodermeet with the London Booze Monkeys, these days professionally led by her majesty La petite mort.

As I will be arriving in the London early in the afternoon of Sunday, December 18, 2005 I suggest starting the week with a proper hangover and congregate, just like the last time at Soma. They have a decent range of beers on tap (and German Wheat beer in bottles) and a nice list of deadly cocktails (and since recently even cheap, yummy stone baked pizzas). Soma is terribly easy to find with it being on the other side of the road from Stepney Green tube station. Stepney Green is served by the District Line and Hammersmith and City Line and is only 10 minutes by tube from Liverpool Street and Stratford.

So, defy the terrorists and meet me (and the other noders) full of christmas spirit and alcohol there and then, on that very Sunday evening at 18:00.

Who's in:

• TenMinJoe says: Christmas nodermeet! Sounds good to me.
• Hazelnut says: Well, I shall try...
• ascorbic says: Sounds tempting. haven't been to a meet in forever. If I can find somewhere to stay, then maybe.
• Andrew Aquecheeck says: Depending on money, family, global politics, the ecconomy, flying monkeys and the phases of the moon, it's possible I'll turn up.
• La petite mort says: Well because you called me your majesity I will just have to attend
• Spiregrain says: looks good, count me in
• BaronWR says:At last, a nodermeet that I have some chance of attending: for the last five britnoders have managed to choose times when I'm abroad or broke.
• StrawberryFrog says: An almost christmas nodermeet? I'll do it,
• Catchpole says: See you there!
• darl: possibly
• princess_loulou: very possibly
• booyaa: attached to the princess, so highly likely
• pjd says:Hey, I would love to come to this if anyone can put up with drunken britnoder on their sofa.
• Pandora wants to come. Why not?
• purple_curtain says:being in severe nodermeet-withdrawal, i shall do my best to attend.

Who's chicken:

• me, due to a series of unfortunate events.
• passport says: WRONG COUNTRY, ACK!!!!++++ =)
• rootbeer277 unfortunately will not be making it. And his initial ok was actually a typo correction. My bad.
• shimmer says:Not sure if we can make it yet as we have Stupot's work party on the Friday and it usually takes a couple of days to recover due to it being free with all drinks included ;o)
• Oolong says:Alas, on the 18th diotina and I will be busy with our fourth and final consecutive day of wedding-related partying in India.
• Paraclete says: Would love to if only I hadn't also stuck myself in a large, widebodied plane and flown to New Zealand. Soma's (or Stoma, as we "affectionally" term it) one of my locals too... bad timing!