Be coreful what you wish for..

I found myself meeting friends of Helen in The Shelbourne yesterday.. I'm not a man who finds himself in the bar of a 5 star hotel often and whenever I do I imagine it as some kind of act of Class War.. I don't want to seem harsh, and I'm sure they're all lovely people, but there's something about the flashiness, the fake tan and the even faker designer bags that makes me want to puncture a few egos.. And that's just the men..

Anyway, needless to say the people I was meeting aren't like that at all (well, not all of them) and buoyed by a great result in the Grand National I wasn't having a bad time at all.. One of the girls in our group bumped into an old friend at the bar. I won't say his name but he's the guitarist in a particularly bland Irish pop/rock band famous for the attractiveness of some of of it's members. After he was introduced to us, he sat down and the first thing he said to us was "Don't mention the band or I'll slap yis". Charming stuff. Of course now he was in a bit of a pickle. Because since we weren't allowed talk about the band (and really, in your wildest dreams you couldn't really think of much to say about them) we didn't really have anything to say to him at all.. So he sat there in silence, drinking his mojito and listened to a bunch of people he'd never met before talking about things that he couldn't contribute to.. In truth he cut a bit of a pathetic figure in his expensive clothes and his sunglasses..

Eventually he was rescued when a friend phoned him and he left to go and have a burger - soakage, as he put it, to prepare him for the night ahead.. The last I saw of him he was rattling a door that was clearly locked trying to get out.. Shuffling out of a hotel that he'd been drinking in alone to have a burger.

Such is the glamorous life of an MOR rock star.. I wouldn't really fancy it much..