Speights ‘Good on ya mate’

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Speights is a New Zealand beer which is trying to establish itself in the London market. As part of this they recently sent an alehouse on the back of a barge from NZ to London via Samoa, Panama, the Bahamas and New York. 6 lucky b@stards won a competition run in NZ and accompanied it over. The trip took over 70 days and when they got here they threw a few shindigs and invited some kiwis along. Thankfully my mates brother was in on it all so hooked me and Nicola up with invitations. Cheers Ben. (Or in kiwi: chur chur Ben).

Jaimee, Joel and their flat mate Puds all wrangled tickets too so there was a bit of a crew. We arrived expecting the party to be in the alehouse but it turned out that was pretty small so it was on a riverboat. The boat was impressive and the background of Canary wharf made us feel like we were sophisticated socialites living the high life. Well for about ten seconds until we started chugging beers and scoffing our faces with pizza. It was all free, what else do you expect? They were good pizzas too, Hell’s pizza all the way from NZ. I think they may have regretted how they distributed the boxes though, they just put them in one large pile and said help yourself. Luckily for us we were close by and grabbed heaps. I felt like I was a kid again, eating as fast as I could to make sure my siblings didn’t get more than me. And my sister Jaimee didn’t, I had about 3 pizzas to myself (Jaimee did however threaten to tell Mum but I called her bluff).

Jaimee and I saw a whole heap of people from Palmy, probably explains the general rowdiness. For some reason I thought it would be awesome to take as many Speights cups home with me as I could. They probably would have given them to me for free, seeing everything else that night had been free. But in my drunken state I decided to be stealth, hiding them under my jersey. I felt like a rebel, until a few of them fell out by the bouncer. I thought I had been busted, fortunately he really didn’t give a sh*t. So I carried about 50 beer stinking cups to my flat, bet people on the tube loved sitting next to me.

(A few days later I also caught up with my mate Steve who I used to work with at NZ Cricket, was good to have a few beers and reminisce about old times and how my colleague Laney used to do no work and go shopping all day. Ha ha Laney, go on take the bait).

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