Jerry Collins - King among men

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I'd had this circled on the calendar and was counting down the days seeing as last years pub crawl was such a brilliant day. Once again we decided to make t-shirts, I mocked up a design with Jerry Collins' head on Mr T's body. With the line 'Jerry Collins: NZ's Mr T'. All of my flatties were keen to get them so we thought we'd see who else of our mates would want one. A few days later we had orders for 42! The week before the crawl we had a production line going in our lounge. Andre managed to shatter our glass table whilst ironing on it. Apparently Lisa's head went red and almost exploded as she had warned him it would happen. Naughty boy Andre.

For the second year running we had the hottest, sunniest day of winter so wearing t-shirts wasn't to bad. We once again congregated in Paddington station and had a large brekkie to prepare for the day ahead. Five minutes later we washed breakfast down with a beer when we arrived at the first pub. An Aussie guy was unfortunate enough to stroll passed in a Australian rugby jersey, boy did he get some stick. I wish that I'd made more t-shirts and sold them on the day because people loved them. Some great outfits included people dressed as marmite jars, sheep and cows, an old lady from Waimate retirement village and stacks of flight of the conchords t-shirts. (If you haven't watched flight of the conchords yet then do it NOW, best tv show ever).

Our group contained a few imports - Nicola, her brother and her friend Nina from Germany. They all got into the swing of things and were having a great time. Richard and Morgan bought a mini rugby ball so that was being thrown all over the show. I hit a cop car by accident, thankfully they are pretty tolerant of us Kiwis. I'm not so sure about an Indian shopkeeper though who threatened to steal our ball when we hit his shop window. A chorus of boo's got us the ball back! Other evnts included using KFC's, McDonalds, Burger Kings, Marks and Spencers and Nandos' toilets and probably a few pillars here and there. Someone, I think Richard or Emily had a stash of Cadburys cream eggs and decided a race to eat one would be a good idea. I thought so too until my teeth started aching. Andre was definitely the fastest, I think the big rig is a bit of a chocolate fiend. By the time we had arrived at Westminster to do a haka in front of Big Ben everyone was well on their way. So much so that we missed the haka as we were playing a drunken form of rugby. Later we moved on to a boat moored on the side of the Thames and imbibed there before moving onto the Southerner bar who have Speights on tap. A bit of piggyback racing finished the festivities before we headed home for pizza, pizza and pizza.

Nb: this is the poem I came up with for the back of my shirt -

Jerry-Jerry quite-quite scary,
How does your gold hair glow?
With bryl cream gel and the fire of hell,
You're way better than Russell Crowe.

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