I'm currently very hungover (seeming like a common thread at the moment) as I went to a party last night and didn't get to bed until 6am. The party was in Wales. We got to Newport. It started raining. It carried on raining when we reached Cardiff and didn't stop until this morning. Jo is right. It does always rain in Wales.

Sadly, excess of alcohol meant that when someone mentioned the Stereophonics, I gave my honest opinion - namely that their music is whiny and bland - forgetting that I was in Wales and would therefore get lynched. No matter how much I protested that I liked Catatonia and Tom Jones, I still couldn't win. Was persona non grata for a while.

Other than that, got into a conversation about homophobia in the military - and there were far more squaddies than me there. They were trying to not be homophobic but the military attitude prevailed. When I suggested making it a disciplinary issue to beat up someone because they were gay, they said that it would make things worse. You can't 'dob someone in' and doing so would escalate the violence. Added to which, apparently many of the 'higher ups' didn't care about homophobia because they didn't agree with people being gay. They were at a loss what to do because of the military culture (one of the guys also thought that it was bad having gay blokes in the military because they'd be trying to pull all of the blokes. Then said 'oh, but gay blokes only fancy other gay blokes don't they'. Was at a loss as to where to start). Military sounds hideous - like school but the bullies have access to guns.

All in all a somewhat challenging night where I was mostly in the wrong. But I did get to drink some Bollinger and meet some nice people too.