I'd read in the local paper about a fight on New Year's Eve which left a man in hospital on life support. On the way down to London I found out from my friends that it was a guy we used to play football with and that his life support had since been switched off.

We had a map of various pub crawls and decided to go for the one that was near Tottenham Court Road, so we got off the train at St Pancras and jumped on the tube to Holborn. As that was so close to TCR we decided not to bother changing tubes and just to walk to the first pub. Unfortunately (or not!) there were a lot of pubs around here, so by the time we got to the first one on our pub crawl map, we'd already been to three!

Usually on our pub crawls we play a game which gets really annoying. Name bands beginning with a certain letter, then each time we move to a different pub we change to the next letter of the alphabet. As we'd done this quite a lot in the past we decided to do it with film titles this time, which was just as annoying.

When we reached the 9th pub we somehow acquired a Finnish woman, who came with us to the tenth pub. One of my friends is a bit of a history buff, but somehow she knew more about English history than he did and managed to stump him with this question about Henry II: Who was his wife? For those of you who don't know the answer, I'll tell you later.

The tenth pub called time and we left to get the tube before we missed the last train and got stuck in London. Me and the history buff got separated from the others and we don't know London so I used the GPS on my phone to find Leicester Square tube station. He wouldn't believe me about which direction it was, but I eventually got him there. Unfortunately it was shut by that time and I really needed a wee, so we went in McDonalds to use the facilities and buy a couple of burgers.

There didn't seem to be any available taxis passing by anywhere near us, but suddenly and convenient minicab pulled up and said he could take us to St Pancras for ?15. As that was only ?7.50 each and a lot better than being stuck in London all night, we jumped in. Chatting to the driver it turned out that he had family who live just a few streets away from me.

We got to St Pancras and made it to the 01:02 train just before it left. Once I was on the train I phone the rest of the group to find out where they were. It turned out they had only just got to St Pancras and weren't going to make our train, so would have to wait for another half hour.

The journey home was uneventful and I was in bed by about 02:30.

That's the end of my first ever journal entry, except to tell you that the answer was Eleanor of Aquitaine.