My own birthday party

I wanted an ‘authentic’ English pub experience for my birthday, so I asked one of my co-workers to show me London.

The Walrus and the Carpenter is a pub just steps away from the front door of work and seemed a logical place to start.  The bar is named for a poem in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’.  The poem is the inspiration for the Beatles song ‘I am the Walrus’. As it turns out, these are excellent points of reference for how the night progressed.

According to Wikipedia, a central passage in the poem is as follows:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

As one pint flowed into another and the night went on, my hosts and I covered many topics - life, British and American politics, work, Irish heritage, marriage, relationships and finally drinking.

My night started early and didn’t end late (by American standards).  But it didn’t have any eating and I definitely tested the limits of my endurance.  As we moved to the next bars, I realized that I had experienced much more that I could have hoped.  It was a great and terrible night and one that will not be easily forgotten or remembered. And that is exactly how Lewis Carroll would have described it.