It comes with a bun

I'm on one of my spasmodic purification phases (they never last long), but there's no reward for virtue.

My friend, with whom I went to Kyiv for Eurovision in 2005, was down from Manchester. We started in Wetherspoons, before going on to somewhere with less food on the carpet. I asked for a Heineken Zero, which was £2.68 for 33cl (so £4.61 a pint); my friend's pint of ale was £3.48. He says he manages to save £800 a month from his minimum wage job: he has no housing costs. He works on the phones in customer service. When someone says their house number is one, he says "oooh, is that the posh end of the street?"

We talked about our Ukraine trip, which has a barely believable quality about it now. We spent the week drinking their version of champagne, staying in this magnificent flat belonging to a lawyer, high up in one of several high-rise Soviet concrete slabs dotted amongst unmade roads and a tiny children's playground. We knocked about with a German-Latvian couple and a couple of Glaswegian lads who were at one of the semi-finals and obtained our tickets by meeting up with a young couple in an underground station. It was all blogged at the time, but 2005 is one of the many years that I lost when I couldn't afford to renew the hosting one year and I hadn't backed anything up.

On Saturday me and Mel met up in one of the few pubs in her suburb where the pub garden has grass in it rather than paving slabs. A fence came round and we bought a load of cheese off him for a fiver. The young barmaid, collecting our glasses at the time, looked disdainfully at us and the people at the next table, who were also in the market for his goods, without having the authority to do anything about it.

There was a little shack selling what was advertised as Thai food. I ordered the kimchi bowl (everything's in a bowl nowadays). "It comes with a bun," said my cockney host. "A bun? No it's alright," I replied, "you have the bun." Afterwards a woman came over to ask me how I'd enjoyed my dish of onion and pickled red cabbage in syrup. "Well... it was just a tad on the sweet side for me," I said. "Ah well, normally it comes with a bun."

After ruining my meal by insisting on it being bun-less, we sat and drank, hatless under a radiant sun, then carried on at Mel's, where we played some increasingly drunken games of écarté, a game I learned after reading about it in Vanity Fair. We went to bed, where there was an unsuccessful mounting.

The following day, the sun and the ale withdrew their favours. I lurched from toilet to bed, spending hours trapped in a cycles of nausea, vomiting, and sleep. I finally stopped throwing up at 8pm, then went to sleep for thirteen hours. On Monday, I cycled home, and went to sleep again. It's because I didn't have it with a bun.