Christmas partying in NYC & Why we love the Beatrice Inn

gI sometimes wonder if I will ever attain proper grown-up status. Most of my friends in London are married, sprogged up and have vaguely sensible jobs. Me, I'm still behaving as I did in my twenties, and see no agenda for change in the near future.

Last night we had our Big Christmas Night Out. The four of us dressed up (frocking around the Christmas tree as BA put it), feeling all Manhattan sparkly & glam. The English contingent (BA, M & me) have a collective obsession with guacamole, which means that we tend to always eat Mexican food when we go out. (We eat Indian instead of Mexican in the UK: there is one national chain of terrible Mexican resturants - Chiquitos - and that's pretty much it.)

We love Rosa Mexicano because they wheel over a huge guac trolley to your table and make it fresh in a huge pestle & mortar in front of your very eyes. Dos Caminos have a guac station and La Palapa do a pretty good version too, & that's where we went last night. They also do pomegranate and blood orange margaritas. In fact the margaritas are so good that we were singing Christmas carols by the end of the meal last night.

We had lots of parties to go to after supper, but ended up hailing a white stretch limo (I know, I know, but ridiculous fun, & five don't fit in a cab here) to the Crash Mansion on The Bowery to see my great friend Julian (known as Shah), in town briefly to play a gig with hotly-tipped LA band Piel.

Unfortunately they weren't on 'till 1am, so we contented ourselves with a lot of dancing to the bands on beforehand. We were definitely the most over-dressed women in the room - and the only ones on the dance floor for most of the time - but hey, we like making a spectacle of ourselves occasionally.

And then we high tailed it to Beatrice again for more shenanigans. I woke up this morning with The Cure's Boys Don't Cry in my head and remembered doing rather a lot of air punching on the dance floor. Which probably isn't an enormously good idea in a very short mini tunic.