» The nicest thing someone's ever done for me

it's my first post please be nice...
It was New Years' Eve, and I was due to work behid a bar till 4am, about which I was much depressed. Before leaving, it seemed like a sound idea to have a shot or two with my housemates in order to try and get some kind of goodwill rolling. As I was supposed to be leaving work and joining some friends at a party afterwards, I bought a bottle of rum on the way.

By midnight, the evening was going swimmingly. We'd all lubricated ourselves quite cheerfully behind the bar, and to joyfully launch the new year, more shots came out during big ben. Unfortunately, shots of Absinthe. After which, everything is black.

The next thing I knew, I was coming to on a nightbus. And I didn't know where. Or how I'd got there. Or where I was going. And somewhere in my brain it made sense to get off. I found myself on a street somewhere in the suburbs, possibly in South London, but to be fair, it could have been anywhere. A quick inventory of my pockets demonstrates that I have no phone but am stil carrying an empty rum bottle around. At this point I realise the fact that I am completely screwed.

After about an hour of aimless wandering, I find a telephone box and use my last 50p to attempt phoning for help. Obviously, weeping into the phone that I'm lost and I don't know where in London I am and I need help produces very little in the way of positive suggestions from my friends, who it turned out had been awaiting my arrival in North London, having heard me trying to organise a taxi in an earlier phone call. Of which I have no recollection.

I leave the phone box in a state of absolute dismay, give up, sit down on the curb and cry. It's getting light outside, and having dressed for a night behind a sweaty bar followed by the best part of the next day in a sweaty warehouse I am now frozen. My brain is starting to come to properly, but I still can't walk straight.

Just at that point in time, a black London taxi pulls up next to me. The driver asks if I'm ok, as I am a shivering wreck. I tell him that I don't have any money for a taxi, but I wondered if he knew how to get back to my house, or even if he could just tell me where exactly I am and if there's a bus I can get to anywhere I know.

I must have been a completely desperate sight. He looks me up and down and tells me that he's made enough money tonight, and that if I want he'll just take me home. I don't know how long I was in that taxi, or where I went. I remember it taking ages, and I remember being lost. I think I may have cried over my early dismissal from work and my lost phone. I know for certain that I was not the easiest fare that guy had all night, and I know that on new years' eve I should have been charged an absolute fortune. And even thought I had to break into my house with a brick when I eventually did get home, I never even would have been there had it not been for that man, who I quite possibly never even thanked...
(Sun 5th Oct 2008, 23:45, More)