Chicken stacker

Hoxton Kitchen - the easiest place to spend a Friday night with a heated patio, bar, restaurant, full stage and dance floor under one roof.

The New Yorkers from that exceptional night in Kew Gardens following their set in Kilburn flew in for the weekend and I returned the guitar that had sat collecting dust (but looking really cool) under the [legally acquired] palm plant in our living room over the summer.

We hit up the Commercial for a round of lager and limes with Salt and Vineager Real McCoys (they're rippled) and I got the call I'd been crossing my fingers for all week - an invitation to the Hoxton Kitchen 10th anniversary party. The place was closed down for the night and they opened the bar and kitchen to anyone who's ever played Boombox, Style Noire and all the amazing live sets over the past decade. All night, we drank as many mojitos, champagne and vodka tonics as could drown out the miniature hamburgers being handed around the party by [little people] dressed in KISS makeup and Afro wigs while Paul Simon remixes reverberated.

Outside, the Jew stood waiting with an entourage of eight, and I left in an unmarked cab - the kind most frequently found outside clubs when the last thing you want is a ride from a stranger with a 1997 sedan hissing "taxi taxi" under his breath as you pass.

When I awoke the next morning (afternoon), my head was buzzing, my hair was a shambles, and my cell phone was missing from my bag. I buttoned an oversized flannel shirt over the previous night's dress and pulled on pair of men's brogues to shuffle outside and find it.

I called from a payphone (the one next to the park that tactfully does not inform its patrons that under its lawns are buried over a hundred hanged criminals from the 1700s) and a Middle Eastern voice ansdwered. My sweet little Samsung with the joystick scroll button had fallen under the taxi seat in my haze and haste, and the driver offered to bring it by my apartment later that night.

Most British people live their lives through their cell phones, much like Americans do with the Internet, and I felt disoriented and cut off from the world without mine. I spent the day in bed eating 99p KFC sandwiches and leftover mixed garlic- and mandarin-stuffed olives from Harrods, reading Mexican graphic design blogs and watching the mouse that until now had shyly rustled out of eyesight running back and forth across the room and under the covers of Joanna's unoccupied bed.

At 8pm, the driver arrived and rang the doorbell. As many times as I've been pickpocketed, ripped off, duped and hassled in the city, it was a reassuring moment that reminded me there are still people who are kind and helpful and inherently everything that I associate with the utopian world outside the dirty East End.