THE CONCEPT

My inspiration for this event was an unassuming brace of paragraphs on pages 12 and 13 of the Red Dwarf book Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. Read about David Lister, professional slob and rôle-model to us all...

"The last thing he really remembered with any decent clarity was celebrating his birthday back on Earth. He, and six of his very closest friends, decided to usher in his twenty-fifth year by going on a Monopoly board pub-crawl around London. They'd hitched a ride in a frozen-meat truck from, Liverpool, and arrived at lunchtime in the Old Kent Road. A drink at each of the squares was the plan. They started with hot toddies to revive them from the ride. In Whitechapel they had pina coladas. King's Cross station, double vodkas. In Euston Road, pints of Guinness. The Angel Islington, mezcals. Pentonville Road, bitter laced with rum and blackcurrant. And so they continued around the board. By the time they'd got to Oxford Street, only four of them remained. And only two of the four still had the power of speech.
"His last real memory was of telling the others he was going to buy a Monopoly board, because no one could remember what the next square was, and stepping out into the cold night air clutching two-thirds of a bottle of sake."

I don't doubt that people had been doing their own variations on the MBPC long before Grant and Naylor wrote this passage (perhaps somebody will confirm or contradict this) but it was in the mid-nineties that I first put the idea of doing it for ourselves to Gareth. Obviously, these things take time to plan, so we were finally ready for the (ahem) "GO" at the beginning of 2007. Unfortunately, (to paraphrase WB Yeats) things fell apart; the centre did not hold. The evening before the scheduled start, I was warned by my dentist not to partake of alcohol for 24 hours, or all my teeth would explode. An alternative (Jack the Ripper) pub crawl was hastily organised but to cap it all, Kate and James got stuck in a snowdrift and had to walk back home.

So, the contents of this Web site are the result of more than a decade of hopes and dreams. If you have shared these dreams at any time, please get in touch and tell us your story, so that it can be included here.