I'm the King of Bolivia!

Limousines are fantastic. In fact any kind of transport that comes with champagne in it is fantastic. Put me in a leaky, plastic, motorbike sidecar, on my own, in the depths of winter and if there's a bottle of champagne there then I'll be happy.

There must be inherent dangers in opening a bottle like that in a fairly enclosed space. If it's a lively one, then there's a risk that the cork will fly upwards and ricochet off the roof and walls before embedding itself in my skull. Or perhaps instead it will smash through the window, leaving a gaping hole that causes the limo to depressurize and sucks all passengers out to their doom. This second option is worse. You can recover from an embedded cork, or perhaps sell yourself to a freak-show as "The Amazing Human Champagne Bottle: Watch him Pop!". It's hard to recover from being sucked out of a window. I've seen the films.

What actually happened was that the bottle went *POP* and the cork remained safely in hand. Not my hand, obviously. I was staying well away, for safety reasons.



The driver was a bit scary, but in a different way to the previous day's minicab driver. He looked more like a bouncer than a driver - big build, long black coat and heavy East-London accent (possibly). Looked like he'd happily bounce you off the nearest bridge if you put a foot wrong. He was no doubt involved in organised crime and I think this could be what he was doing in the afternoon whilst we were at the races. Probably something involving illegal bouts of boxing. Friendly though, despite his connections to the crime lords. And more than happy for us to stay out later than we'd organised at no extra charge. He wouldn't have got to bed himself until very very late. But then maybe he doesn't need sleep as he has one of those chips in his head that they implant in supersoldiers. I've seen them in films too.

The other great thing about limousines is that although passengers can see out, people outside can't see in (unless the lighting's right (or wrong depending on your point of view (possibly literal point of view))). This means that they don't know that you are not famous. They assume that the car is carrying rock stars or the King of Bolivia. Not just a few young men on a stag do. If someone decided to follow us in the hope of getting autographs, or maybe to assasinate us, then they'd be quite disappointed to see what came out of the car.

Maybe the would-be assasin would kill us anyway, just out of pure disappointment.

It's only writing this now that I'm realising how many potential ways there are to find your death whilst travelling by limousine. I started by saying "Limousines are fantastic". I think I'll caveat that now: Limousines are fantastic, but they are really f***ing dangerous.