The later a Sydney pub stays open, the worse it is. The genteel, quiet, pretty pubs are all in residential areas and have to close at midnight for the residents’ sanity, which forces their tipsier patrons to relocate to dives like the Strand, where the clientele is even uglier than the decor. Judging by my nights drinking with Nige, I’ve deduced that the inspectors only issue 24-hour licences to sticky-floored hellholes that happily serve up doubles to punters too drunk to order them coherently. Which pretty much sums up my mate’s taste in pubs.

The Strand is in Darlinghurst, a suburb that ranges from irritatingly trendy to seriously downmarket, and the pub is definitely at the latter end of that spectrum. It’s located on William Street, Sydney’s premier kerb crawled by transvestite prostitutes, who often stagger into the bar to feed their earnings into the pokies. It doesn’t have quite the grandeur of London’s Strand.

Inside, it’s one of many CBD establishments decorated in the hope that a couple of tatty brass railings, fake wood panelling and some grimy stained glass equate to the charm of a traditional English pub. The interior does equate to traditional English backpackers though, and as I entered, the usual dozen were sitting in a corner, shouting unintelligibly in response to the Premier League football on the big screen. Honestly, the more English people I meet in pubs, the more I wonder why Australia ever had a cultural cringe.

Nige saw me before I could spot him, which gave him a chance to bellow ‘JONO!’ at me, informing every single patron of both my name and how much he’d had to drink. It wasn’t the most creative nickname – just my surname, with the obligatory ocker ‘O’. But it was enough for the six other tipsy people at his table to cheer my arrival, even though I’d never met any of them. I guess they figured anyone with such a dinky-di nickname simply must be a top bloke.

Nige is a good-natured, loud-voiced larrikin who’s immediately mates with anyone he meets. We’ve been friends since Year Seven, when we were randomly assigned to share a desk, and we’d gone on to law school together. While our social circles diverged somewhat at uni – his revolving around college and rugby, and mine around the law student scene – we remained close, and as an undergraduate I’d spent more of my nights than I care to remember crashing on an air mattress on the floor of his room at college.

To my envy, Nige’s charisma always attracts women whose quality exceeds what I privately think his oafish, beefy looks merit, and as I shook his hand and headed to the bar to buy a round, I noticed more than a few in his orbit. There was no way of telling whether the ladies were from his work crew or just random barflies who’d decided to come and check out the loud, funny guy in the corner. Like Rupert Murdoch, Nige always boasts an abundance of satellites.

He works at a big commercial firm and was recently admitted as a solicitor. Nige’s life, or at least sixty hours a week of it, is mired in the minutiae of financial regulations. Which is why he needs to compensate by spending as many hours of the weekend as possible drinking. Nige’s life is a corporate T-shirt saying, ‘Work hard, play hard’.

I sat down next to him and finally started to relax as I got into my schooner. It turned out all his friends were work colleagues from Morphett Jackson, the firm that had snapped up most of the smartest kids at our law school. Not uncoincidentally, they were often also the dreariest. Nige is an exception, which is why several of his colleagues had followed him to a genuinely horrible pub at one on a Saturday morning.

‘We’ve just come from the firm trivia night,’ Nigel informed me.

‘Really. The life you Morphett’s kids lead.’

‘Just because you go to at least four awesome parties every single week.’

‘Against my better judgement.’

‘I’ve known you long enough to know you don’t have any. Nah, Jono, trivia’s great. An athletic contest for the mind. Separates the wheat from the chaff.’

‘And which are you?’

‘Oh, the wheat, mate – we were runners-up. These are our victory drinks, and I just knew you’d want to be part of the celebration.’

So he’d invited me here for his own amusement, knowing that if there was one kind of success I wouldn’t want to celebrate, it’d be trivia. I’ve always hated how it brings out the hideous competitiveness in the most placid person. Even easygoing Nige is an absolute shocker when there’s some petty intellectual glory on offer.

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Unless you’d told me what it was.’

‘C’mon mate – they can take away your security pass but they can’t take away your place in the Morphett’s family, hey?’

Nige was referring to the laboured attempts at friendliness made in the managing partner’s welcome speech when we’d clerked there together. All the ‘family’ had required of its newest members, in ascending order of importance, was photocopying, filing and sucking up to the fulltime staff. And we were always getting trapped in conversations with HR flunkies, who were like those unwelcome relatives you get stuck next to at family functions. Their job was to constantly pretend we were all having fun so we’d sign on the dotted line. Nige knew that I’d threatened to throw myself out the window of their anchor tenancy in a chic new office tower if I ever went back.

‘And hey, you know you could come back on board in a second if you ever decide to retire from your high-flying musical career, mate.’

But Nige’s attempt to make fun of me went well over the head of the woman sitting on my other side.

‘Did you work at Morphett’s, then?’ she asked, her prior efforts to ignore me temporarily suspended at the sound of the magic M-word.

‘Sorry,’ Nige said. ‘Paul, this is Felicity; Felicity, Paul – one of the most promising summer clerks ever to have served in the Banking and Finance trenches.’

Felicity was quite promising herself – so much so that my chest instantly constricted as I took in her long dark hair, intimidatingly sleek figure, and pretty alabaster face. Even without Nige’s introduction, I’d have guessed she had some kind of corporate job from her groomed appearance and general air of privilege – neither of which made me think she’d have much interest in a lowly party DJ.

Still, for the moment, her intense brown eyes had locked onto mine so I thought I might as well have a crack at keeping them there. Nige helpfully left me to it, turning to entertain the rest of his acolytes while I attempted to provide her with something resembling entertaining conversation.

‘I was barely there. Just the clerkship,’ I clarified. ‘Although I’m sure my filing skills are still the talk of Level 35.’

‘Banking and Finance is a really great section,’ she gushed.

No, it really isn’t.

‘I’m on rotation there at the moment, I’d love to stay,’ she continued.

Why on earth? The firm practically had to apply thumbscrews to make me work in that section in the first place. I’d only given in on the understanding that I could spend half my time in the section that actually interested me – intellectual property.

She asked why I’d left the paradise on earth that was MJ’s banking department. ‘God, it’s the best firm for bank work in Sydney,’ she said, a smirk flickering across her lips. ‘You must be a very accomplished musician to have given up such a great opportunity.’

Cheers, Nige, for mentioning it, I thought.

‘Well, not exactly; I’m more in the DJing game.’

‘Wow! Have you played any of the big clubs? Do you know Kid Kenobi or Goodwill?’

No, I only knew that they were famous club DJs of exactly the kind I was not. And that left me with few options. I could have admitted that I was just continuing with a student job because of inertia, and that no one had dangled superior alternatives in front of my face, but that was generally where my conversations with beautiful girls like Felicity ended. Especially as she would probably have shared my parents’ inability to understand how I’d resisted the siren song of banking and her alluring sidekick, finance.

But I was saved from having to admit that I hadn’t played in a single non-RSL club and that the most preeminent DJ I knew was Phil because my stubbly-faced friend from the party walked in with his trendy mates. I should have known. Given his level of intoxication, the Strand was the perfect end to his night. Most of the city’s flotsam and jetsam washed up here, and that night he was very much in the drink.

It took him all of five seconds to spot me, demonstrating surprisingly accurate perception given how blurry his eyes must have been.

‘Hey, it’s Mr DJ. He’s crawled out from under his rock,’ he said. ‘His daggy ’80s rock.’

His pals liked that one a whole lot more than I did.

‘And who’s this lovely lady, then?’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Paul?’ Felicity cooed. Great, so she liked drunk pretty-boys. I wouldn’t have done the honours even if I’d known his name.

‘Harris,’ he interjected.

‘Whoa, you’re so cool you’ve got a surname for a first name.’

Not my finest conversational gambit, and he ignored it appropriately.

‘Have you heard Paul here play his little tunes, then?’ he asked, smirking.

‘No, I was just asking him …’

‘Well, we had the pleasure earlier tonight at a twenty-first. And I must say, he’s got a magnificent Bryan Adams collection.’

She was as unimpressed as I’d been when the birthday girl had told me her favourite singer.

‘“Can’t Stop This Thing We Started”, “Summer Of ’69”, even “All For One” with Rod Stewart and Sting,’ Harris said, displaying an incriminating amount of Adams knowledge. ‘In fact, this guy’s got it all for one awesome party.’

Having had well above a trafficable quantity of Adams songs in my playlist that night, I had no comeback.

‘You get paid for playing that stuff, Paul?’ Felicity asked. ‘As opposed to a restraining order?’

She was beautiful, witty and she hated the right music. But this scumbag was hitting on her right under my nose, and using my stupid job to do it. Was I going to stand for that?

I did what any honest, red-blooded Aussie male would’ve done. I gave up and, to pretend there were no hard feelings, I bought a round. I would rather have gone several rounds with Harris, but that would only have made Felicity even less impressed. Besides, with that quantity of alcohol in his system, he probably wouldn’t have felt a punch to the head.

When I returned with the drink that my new buddy definitely did not need, he was still regaling Felicity with tales of horror about the twenty-first. OK, so she didn’t like Bryan Adams. But if she had such impeccable taste, I asked myself, how could she stomach Harris’s effete clothes? His ludicrous facial hair? The prominent, sickly sweet cologne?

But I knew exactly why she could. The beautiful people have this innate super-confident way of communicating that we mediocre-looking types can’t understand. So, realising that I couldn’t have interrupted their growing rapport with anything short of a fire extinguisher, I slunk away to talk to Nigel instead. He was in the middle of a long work anecdote which had his colleagues in stitches, but that I couldn’t comprehend, let alone find amusing.

It didn’t distract me sufficiently from Harris, unfortunately. So I wasn’t at all surprised when about forty minutes later, just on the off-chance I hadn’t been watching him intently out of the corner of my eye, he brought Felicity over. With a grin that was even firmer than the wax he’d smothered into his hair, he pumped my hand and announced they were leaving.

‘See ya mate, we’re outta here,’ he said. ‘And thanks for introducing me to Flea.’

‘Oh, my pleasure.’

Was evidently going to be a whole lot less than his.

‘It was lovely to meet you, Paul,’ Felicity said, a little sheepishly, since her rejection of me was so clear it could’ve been written on the sodden coaster in front of me. ‘I hope we run into each other again. Maybe you can spin some Bryan for me sometime?’ she said.

And with that, they took themselves off for what I sincerely hoped would be terrible sex.