Raving hard on a Thursday night - Koko was packed for Annie Mac's biggest 'presents' gig so far. Despite a few technical hitches it's safe to say it fully went off!

Don't be fooled by the meek-looking sparrow on the Twitter.com homepage - it's a dangerous beast - as I found out on my last sleep-deprived Sunday afternoon.

I'd been all over: Ben Westbeech at the Westbury, Coloured Sound at the Horse & Groom, the launch of Jaded at Ghost and to a party where people were putting their feet in the freezer. And somewhere, between dancing round my friend's bedroom to the youtube video of Bros' 'When Will I Be Famous' and the dark, 4am Monday screening of a man being eaten by a lion, I made a tit out of myself on Twitter.

Twitter is made for talking nonsense. Almost every 140 character missive (or 'tweet') on there is practially useless. But on a Sunday afternoon Twitter seemed to take on a whole new dimension. We weren't with it and - wahey - nor was anyone else, it seemed.

The normally demure Ben Westbeech had apparently got up after last night's gig, gone to see Cirque de Soliel and was now in a K tree! Bizarre, he'd even spelled it strangely, Cay Tre. Much hilarity ensued until we realised (on Monday afternoon) that Cay Tre was in fact a Vietnamese restaurant on Old Street.

Then there was Calvin Harris' manager, who posted 'Why do I keep seeing people dressed as animals in shop windows, is this real? Too much sugar from Magnolia maybe?' and linked to a picture of a man in a blue hamster suit, standing and waving in a giant hamster wheel, in a shop window.

'Reply back! Reply back!' said my friends, who dicated the following: 'That was me. I've got a Basil Brush suit as well. Boom! Boom! Brother.'

Minutes later we got a reply. 'This you too?' accompanied by a picture of a man dressed as a rabbit, sitting in an armchair in a shop window, surrounded by bits of paper and empty drinks glasses. What, and indeed, the fuck. Try it yourself at your next after party. Let me know how you get on @mirandacook

Is it too late to weigh in with a small homage to my third favourite ever venue, The End, now sadly demised? I don't mean to show my age but six days after it opened, thirteen years ago, Mixmag held their Christmas party there. It was a big deal, invite-only affair. Even the Daily Mirror wrote about trying (and failing) to blag their way in. I'd been invited because I'd just written my first feature for Mixmag. I was dead excited.

I received some funny looks when I arrived, prancing around in a purple and silver lurex full-length dress, split to the waist, with skyscraper heels. Everyone was wearing combats and trainers. Even the girls. Especially the girls. One of the then-staff writers told me later he wondered what the fuck I'd come as, but I didn't care. Start as you mean to go on I say. So I ordered a bottle of champagne from the bar and drank it out of the bottle on the dancefloor. At a later party I remember playing the 'Pete Tong Game' with one of Mixmag's former editors. The game was simple. The first person to get Pete Tong to say something to them, won. So my editor went and trod on his foot...

Anyway, I decided not to join the flocks for The End's closing weekend but instead went to the nights which meant something to me: Riot! - London's best ever hard dance night, and Southern Fried(used to be Skint on Fridays) and Missdemeanours(at AKA).

Hard dance is a dirty, dirty word in some quarters, but it's funny who you catch crawling out of the woodwork at these events. A lot of dance music journalists have a 'harder' past and I spotted a few raving away to Ed Real and then BK and Andy Farley's emotional finale set. The last tune of the last Riot ever? The Prodigy's 'No Good' of course. It sounded immense on The End's system.

Missdemeanours used to be the most fun you could have on a Thursday night (or a Wednesday, when it was at The Saint). Any excuse for industry blaggers to get drunk and gossip. All the faces from back in the day were out in force, looking surprisingly presentable, considering... Norman Cook (who was throwing paper airplanes onto AKA's dancefloor from his turbo-VIP roped off area upstairs) was due on in the club at 1am. Just time to have a quick catch up. Since he went off and got super famous, we'd obviously not mixed in the same cirlces.

Norman said it felt "weird" to be playing back at The End again, and remembered the first night he met his missus, Zoe. She'd accompanied him to the club to hear him play, even though she was due at the Live & Kicking studios a few hours later. "What are you doing these days? Didn't you go all Apocalypse Now and lose the plot?" Charming! But I couldn't deny it. I said I was still writing for Mixmag... but now in the Old Crocs division. "Well I'm still doing the same thing too," said Norman. "I couldn't think of anything else to do!" A queue of photo hunters was getting impatient behind me so I said I'd see him downstairs. "Take it easy," he whispered in my ear. "Because we're both really old now." Well, I thought. I must be. Seeing the arrival and then departure of one of London's most loved and established venues was a strange feeling. After all, there'll never be another End.

OK nobody panic, I'm still alive, still kicking around the odd rave, accidentally insulting DJs, their oldest mates and girlfriends - still going to boring industry dos and running into people I hoped I'd never have to see again - nothing major.

However, I have just recovered from that marathon Sunday session otherwise known as Chuff Chuff: the party in a hotel in the middle of nowhere (actually at Alton Towers' Splash Landings for the second year).

Nine years ago (when I last went) I forgot my outfit for the White Party and at the last minute managed to cobble together from friends in the hotel: a hideous pair of massive white pjyamas with huge red roses on, a white afro wig and a black porno 'tache. (I actually got asked if I was taking the piss by a man wearing a brown suit. Yeah, what do you think?) This year the theme was pirates and everyone had really pushed the boat out (sorry).

Admirals and Captain Hooks, gorgeous wenches and sailor girls in tiny hotpants danced to classics upstairs from the likes of Brandon Block and John Kelly, and there were upfront tunes from Judge Jules, Micky Slim and the gang below deck.

In true Chuff Chuff tradition, the first fire alarm went off around 11pm (rumour has it it was Brandon Block, trying to ruin John Kelly's set) and hundreds of refreshed swashbucklers were forced to stand around in the freezing cold until the fire brigade arrived to switch it off.

Still, it didn't dampen the spirit, and the famous Chuff Chuff room hopping began. We ended up in a suite which came complete with rubber rats, a talking door ("come in land lubbers, and join in!") and a locked treasure chest - solve the puzzle written on the wall, crack the combination, open the chest and claim your riches!

Kaiser Saucy from the Loose Cannons and a couple of shipmates spent over an hour trying to solve the mystery, only to find a single Quality Street festering in the bottom when they finally opened the chest. Saucy storms out, returning later with two bags of sweets. ("I went and complained at reception and they said it was for kids! I don't care!")

Meanwhile, Tolley, Kissdafunk's promoter is moaning about the boring tech-house playing from someone's ipod. "This music's terrible! It's like cobweb house. It's blandient, turn it off!"
Wish granted, we sat in silence waiting for someone to get it together enough to put something else on. "Mmmm," says Tolley. "This is like braille house - it's so cool you can't even hear it, you just have to feel the music." Animal, vegetable, minimal, cobweb...

At ten to nine in the morning there's another fire alarm (bets are on the hotel staff this time, trying to squash the party as check out is at a mind-boggling 10am). Opening my door I find 50 people having a rave up in the corridor, but alas we all have to leave the premesis and have a nice long walk in the freezing cold rain - bollocks!

Back for a last look in the rubber rat room and things have really gone overboard, the talk has now turned to chicken plugging and toe workouts ("Move your toe, to and fro... like Uncle Joe"). It's probably time to make a break for it. Until next year then...

Well the God of Rave has certainly dished me out some clubbing karma in the last fortnight. Had too much fun at the SE1? Here, have two shit weekends in a row. De nada, my pleasure.

When I used to visit a ridiculous amount of clubs in a year, living out of a suitcase and staying everywhere from Mrs Miggins' B&B in Skegness to the Miami Delano, the Hyatt in Birmingham was always my most favourite hotel - and so on the 20th September I returned to the scene of many crimes.

Stepping into my room on the eighth floor brought back memories of the time when Wall of Sound's bad boys came back for a drink and tried to break the window with a bottle of gin, before smashing the glass table and leaving, saying "we're not sorry". Or the time when a bone fide pop star crashed our room party and offered to buy a line of coke for fifty quid "because I can afford it". Oh yes, many happy mornings at the Hyatt...

As it turned out, ordering room service was about the most exciting thing that happened on this occasion. We went to The Club Which Must Not Be Named (politics, sorry) expecting glitz and glamour, and all we got was sweaty.

Everyone knows that the laws of clubbing dictate that the further you travel, the more fun you must have to make up for the suicidal journey home the next day. So when you're hundreds of miles from home and you get that sinking feeling - the feeling that this night out is actually a huge, smelly turd - what can you do? Well there's only one thing for it. Get terribly and unequivocally drunk, of course! Two double vodka Red Bulls for fifteen quid? Brilliant, I'll have eight.

So I had higher hopes for my night out at Renaissance at new London club matter on 27th September. Sounded great, looked great in the papers, what could go wrong?

I should probably mention here that I know it's not the club's fault I had such a terrible night. Apart from looking like a giant urinal (what's with the public toilet-themed decor and people-sized troughs?) it's actually a pretty decent venue. But I seem to have some anti-Fabric force field (I was pushed down the stairs on the opening night of Fabric and haven't had a good night there since) so maybe it just transferred itself to their new venue.

Anyway, the night got off to a flying start when the two mates I'd arranged to go with blew me out at 8pm. The person who was supposed to 'sort things out' went AWOL. When I actually made it to the club, the bass in the main room was so loud it killed my throat and made me feel sick, and the music in room two was - shall we say uninspiring?

I couldn't even get drunk and forget about it because I was driving, I pulled someone eleven years younger than me and it just made me feel really old, the only DJ I wanted to hear didn't even turn up, then when I left at 4am I found my car had been stolen!

So I walked around the car park for half an hour in disbelief, (car horns hooting me, rude boys shouting "whitey!" at me and trying to 'get my digits') before realising I was standing in the wrong fucking car park and my car was actually fine.

In summary: I am considering staying in for the rest of my life.

OK, I admit it. I did “a Danny Rampling” and retired. Chucked the disco lights and sticky dancefloors in for a normal life. I did normal people things like giving up drugs, cigarettes and caffeine. I bought a flat. I wrote a book. Like Mr Rampling, I didn’t open a restaurant and I didn’t go completely bonkers. But too much normality is hazardous to your health and so one spring evening I decided to make a quiet comeback. Now I’m back after a nice refreshing rest, and almost worse than before (if you remember my columns in Mixmag you deserve a long service medal).

So here begins my sequel, my further adventures in clubland, an honest look at what’s going down around town… and maybe even outside the M25, you never know.

Friday 12th September was the first part of Ministry of Sound’s 17th birthday and The Gallery had rustled up an old skool line up of Danny Rampling, Tall Paul, Seb Fontaine, Luke Neville and Mark Moore. Don’t forget your zimmer frame!

The club was busy, everyone from suits to tracksuits to tourists to the Gallery faithful… but there was definitely something missing – probably the Turnmills atmosphere. I bumped into the Gallery’s door grand wizard Tom in the smoking area and he lamented the last hours of Turnmills. “The cleaners came in and stripped all the stuff from the office before we had chance to take anything which had sentimental value. We were still there having a drink on the Monday afternoon after the closing and the builders were knocking down the back of the club. I mean – have a heart!”

I wonder what would happen if ALL the clubs in London except the MoS close down, leaving punters with little choice but to go to south London and drink their rancid Ministry vodka of a weekend? Hangovers, that’s what. Thanks to three evil vodkas on their premises I woke on the Saturday with a vicious hangover. But I battled through it to get to Sick! On The Dancefloor at SE1 on Saturday 13th.

It was a total sell out event with Bombsquad Records in the main room and Hoi Palloi and Dirty Funkers in the other two arches.

The SE1 is not the kind of venue that gets my heart racing (the familiar smell of damp dog greeted us on arrival) but there were all forms of life on the dancefloor and they were, to use 90s parlance, ‘well up for it’.

I’d not been in the club five minutes when I saw a Chinese couple in their 60s skanking around by the bar. Apparently last time Bombsquad played, there were five girls “in average Primark bras” having a multi-level podium fight. Brilliant!

With entertainment tonight coming from a thrusting, strutting and gurning lady dancing by the decks and kicking drinks over everyone, it seemed you were never far away from an over-friendly face. Suffice to say the dancefloor mutated into extras from Night of the Living Dead come 4am, but the music was phenomenal. Stupid Fresh, Micky Slim and even the Loose Cannons (who weren’t billed but drove up from their gig in Brighton) ran tings from one in the morning until gone six – heavy basslines, rave attitude, bit of electro, hip hop stylings, and last tune of the night when the lights came on – Earth Wind and Fire’s ‘Let’s Groove’ – they totally smashed it.

Later, like all the best after-parties, I found myself in a sweaty King’s Cross Travelodge with a load of boys who were wrestling each other, singing like Gizmo from the Gremlins and being sick on the carpet. Ah, how I’ve missed this shit.