“What plans for the weekend?” is a question I hate intensely. Earlier I could say “Oh, I have to clean my place – it’s such a mess.” These days, almost everyone has found out that I get housekeeping facilities as part of my package deal in my new apartment.

So I have to fall back on something lame like, “I’ll probably watch a movie.”

“Oh, yes, so many new releases coming up with weekend… Which one are you planning to catch?”

“Er, no, I was planning to watch a couple at home… you know, on DVD… Howrah Bridge and Notting Hill perhaps.”

Many people actually tell me I live the most boring life possible. “You’re in such a happening city… Why do stay at home on the two days when EVERYONE is partying?”

I don’t know either. All I know is that I go out of my way to keep all my socialising on weekdays – so that I can do my own thing on weekends: sleep really late, try and cook once in a while, catch up with my reading and movie-watching, write my blog, call folks back in India (there is a discounted calling rate on weekends), and just be.

Last week, a friend — a self-professed “wine snob” — cornered me. “I need your company this weekend – you owe this to me babes,” she said, and I couldn’t say no. At the end of it, I was happy I went out, since I learnt something entirely new.

I don’t know if any of you are familiar with drunch – but I wasn’t until this Saturday. Me and my wine snob friend were supposed to “do drunch” at a restaurant called The Warehouse. At first, I’d thought there was something wrong with my hearing faculty: I was hearing drunch when I should have been hearing brunch.

But no, it turned out that there IS such an affair as drunch.

So I went for drunch at The Warehouse on Saturday; it starts at 1 pm and goes on till 3.30 pm, and you get served heaps of food – starters, mains and desserts – along with all you can drink. I had the bright idea of looking up urbandictionary.com before I arrived at The Warehouse – and stumbled upon one definition: a drunch is a drunken lunch, one that is guaranteed to have you knocked senseless out of sheer inebriation. Which was probably why EVERY item on the drunch menu has a recommended cocktail to go with it – and this is other than the mind-boggling array of wines, beers and spirits that you are constantly thrust with. For us, the wine was obviously the centrepiece of our outing.

But then again, a drunch could also be lunch-cum-dinner (just the way brunch is breakfast-cum-lunch), and you are supposed to skip dinner at night and hit the sack early. By the time the festivities end, you can really only think of doing one thing: going back home and crashing.

Urbandictionary.com also informed me that there is something called slunch, a mixture of lunch and supper, served in the late afternoon – and it first started doing the rounds in Paris, and is now catching up in the New World.

Well, what do I say? Eating out has become an entirely new thing: there is something for every time of the day. One doesn’t necessarily have to say, “Let’s meet for lunch or dinner.” Or worse, for boring old coffee.

Lately, breakfast meets have become pretty common in India – for business and for pleasure. I know of the popular brunches at Olive and The Machan at the Taj Mansingh (one of the two – or maybe both – is called ‘champagne brunch’: am I correct?). I wonder how long it will be for drunches and slunches to catch up with the Joneses.

And I must say getting out once in a while on weekends may soon reap rich rewards for my word power.