Entertainers

It is one o’clock in the morning, and I am sitting at my computer in a glorious inebriated haze.

I have made several attempts to write sense, and this is the best result I can come up with, and it has taken me ages. It is I am dozy and full of wine and rich dinner and far too contented to mind in the least even if people write on my Facebook tomorrow that they have read my blog and it was rubbish.

We have had friends round for dinner, and we have laughed so much that my face hurts.

I have spent most of the day cooking and having performance anxiety, because although everybody is a good friend and also quite happy to eat anything that gets put in front of them, of course this sort of socialising also involves a not terribly subtle one-upmanship, at which I have got no intention of losing.

In the end the Goddess of Dinners That Turn Out All Right smiled on me, and it all Turned Out All Right, even the mousse that I had thought might be too salty was perfect, at least I think it was perfect, it was only the starter but I was halfway down my second therapeutic glass of red by then, so I am not entirely sure. Everybody said that it was, and since they are taxi drivers they do not do polite social fibbing, so it must have been a good idea to add the extra lemon juice and eggs after all.

I did the cooking so they brought the wine, and it was all excellent: a Chilean Merlot which is one of my favourites, and a Beaujolais, which was unfamiliar but splendidly rich and fruity, and since I had done all the cooking I found out that I wasn’t very interested in eating, but the drinking was lovely.

We have known one another for an awfully long time, long enough to take a very uncomplicated pleasure in one another’s company. We have met up for the occasional dinner together for over fifteen years now, and the evenings are always too short. We drank a great deal, and ate long past the point of comfortable trousers, and talked in the relaxed kind of way that you only can with people with whom you have been drunk and giggly many, many times before.

Of course these things take a great deal of messing about and I started cooking yesterday. Number One Daughter turned up with Ritalin Boy this morning and helpfully sampled everything so that I could be quite sure that it was fit to serve to guests. Some of it she sampled so effectively that she took some tubs of it home with her to continue sampling without distraction.

It all met with her approval, which was handy to know, except that she is not always the most discriminating audience for dinners, and invariably comes in through the back door and takes the nearest short cut to the fridge and eats anything she can find that is not actually off. Ritalin Boy ate the strawberries and charged about with Oliver. Lucy said that my cooking was revolting old person stuff and had Pot Noodles, both for lunch and dinner. She walked home from work today before collapsing on the floor and moaning in exhaustion, so we are seeing an improvement.

There was an awful lot to do. I didn’t just get dinner ready, I cleaned the bathroom and hoovered and tidied and changed the sheets. This last was not strictly necessary as it was dinner and not a swingers’ party: but when Mark came back from the farm with the dogs they were worn out from all the charging about in the fields and when they got home they curled up to sleep it off in our bed. I would have died of shame had our visitors happened to glance in through the door and wondered exactly what went on in our bed to leave it full of brown smears and bits of grass: and also I had got no intention whatsoever of getting in between sheets in that state so a boil wash it had to be.

I have just read this and am of the opinion that it is a bit incoherent and also mildly dull. I can’t tell if this is because I have had too much to drink to read it or too much to drink to write it, and so I am going to draw my ramblings to a close.

We don’t have to get up tomorrow morning.

None of us have got to go to work, and Mark has washed up the last of the pots whilst I write this.

Tomorrow we will be having leftover Eton Mess for breakfast.

The house will be tidy.

If it only it weren’t for the hangover life would be perfect.