Grease Is The Word

We were woken from what novels describe quite accurately as an uneasy slumber at nine o’ clock this morning by the telephone ringing.

It was Number Two Daughter in Dubai.

“Mother,” she said crossly, “tell me you were not in the Stag’s Head last night singing Grease Megamix in the karaoke.”

There was a long silence after that as it all came flooding back, and Mark next to me started to laugh, and Number Two Daughter, who had spies everywhere, reminded me of my own useful advice to always consider first what the Queen would do before embarking on any course of action: had she been in my shoes this morning I imagine she would very likely have felt obliged to abdicate.

“I just want you to know that it’s a new low in embarrassing parenting. Even for you.” she growled before she hung up.

Regular readers will of course recall that our plan for last night was not to work until especially late at night, we had thought that it would very probably go fairly quiet at the end of the evening and so we would take the opportunity to go home and get some useful things done and then go to bed early.

You may already have guessed that it did not, in the end, work out that way.

It wasn’t that it was terribly quiet on the taxi rank after I had written these pages last night: but it wasn’t exactly action packed either, and I was making good headway with the book I have almost finished, which is a biography of Margaret Thatcher. I was just reaching the gloomy bit at the end where she starts to drink too much and has all her teeth taken out, which is a depressing sort of prospect for anybody’s old age: when our friends who run Lakeside Taxis appeared at the window, en route from the pub across the road from the taxi rank to the pub at the back of the taxi rank.

They were not sensibly driving their taxis. They were out drinking. They were at the wonderfully endearing stage of drunkeness where they had just remembered how very much they loved us and thought they would just stop by the taxi rank to tell us so.

It could be that I am just too suggestible. I do not exactly recall the subsequent conversation.

However, what I do recall very vividly is that less than fifteen minutes later I was not sensibly driving my taxi either. Within a very short space of time we had somehow reconsidered all our carefully laid plans, recklessly abandoned our taxis at the roadside and were half way down our first glass of somewhat acidic red wine in the Stag’s Head.

Had it stopped there it would have been a pleasant, if unremarkable evening. We sat outside on the picnic tables in the warm evening air, because we really enjoy our friends’ company, and it was too noisy inside to talk, because it was karaoke night.

The thing was, then it started to rain.

We all dashed inside, and then conversation was at an end, because of the karaoke, and after a while we stopped shouting at each other and I pretended to be doing a nineteen seventies disco dance, which made them laugh, which was fatal.

After that suppose I cast myself in the role of group entertainer. Then somebody put some drinks on the table which I have not come across before. They are called Jaeger Bombs, and you have got to drink them down in one. This happened more than once. Shortly after that my role as group entertainer expanded to whole-pub entertainer.

There are little cards with Inspirational Mottoes for sale in a shop in our village. One of them says, encouragingly: “Dance like there’s nobody watching.”

I did that.

There wasn’t nobody watching, though. After a little while the whole pub was watching, and Mark filmed some of the finer moments on his mobile phone, presumably to use as blackmail at some future date.

I have never been to a karaoke before, and it struck me that just staring at the little screen and shifting rhythmically from one foot to the other is not the idea of it.

If you are going to do something, do it thoroughly or don’t bother.

If you are going to behave badly, be the worst imaginable.

We danced and laughed and knocked Jaeger Bombs back in one mouthful, had the most wonderful, reckless splendid evening: and neglected to notice the small but keenly interested group of Number Two Daughter’s friends sitting gripped by the whole spectacle.

We finished the night off in grand style by purchasing a kebab and staggering drunkenly over to the taxi rank. Once home we walked the dogs and collapsed giddily into bed, where we remained comatose until the phone rang.

To our astonishment we didn’t seem to have hangovers this morning. I had some uncomfortable heartburn for the rest of the day, however, to serve as a reminder that I am actually fifty and not twenty three.

It must have been the kebab.