Late night

Dearie, dearie me, the clock on the computer says 0:22 and I am not nearly in bed.

Mark is downstairs washing up and I have just remembered that I have neglected to write to you and so I have dashed upstairs to remedy that in as few words as I can possibly manage on account of being sleepy and also drunk.

You might remember that I invited Elspeth and her husband John over for dinner in order to have an admiring audience for my nice clean bathroom, which was completely wasted since neither of them remarked at all on the astonishingly shiny taps, but not at all wasted in that we have had a splendid evening and drunk far too much and eaten to the point of mild discomfort.

Mark and I have had a gentle cooking day, listening to the rain outside and playing Scott Joplin ragtime and dancing in the kitchen together, and making curries and different sorts of apple cakes, and feeling happy and warm and safe.

When we came back in from emptying the dogs everywhere smelled glorious, cinnamon-spiced apple, and cardamom and fennel and coriander, and jasmine candles and frankincense, and then we had careful showers in order not to make a mess in the lovely clean bathroom, and I put on my bluebell perfume and Mark his lovely beard oil, and our friends arrived just in perfect time.

We sat round the table with glasses of a lovely Rioja they had brought, and ate curry with hot Naan breads, and little apple pies with honey yoghurt, and then cheeses and grapes and tomatoes, and talked and talked and talked until it was the middle of the night and they had got to go.

Unfortunately we have got to get up tomorrow because of promising Lakeside Taxis that we will do their school runs for them. They are going to see something called Jeremy Kyle being filmed.

Mark explained this to me and I am not sure whether to be absolutely captivated and fascinated, or appalled: because it is people who have had dreadful things happen to them telling an audience all about their most dreadful humiliating moments, and then the audience chip in with their opinions. This must be very good if you have got lots of opinions that you are certain are right, like I have, but rubbish if you don’t want everybody who watches television to know about your upsetting experiences, which I wouldn’t. In the end I didn’t know what to think so I shall wait until they get back and find out what it was like. I shall keep you posted.

Also tomorrow we can’t even go back to bed, because we have got another friend coming over who would like Mark to help mend his car, and then after all of that we have got to go to work, so we may not have thought it through as thoroughly as we might have, especially when it got to the third bottle.

I don’t care. It was lovely.

I am not going to write any more on account of the third bottle, it would probably have been all right without that, but also because of feeling guilty about Mark washing up all by himself. He has spent a lot of the day washing up, and bringing logs in, and he did the fiddly bit of the pies because I have got the co-ordination of a sea lion trying to knit a jersey.

So it is a short entry but a happy one. Eating is always splendid, and we had such an ace night.

Mark is playing Gershwin on the CD player and washing up. I am going to stop writing and go and help.

Tomorrow is another day.

LATER NOTE: I did go downstairs to help Mark, but it turned out he had finished washing up and was gluing the plastic diamonds back that had come off my gypsy cake stand. I accidentally stuck my fingers in the glue and got super glue all over everywhere and he said I was a liability and to go away, so I have left him to it and am going to go to bed, partly because it is not easy to type with glue all over my fingers