Last night came to an unexpectedly lively conclusion when on my last journey of the night one of the customers in the back rather surprisingly caught fire.
This is an unusual event in a taxi, especially since smoking is prohibited these days. In the end when his friends had managed to extinguish him, and we had all finished flapping about being helpful, it turned out that somebody outside the nightclub had thoughtfully dropped a lit cigarette into the hood of his jumper, presumably as a surprise for later, how very witty some people are.
Actually we did all laugh, afterwards, obviously except the chap with the sore neck and the large hole in his jumper, because of course it is hilarious when frightened drunk people spontaneously combust. It must have been funny, because Mark laughed later as well when I told him about it. I suppose that this is because late night taxi driving does something peculiar to your sense of humour.
The dogs are still rather incompetently in love, a passion which has been thwarted so far by the misfortunate fact that my dog has got very short legs and is having some difficulty in reaching the desired target.
Lucy watched them with some distaste this morning and then explained that we were going to have to do something about them, because her friend who is coming for dinner with her parents tomorrow is not supposed to know anything about sex at all, and wouldn’t even sing the swear words in the pop songs when they were doing karaoke on their earphones in the car on the way back.
She added that if we didn’t mind there were some things about sex that she would very much rather not know as well, and perhaps we could just put them in the shed.
I don’t want to discourage the dogs too much, because I am rather hoping for some puppies, but the current state of affairs is doing nothing to soothe my anxiety about the middle-class dinner party on Sunday night.
This morning the weather had a miraculous change of heart to gentle warmth and soothing blue skies. We had intended to have a peaceful cup of coffee in bed before starting the day: Mark went downstairs to make it and I opened the upstairs curtains. When we returned we found Lucy comfortably buried underneath the duvet in the middle of the bed, so after that it stopped being civilised and became a bit of a riot, after which we had our coffee and thought we would get up.
I had plenty of leisure time to worry about tomorrow’s dinner then, and explained carefully to Lucy what I had planned to cook, and she shrugged and said indifferently that she didn’t think it mattered in the least what I cooked since nobody was going to want to eat anything because of being put off by the dogs ineffective but repeated attempts at coupling in the middle of the living room.
I had to concede that she was right, but nevertheless spent most of the day in a complete fever of advance catering activity. The shepherd’s pie is done, and I made a fruit mousse with melon and raspberries and whipped cream and honey, and a jelly flavoured with French cassis aperitif, which all seemed to work fairly well, and even if all our visitors are on diets Mark will eat them afterwards, the puddings not the guests, obviously.
When we went out to work in the afternoon Lucy helpfully made some cakes as well, flavoured with butter and vanilla. We arranged them on the lovely gold and plastic diamond cake stand that we bought from the gypsy at Appleby Fair last year and put them on the windowsill to keep cool, they look brilliant.
I am quite sure it will be fine, in the end the food is the easy bit. Having a happily companionable evening is the thing that counts.
It is of course bank holiday, so we are working tonight, and will be working all of tomorrow afternoon, so everything that can be got ready now has been got ready. We will just be able to dash back home and lay the table, and hopefully everything will go swimmingly after that.
Except there are still the dogs to worry about.
I took the picture from my taxi this afternoon, so I have got some evidence of good weather to cheer me up tomorrow. If you go to the page via Google search you should be able to see it.
