It is the day of The Dinner and I am sitting on the taxi rank.
I think I have probably done all the necessary flapping about, ably assisted by two daughters and Mark. However, the thing is that it is bank holiday weekend and we really can’t afford to miss it, so we set the table and hoovered, and shoved the shepherd’s pie in the oven and went out to work.
It was just starting to be daylight when we went to bed last night. It will not be very many weeks until we will be hiding under the duvet from happy birds making a racket on the washing line when we are trying to get to sleep. We had had a long, and of course full of tourists, busy sort of evening, which is always ace when you get to the cashing up bit at the end of it, we felt very pleased with ourselves and resolved to pay some bills before anything more interesting turned up.
It was quite a nice evening really, nobody was sick or tried to run away rather than pay the fare, only one person called me rude names and she was so drunk it was hard to be sure what she was going on about anyway.
I had to leave one customer lying in the middle of the road, which was mildly troubling, but he staggered out of the taxi and then thought he might have a lie down, and promptly fell asleep. I am not up for trying to kick start sixteen stones of intoxicated customer, and he had already paid, so I just left him there and assumed he would be all right, which probably he was since nobody has reported any corpses this morning.
I listened to a millionaire telling me about his regret that his much-younger wife, although very beautiful, had turned out to be a bit dim, which I really thought he should have noticed before they got married, and somebody else telling me about being the middle one of nine children, and one chap had been taking something called MDMA and could hardly talk at all, just dribbled. Lots of people were only going round the corner and one delightful chap gave me a ten pounds tip, for which I was suitably grateful: in short it was a fairly straightforward Saturday night.
We were woken up this morning by Number Two Daughter bashing around downstairs as quietly as she could having returned from sliding ecstatically down Scottish mountains for the weekend. The dogs were very pleased to see her and charged about barking excitedly whilst we groaned and tried to carry on being asleep for a bit longer. She declined an invitation to join us for dinner, and went off to work, leaving us to try and organise the house for a dinner party before we had to go to work as well.
Lucy sailed downstairs at about lunchtime whilst we were trying to find space to open the table wide enough so that we could fit six chairs round it, and remarked that the house was very homely and lovely, but that the guests were going to wonder where the rest of it was. In the end we moved the table into the living room and put the coffee table and the rocking chairs in the kitchen, which looks a bit unexpected, but is fine, I could get to like it, it gives the house an original flavour.
We laid the table with our best Age Concern china and the wine glasses that we had that matched closely enough for nobody to notice, and set out the gorgeous crystal brandy glasses loaned for the occasion by Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma, who has got beautiful taste in things like that, and produced them for us in a tidy plastic box neatly cocooned in bubble wrap. I thought the glasses were very nice indeed, they had a pleasing pattern cut into them, and sat comfortably and roundly in my hand the way a glass should, and it might take me some time to remember to give them back.
LATER NOTE:
Well, it all went splendidly well. Number Two Daughter broke the ice by chatting animatedly about skiing in glamorous places until the first glass had had time to take effect, and then we were away.
The dogs behaved beautifully, which was such a relief it was almost disappointing. Every time they went anywhere near one another my eyes, and Mark’s, and Lucy’s and Number Two Daughter’s, swivelled after them in breathless anxiety, but apart from licking one another’s ears they were entirely restrained. In the end they went to sleep on the sofa, and one of the guests said: “What good friends your dogs are,” and we all grinned weakly.
I don’t know what dinner tasted like, because I get into such a state when we have got visitors that I can’t tell: but everybody ate it, and had second helpings, and lots of pudding, and then cheese and brandy.
Of course it had not occurred to me in advance that they would be as nervously anxious to impress us with their suitability as escorts for Lucy as we were to impress them with our respectable middle-classness, but of course they were, which suddenly made me feel a lot easier.
By the third glass of wine we were all suitably impressed with one another, and our tongues loosened. Indeed, apart from a brief moment when the two dads discovered a mutual interest in car engines and I had to try and catch Mark’s attention and frown to remind him not to talk about diesel injectors at the dinner table, the conversation flowed, and we parted on splendidly good terms.
In the end I have had a rather lovely time.
I might have a headache tomorrow.
