I have started to write this a bit early. This is because we have got visitors coming, and I shall be drinking wine.
We all know what happens when I drink.
In fact I have just noticed that actually I am longing for a drink already. I do not know if this is because of the excitement of having visitors, or because of the happiness of a night off, or because actually I am just a drunk.
I would like to reassure you that I have not had a drink already. No matter how lovely red wine would be I am not yet at the frightful stage of life when you have got to swig half a bottle of brandy just to pluck up the courage to face the washing up. I will drink sociably later on with our visitors, and if they do not drink, as I suspect they might not, I shall drink unsociably by myself and then wonder tomorrow what sort of frightful rubbish I have talked whilst Under The Influence.
I should not be writing diaries. I should be emptying the dogs and having a shower. I would like to have a shower but I have cleaned the bathroom and it will be very irritating to mess it up again.
I could empty the dogs, not that they are showing any inclination to be emptied. I opened the back door this afternoon so that they could go outside if they wished, and they both looked out at the weather, shuddered and climbed back on the sofa. They are not allowed on the sofa but I have been too busy to argue.
Obviously I have spent much of the day preparing for having visitors. It is nice to have visitors, because it makes you do lots of things that otherwise you might not bother about. I have made an apple pie, which has used up some of the sack of apples in the conservatory. Even if we all have massive slices of it tonight there will still be plenty to feed Mark for the rest of the week.
At the time of writing I am not entirely certain how I am going to serve the apple pie, having just discovered that all of our middle-class china bowls have left home with Lucy. I have left to me two options, the first being middle class china soup bowls with handles. These are perfectly functional but which will make me look as though I don’t know anything about not serving pudding in soup bowls. This is partly true because I do not know why you are not allowed to, only that you are not, and you will look unsuccessfully aspirational and deserving of ridicule from the true-born middle classes.
The second is a matching set of elderly pudding bowls which have got Winnie The Pooh on them, which I have not managed to break in the last twenty years despite being completely indifferent to their well-being. These are also perfectly functional but not remotely middle class.
These would not make me look aspirational. They would make me look as though I was about to serve Rice Krispies with a side order of lollipops.
It is a Quandary.
I will let you know what happens. I will have been drinking by then anyway.
I made swirly bread and the Turkish thing with eggs on the top. I had a small but nevertheless intensely flappy setback this morning when somebody from Germany informed me on Facebook that our guests were vegetarians. I almost despaired and went back to bed, but discovered in time, and to my massive relief, that it was a Fib.
Naughty, naughty continentals.
LATER NOTE:
Of course it was a lovely evening. My schoolfriend has hardly changed at all in the past forty years, except that obviously he did not have grey hair and drive a Subaru then.
I think it was a Subaru, it was dark.
It was superlatively nice just to sit and listen to their stories, of which there were many, because of course they have done all sorts of interesting things in the last forty years. They were funny and entertaining and civilised.
I thought that I was funny and entertaining and civilised as well, but I always think that when I have been drinking.
My friend writes railway timetables on computers. Mark thought that this was riveting, and said afterwards that he wished they had had more time to talk. They talked about rolling stock for a while. I did not listen very hard to that bit.
I went with Winnie The Pooh in the end.
Have a picture of some Interesting Fungus discovered on my walk this morning.
