I think that the time may have come to have a moratorium on alcohol.
This is not because we are not enjoying it. It is because we have had some very splendid evenings indeed.
I am writing to you at the end of one.
In fact I am writing to you at the end of two.
Obviously yesterday was Mark’s birthday. We celebrated with cake and presents and a nice dinner, after which our friends with Pepper the dog came to see us, so that Roger Poopy and Pepper could gallop about knocking things over and bark at one another.
Whilst they were doing this we all drank far too much and occasionally shouted at the dogs to shut up.
We had a brilliant evening. Our friends are thinking about buying a camper van and wanted some advice.
Obviously we can talk about camper vans all night. Mark even has a slide show of pictures of our camper van in its rustiest days, set to music for the purpose of entertaining anybody who can’t find an excuse to slope off.
They were a very patient audience and we had a whole box of wine. They sat through the slide show twice and did not once remark on how dull it was. This was not a good thing because it just encouraged us to embark on more and more boring stories of rust, and breakdowns, and rotted roof timbers. We told these in ever-increasing detail as we got further and further down the box of wine. Regular readers might recall the days when I wrote on these very pages about such matters, day after tedious day. We can be fantastically boring and obsessive if we are not checked in the earliest stages. The children know best how to do this.
Anyway, we spent all of last night consuming masses of wine and telling people boring stories called things like: When We Took The Windscreen Out Of Our Camper Van.
Fortunately they had been drinking as well and did not seem to notice too much.
We all rolled out some time after midnight, and we felt a bit fragile this morning.
We had not even learned our lesson today, because this evening we had an invitation to dinner.
Our next door neighbour has currently got a girlfriend from Ghana. Mark took her up to the farm the other day to give her some off-road driving lessons. This was because she needs to be able to drive because all civilised human beings should, and she had only had lessons with some patronising supercilious twerp of a brother, or cousin, or something, who told her that it was just simple and she was an idiot.
Mark does not like patronising and so they went off to learn how to change gear and find the biting point without women’s equality being an issue.
In return they invited us for dinner this evening.
She cooked us the most splendid African dinner of jollof rice and ginger chicken. I cook sometimes but this was truly marvellous. We ate and ate and ate, and washed it down, as we very often do when meeting our neighbour, with champagne.
We continued washing it down for some time afterwards.
I do like our neighbour. He has never minded anything that we have inflicted upon him in the least. He has stoically endured Oliver’s drum practice, and our accidental floods in his living room, and the time when we set his house on fire, two times actually, and that we have not given his ladders back for so long that now he has to pop round and ask to borrow them. The view from his garden is absolutely rubbish, being full of our conservatory and Mark’s solar panel towering over the wall in the back garden.
Tonight he said that he hoped he did not get on our nerves too much, and wondered, anxiously, about the annoyingness of his wind chimes and the incursion of his ivy over our back wall.
We told him sternly that we would put up with it, we supposed, but that it had better not be the thin end of the wedge.
We have just rolled back home. It has been the most brilliant evening.
All the same, it might be time to consider some abstinence.
I didn’t remember to take a picture so I asked Mark to take a picture of the conservatory. Unfortunately it has gone dark, sorry.
