I regret to announce that this diary entry is going to be one of those all-too-frequent ones which is abbreviated due to intoxication.
Actually I don’t regret it at all. We have had a lovely evening and my real regret is that I did not write this first. Had I done that, then after all of the self-indulgent drinking and chatting and eating too much, I would have been able to collapse into bed in a glorious haze of fuddled weariness.
Instead it is midnight, and I am trying to write to you though a red-wine-soaked mist. Sometimes I am just a slow learner.
However, onwards and upwards, let me tell you about my day.
This was what happened.
As you are perfectly well aware, these pages have been subject to a wicked cyber attack.
A malicious hacker, almost certainly sent by President Putin, has been instructing readers first to try their chances in a spin-the-wheel lotto, or to give their bank details to a trustworthy source, or to purchase online medications for nasty genital warts.
Tonight my kindly computer-literate friend, master of coding, of FTP and SSH, of terminal commands and malware diagnostics, had arranged to come round for dinner with his girlfriend, who is my friend Kate. The idea was that he would help me set up a secure system and between us we would jolly well make sure that President Putin would never be able to get near these pages ever again.
I must now acknowledge, my friends, that any future computer-hacking disasters are actually entirely my own fault.
When they arrived, we were so very pleased to see them that we forgot all about websites and malware, and just wanted to hear about their adventures and tell them about ours.
We sat down with an enormous dinner and a lot of alcohol and talked our heads off.
We had the loveliest evening. We ate and drank and told each other lots of things, and then drank some more.. I confess that there was a point where he said: Umm, your website, you need to extend the oxymoron of the hosting dimorphic metamorphosis, would you like me to…and I said: really, how jolly clever, gosh, not now, let’s have another glass.
I am very much afraid that President Putin might be able to wreak havoc again after all.
I don’t care. I like them so very much and we have not seen them for months and months.
Of course I have spent all day flapping about cooking things and tidying up. We moved the big table into the conservatory, much to Pepper’s puzzlement when she came to visit this afternoon. I made dinner and cake, and then made lots of biscuits and things for everybody’s picnics, and when Mark and Oliver came home from work the fridge was so full that there was hardly room to put back Oliver’s uneaten yoghurt.
We had only just finished showering when they arrived, and to my absolute joy they had brought with them some ginger beer and a ginger beer plant for a present.
This means that I will be able to make ginger beer of my very own. I am very, very pleased indeed about this indeed, expect to hear more about this in entries to come.
They had not just brought ginger beer. They had brought some vodka to make it into cocktails.
This was the beginning of the end.
It was also Instant Death To Computer Literacy. By the time we had drunk cocktails, and wine, and eaten the first mouthfuls of a massive dinner, it was more than obvious that no cyber-miracles were going to be performed after that.
This did not matter in the least. In fact it was much better like that. I might not have a very functional website, but I have had a lovely time. It was ages and ages since we had seen them, and I did not want to waste a single precious social minute talking about dull things.
We had a brilliant, happy evening.
I am going to have a hangover when I get up.
I will worry about that tomorrow.
