Unexpected outcome

Dear everybody,

I meant to write my diary but  have become inadvertently drunk in Peterborough.

I did not at all mean to do this, it was completely unexpected. We are going to go home when things happened differently, and now I am in Peterborough and am going to feel very rubbish tomorrow.

Oh well. I am sure that this sort of thing happens in the best regulated families.

In fact it was my family’s fault. They are entirely to blame.

If I did not have a family I would probably have gone blamelessly to sleep, probably in Windermere after chugging blamelessly home,and would have woken up at seven o’clock tomorrow in nice time for Mark to go to work.

Since I have got a family I am going to wake up somewhere in East Anglia with a splitting headache and no possibility of anybody being in gainful employment anywhere.

I am possibly as happy as it is possible for a person to be. I do not see my cousins very often, still less in company with the generations who have come before and after us, usually not unless somebody is being buried.

Because it is not very often I seem to forget, every time, what brilliant fun they all are, not just my own age group, but the nine year olds and the ones who are almost ninety. 

It is brilliant fun even when somebody is getting buried, which they weren’t. Without corpses casting a damper on the proceedings it was truly splendid.

It was utterly, indescribably, brilliant fun and now I am going to have a hangover.

We spent all day getting Lucy’s new flat organised. There was a very lot of drilling and banging and sweeping and running up and down the stairs.

Lucy helped for a while, but in the end had to buzz off and be responsible for keeping Kettering free of crime, so we stayed on by ourselves.

We were almost ready to set off for home when we realised that the washing machine was not working. A telephone consultation with Lucy revealed that it had never, ever, properly spun things dry, or drained the water out, ever since she had bought it from the second-hand-washing-machine man in Northampton a year or so ago.

We did all of the usual things but in the end Mark had to take the front off and inspect the drain hose, which would have worked better had it not been for the presence of an ancient and much-deteriorated sock, surrounded by hair and hair grips and other such revolting detritus.

It was not even Lucy’s sock. It must have belonged to the previous owners.

After its removal the washing machine worked much better but we were very late.

We thought that instead of going home and sensibly going to work, we would go and see my parents and my aunty Pat, in Peterborough.  

My cousins came to join in as well. You know, or can deduce, the rest.

I think it must be Aunty Pat who is the bad influence, because we were all right when we arrived but I am terribly drunk now. 

I seem to remember that something very similar happened when she came to our house as well, about five years ago, when my cousins came to collect some dogs.

Naughty Aunty Pat. My poor cousins have got to get up for work tomorrow.

I am going to have to stop writing. It is the middle of the night and I can barely string together a sentence.

Perhaps I will be able to tell you better tomorrow. I am very sorry that this is so short.

I have got to go to bed. Mark has just almost fallen over whilst trying to wash up a cup.

I will tell you the story tomorrow.

Probably.