Party animals

We are just having a short entry, I think, this evening, because I am very busy.

I am, like the classic failed Cinderella who got home with both her shoes still on her feet, back on the taxi rank, and extravagant wines, fire-lit dancing in enormous marquee tents, gowns and flowers, are already fading to become a distant memory.

Even poor Oliver has had to go to work. He is looking menacing outside some pub in Bowness, I do not know which one. He might be having some difficulty in looking menacing, because he did not get in to the Travelodge until almost eight o’clock this morning, and although he dozed, uncomfortably, in the cramped back seat of the car all the way home, it might not have been terribly refreshing.

It was cramped because he was sharing it with three or four suitcases, a pile of discarded ball gowns and a picnic. My mum’s car is not very big and we filled it to bursting. I mean really bursting, we practically had to shoehorn Oliver in once all his stuff had been shoved in on top of ours.

We danced until the daylight was beginning to gleam in the northern skies. We had had such amazingly fortunate weather, the whole day was blessed with glorious sunshine with scarcely a breath of wind, and the evening, lit by Gordonstoun’s ever-present braziers, was blissfully starlit and still.

I have no idea how much we had to drink. I have a vague recollection of becoming increasingly sozzled with Matron after dinner, in the way you do when you suddenly realise that the person next to you is lovely and loveable and your world is full of lovely happiness together. We ate a magnificent dinner, truly magnificent, washed down by champagne, about a bucketful of red wine, and, later on, port and coffee. I can’t even remember what we ate, except it was all excellent.

We were at a table with several other Duffus families, because of course the families from the other houses weren’t in the least interesting. I don’t remember what we talked about but it must have been a very lot because I was completely hoarse this morning.

There were Scottish reels, and a casino, which we missed because we were still dancing, and we finished up drinking coffee in the North Room under the benevolent gaze of the portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh. We forgot to say goodbye to Oliver, but that didn’t matter, because some rash parents had offered their barn for the entire sixth form to end their evening, with music and more food and presumably rather a lot more drink.

Kin-wai’s parents kindly took us home, because Mr. Kin-wai wasn’t drinking, much to his wife’s satisfaction, and even more kindly, they got out of bed at six to collect Oliver and Kin-wai from their all-night post-party barn-bash, and took them to MacDonalds for breakfast. Oliver staggered happily in some time later, exhausted and beginning to look a little dishevelled, but happy, and collapsed into bed fora couple of hours, until the time arrived for checking out of the hotel.

We dashed downstairs for breakfast then, which we had missed, but the very nice chap on the desk kindly gave us the leftovers and didn’t charge us, probably out of completely misplaced sympathy for our white exhausted faces. It was a good thing he did, because it probably mopped up the last of the alcohol, and we squished ourselves into the car for the long, long, long journey back

…and the unpacking.

There was a lot of this. We haven’t finished. We just knew that we had spent every penny we owned, and several that the bank owned, and we needed to go and earn some, so here we are.

It has been a busy week.

There might not be a diary entry tomorrow. I think I might need to give my fingers a rest.

We will have to see.

PS. The Weather Gods got their own back for yesterday. I checked the weather forecast when I got home and it was going to stay clear until tomorrow morning, so I hung the first load of washing outside, at which point the heavens opened like the hose on the Duffus Water Slide yesterday afternoon.

I suppose it might have been funny to a certain sort of humour.