Drunk

Right.

The thing is, tomorrow is my birthday and I am sorry to have to explain that I have started celebrating a bit early.

I will tell you all about today in a minute, but first I have got to explain that I have got lots of things to do tomorrow and so because it is almost my birthday tonight my friend Elspeth and I thought that the thing to do after being friends for the last thirty years would be to go out together and have a quiet party together.

Mark went out to work to earn some  money whilst we did that, and the problem was that it wasn’t an especially quiet party.

After a while it got really quite loud.

We went across the road to the lovely bistro and had pizza and drank nice wine, and as we drank more and more we got talking to the girls at the next table who were a group of mums with newish babies, which they had very fortunately not brought with them, all out together to drink wine and forget the dreadfulness of looking after a new person.

We were on our second glass of wine, so we very helpfully, but possibly a bit loudly and enthusiastically, gave them all the maternal tips we could think of.

I hope they were drunk enough not to remember any of them, because I forgot to add the rider: ‘oh, and if you actually do this then school will ring Social Services,’  so with any luck they will forget everything we said to them because I have got four children and if my parenting style were to be summed up by all of them it would probably say something along the lines of ‘optimistic but a bit confused’.

Anyway, the nice thing about being fifty, which I am now since it is after midnight, is that I don’t have to care at all, because I am now a real grown up, and it doesn’t matter at all what anybody in the world thinks about me, which at this actual moment is probably just as well.

Mark took Elspeth home when he came in from work and found us almost at the end of a bottle of Prosecco at the kitchen table. I think that when you are already drunk when you start drinking Prosecco you can’t at all tell that it isn’t champagne, and thus the economy benefits are astounding.  Anyway, he kindly took her back to her house in the taxi because we had had an awful lot to drink and she could just about walk but she could not have reasonably have driven since it isn’t the nineteen eighties any more.

It was a lovely night, and came after a lovely day.

Mark buys me flowers for my birthday because I like them and it is not too problematic, not like buying a cherry red cardigan from Littlewoods or something, which could be wonderful and perfect or excruciatingly embarrassing, depending on all sorts of things that he could not fairly be expected to know the first thing about, like whether it is acrylic or cashmere and whether it is long and hangs nicely or buttoned up with too many plastic buttons and pockets with acrylic frills.

Littlewoods is a minefield. We stick to flowers.

We don’t even hedge our bets on that one, because he took me to the florist and I chose my own. I have got a book about flower arranging out of the library and decided that I would have a jolly good go at making my own centrepieces and posies and wreaths, but even though I wasn’t drunk then it is a lot harder than it looks.

Anyway we chose lots of very nice flowers, and after that he had got no money left, which is why he had got to go to work tonight, and it was even worse than that because his car was almost out of fuel, and I took the last bit of money with me to go out birthday carousing with Elspeth and he had got to drive really slowly and carefully with the fuel light on until he had earned enough to buy some more.

I am very glad I am married to Mark. I have got myself into an inebriated state and he has earned enough money to pay for all sorts of things and also taken my equally inebriated best friend home.

I, on the other hand, am a riotous fifty year old drunk.

Happy birthday to me.

I will write something sensible tomorrow.

xxxxx