It is still morning and I have started writing whilst I have got a quiet five minutes.
I am sitting at the Respawning point for the game of Capture The Flag.
This is a game played around the Midland Hotel by teams of Nerf gun shooters.
It is not organised by the hotel. It is our own game.
The idea is to find the hidden scarf whilst shooting everybody else. If you get shot then you have got to come back to the Respawning point. You are not supposed to shoot the other guests or the chambermaids.
I have hidden the scarf and begged the chambermaids not to tidy it up. They are Eastern European and had some trouble understanding, but in the end accepted that I am a guest and therefore to be indulged.
Despite the size of the hotel I can hear the charging about and yelling from two floors away. Every now and again the lodger and the children appear, squeaking and giggling. The other team, which is Mark and the lodger’s friend, Irish Mike, are nowhere to be seen. Number One Daughter has gone to the gym for some peace and quiet, and we are encouraging Ritalin Boy to be noisy and riotous in the meantime.
I don’t suppose Theresa May had such a good time when she came here for the Conservative Party Conference.
LATER ON:
I did not mean to stop there, but was halted by a particularly noisy firefight, brought on by an hotel electrician telling one team where the other was hiding. Mark and Irish Mike captured the flag, or scarf, if you are literal, and the other team thought that they might have a shoot out to see if they could rescue it, but they couldn’t, and there was a small but riotous incident which the housekeeping staff kindly decided to ignore.
I have come back to this at midnight, and I am very grateful to the me that I was this morning, for leaving me the present of an already started diary entry.
This is because I have drunk so much that I can barely see the page. It is not a page, it is a flat portable Apple product, but it does the same job, in a cleverly twenty-first century sort of a way.
I have drunk glass after glass of wine, and when I closed my eyes just for the smallest moment just now, my eyelids were stinging so much that I opened them again quickly. I am intoxicated, full of dinner, and joyously, painfully happy.
We have had the nicest day, full of friends and looking at the city. We had Ritalin Boy in our care for a while, whilst his parents were busy doing other things. This was made far more interesting by the small detail that he has become a dragon quite recently, although it is a secret and nobody must know.
I promised that I would not give it away, and he explained about the difficulties and discomfort of having wings and a tail tucked under his clothes. Unfortunately as a dragon he was beset by a wish to set people on fire, which in the real world seemed to translate into spitting into their ears.
We went round the Christmas markets, and to Waterstones, and eventually decided that shopping with a dragon was too much effort, and retreated back to the hotel.
The dragon’s company was soon mitigated by the arrival of his Identical Twin Cousin, and the two of them disappeared into corners to whisper and giggle and plot rascally things. We sighed with relief, had an early glass of wine, and then when the children wanted to go upstairs and draw pictures, thought we might have a little snooze.
This worked brilliantly until Ritalin Boy realised what we were doing, at which point he commenced a sort of indoor knock-a-door-run-away, in which he tiptoed over to the door, banged on it and then dashed back to the table. By the time I leapt up from my doze to admit the non-existent guest, he had safely returned to his seat and was peacefully drawing pictures of dragons in his notebook.
In the end his parents reappeared to take him swimming, Mark went to play some computer thing with Oliver, and I went for a bath.
I love the idea of baths, in our household all heat is produced by a colossal amount of effort, sawing and hauling wood and stuffing it into the fire, and I have got no intention whatsoever of wasting that on heating water only for it to gurgle down the plug hole half an hour later.
Therefore a bath is a marvellous luxury, and I enjoyed it very much. I stayed in until I was bored, and then got up to shower the soap off. I thought I had been in there for ages but when I checked with my watch it had been slightly over five minutes, my boredom threshold is clearly not great. I was glad that I had not had to spend half an hour being alarmed on behalf of my fingers and the chainsaw to achieve it.
We went out for the evening, which was when I got myself into this awful state.
It was not an awful evening. It was a lovely evening, at a splendid International buffet, by which I mean that they had Chinese things, and curry, and Yorkshire puddings. It was brilliant food, and enlivened by Number One Son-In-Law and my friend Kate playing juvenile games with fish made from strawberry jelly. These were marvellous fun, because we played them last year as well, so we were very pleased with ourselves for establishing a real Tradition, in fifty years it will be a ritual, performed by people who never saw the original, but who will roll up their trouser legs and bow to one another and get on with it in all seriousness.
Lucy spat out the fish, although Oliver had more success. I have Hopes for his future, he has a certain tenacity about him.
There is nothing in the world happier than being in beautiful places with interesting and friendly people.
I want you to know that I am stopping writing not because I have run out of things to say, but because Mark is snoring, my eyes are hurting, and I am longing to be asleep.
I am very drunk indeed.
It has been a wonderful, marvellous day, full of sights and sounds and smells to delight the senses, and I am more contented than I can say.
All the same, I am not looking forward to the morning.
