some enchanted evening

It’s been a very strange few days…

Do you ever get those little cataclysmic periods that convince you that it would be a lot safer to make a flask of tea and some sandwiches and retire to bed for the week? (I would have considered that as a viable option at one point but you will find out why it wasn’t such a good idea in a moment or two).

It all started out quite gaily enough. I’ve started to play hockey again, I’m okay so long as I concentrate and feel better for the exercise. I never could just sit there and wait to feel better….I feel so bloody, sedentary, potato like, I’d much rather see if I can do something.

And after playing the beer always tastes better, and in the evening, after the game, I went to a birthday party. It had a cowboy theme, and a lot of the guests had actually made the effort to turn up in chaps and Stetsons, spurs and lots of leather….and some of the men dressed up too! (it looked rather like a Village People video). But la piece de resistance was the mechanical bull. Bulls in any form are not a thing we see very often in our neck of the woods…unless it’s being discreetly slaughtered in the car park of the Halal butcher on Bounces Road, but I digress.

It had to be done, didn’t it? No self respecting man can see his friends being liberally tossed at a party without wanting to join in?

My 43 seconds of madness came to an abrupt end in the corner of the room, under a half collapsed table, who’s legs, mercifully, were intended to fold under for storage. As is my wont, I’m sure it has something to do with streamlining, I flew arrow like and head first to meet my destiny with said table legs. We all agreed that I was lucky to only chip a tooth.

Have you ever wondered where the phrase “don’t you have any bloody homes to go to”? came from? I know I do. It’s going to be my catch phrase for a while. I’m not sure what it is about my place, perhaps it’s the fact my friends feel comfortable here in the belief that they can’t possibly make a mess, or the fact that I become lugubrious and relatively philanthropic with my wine after I’ve had a few drinks…but we always seem to decant to chez zoo if they feel that there’s more party to squeeze out of the night.

Which would be fine, well not fine –but not too awful, except that it’s such a clutter in the morning. Stepping over dead bodies, and fighting for a little quality bathroom time. Trying to find the dogs amongst the human detritus and separating them from pizza boxes and whatever else your friends decided they might like to eat after you dozed off.

Having said that it’s usually quite civilised. Everyone muck’s in and helps to tidy up, and to be honest by the time they’ve finished my friend’s wives and girlfriends have usually given the place something tantamount to a spring clean. Except for this weekend, it seemed as if a kind of viral, almost Biblical, plague of bodily dysfunction had visited us while we slept.

We are grown ups, we have fun and we get, occasionally rather drunk. Then we sit and play silly games, good humouredly, en masse and then we fall down and go to sleep.

On this Saturday two people felt it necessary to vomit. One of them was apparently busy missing the toilet by a full yard when the other entered the bathroom and was left with no alternative but to utilise the bath. They must have kept each other company honking and hooting for quite a while (from the sheer quantity of technicolour yawn that they produced….and left behind!!) before shaking hands on a job well done and taking themselves off to their eventual repose on the sofa or floor…they wouldn’t fit in the bed, they don’t know how lucky they were.

The bed was occupied quite early on by, we will call them Lightweight and the Waterboy to save face, though goodness knows why, I actually considered having posters made on Sunday morning. Lightweight tells me that Waterboy sometimes gets a little disoriented when he sleeps in a strange bed. Now I’ve known this particular ‘Aquarian’ for a lot longer than Lightweight even though they have been married for 2 years, I know for a fact that “disoriented” is an inadequate term for what Waterboy gets when he’s had too much to drink….hence “you’re welcome to use my bed” seemed like a good idea at 3am.

Not so at 9am the following day. It appears that Lightweight suffers from chronic spontaneous combustion, and that Waterboy selflessly tried to extinguish her by using the only liquid to hand (literally)…or he’d had that “thank God I made it to the toilet dream”….or, he had indeed made it to the toilet only to find it occupied by regurgitating were-geese, and decided in a drunken stupor that the bed was a viable option.

To be fair to the girl, Lightweight did her very best to cover for him, some dreadfully half arsed story about making a cup of tea and then spilling it….and to be fair to Waterboy too, he came clean, as it were, when I asked him if he had peed in the kettle as well.

But, as I said we are all friends, and we all mucked in, some more sheepishly than others, to clean the debris out of the loo and the “tea” stains off the bedding…and then we all went out to breakfast.

Where, incidentally, we found out that we had slept through the largest explosion in Europe since the second world war. We were 10 miles away, and it woke people up in Holland.

Which is nice?