another saturday night

now that herself has finished cleaning the blood off the walls i have cornered her and sat her down to write about last night, before she goes off and starts getting out her toolbox or something.  last night provided some good blog-fodder.  it all started when my boy came home from school on thursday with an invitation to a party.  my boy finds parties tricky.   well, not so much all parties.  more the children's/teenagers type of parties.  the invitation had a phone number on it.

"you'll have to let him know you aren't going," said herself, "it's rude not to."

"i already have," said my boy, "i said i thought you had invited a load of people round."

"but we haven't!" said herself, "you mustn't tell lies - its a rubbish way to treat your friends!"

"we'll just have to invite some people round then," said my boy, with his indefatigable logic, "then what i said will be fulfilled and it won't be a lie any more."

herself is never one to pass up the chance of a social event so she pinged off a few texts and e-mails, and made a couple of calls.  himself said he would make the grub.   this is a sound move, given herself's record in the kitchen.  it was going to be curries.

because the peeps had left it very late to invite people, on account of not knowing they were going to be inviting people rather than the usual disorganisation, many of the invitees had already made plans for saturday night.   one of himself's colleagues was thoughtlessly getting married and therefore a number of other colleagues were going to that as well, some other friends were building some patio doors and others had a special memorial picnic to go to.  when herself counted how many people could actually make it the numbers were rather small.  it boiled down to the snake-charmers and the next-doors.  and the next-doors had someone staying so they said might not want feeding.

"it will be like one of those parties where you put all your teddies round the table and pretend to give them cups of tea!" said my boy, causing herself to get rather anxious.   himself had arranged to make rather a lot of curries.  mind you, curry is something that will keep, provided it is placed out of my reach, so it would feed the peeps in the coming months.

as it happened all was well.  it is not the quantity of guests that makes for a nice evening, but the quality.  and boy, were these guests quality!  the snake-charmer and her dad arrived first.  the snake-charmer was put to work making naan bread to cook on the dalek.   this is a nifty little charcoal cooker that comes camping with us.  the snake-charmer is a great cook.  while the dough was doing what dough does it came to the notice of the grown ups that her hair was shinier than usual.

"that's the cream," she said.  it transpired that this cream was not what the hair-slayer calls a hair product.  it was the sort of cream you eat.   now i know it is easy to make mistakes when your eyes are full of shampoo.  i have seen my boy try to wash his hair in shower gel on more than one occasion.   but surely no-one has the eating sort of cream in their bathroom?  

soon all became clear.  the snake-charmer is a cook much in the mould of herself.  the cream had been part of making a cake.   unfortunately the snake-charmer had looked at the wrong recipe and had made a huge amount of icing.  at some point she will have to make a cake to go under it.  anyway, somehow quite a lot of cream had got in her hair.   shortly afterwards her mum arrived, having had to work till late, and commented on the increasingly ripe smell from the hair.  i have to say, i rather liked it, but no-one asked me what i thought.

then the next-doors arrived. they have had a visitor who has been going through a tough patch so they had been up talking a lot of the night and were mighty tired.  however they rose to the occasion, as all good guests do.  after a little persuading they went next door and collected ruby the puppy.  young ruby was so excited she forgot herself and made a large puddle the minute she came through the door.  then she ran at very high speed around the house, causing all sorts of malarky.  it all got a bit too much when she bounced onto my sore tail and i felt the need to teach her some manners.   i was removed in a rather undignified fashion when herself got hold of the scruff of my neck but i think i made my point.  young ruby went home while the peeps ate which was probably just as well, especially for my tail.

after the grub mr next-door was persuaded to fetch his guitar.   he is a fine musician.  the peeps could not believe their luck when they discovered they had moved in next door to someone who could coax such notes from a guitar.  he has a funny glass thing that goes over one finger to make the guitar sing.   the snake-charmer had a go.  you can just about see her in this picture.   you may wonder why her hair is wet.  this was because the hair smell was getting a little too high for her mum so herself washed the snake-charmer's hair over the sink.   this averted the need for the snake-charmer to get the hose out (regular readers will recall her affinity with water) as well as rendering her rather more fragrant.

anyway, some singing and playing and eating of chocolates went on for a while.  the blues are wonderful.  or possibly the blues is wonderful.  various songs were made up to fit the conversation.   the one thing that seemed not to lend itself to this treatment was the 'we've got problems with our boiler so we have to use the immersion heater' blues, which just would not scan.  but the 'i lost my snake once and was broken-hearted until i found her behind some furniture' blues were a great success.  

eventually the guests started to flag and the evening wound up.  herself looked around at the devastation and decided to leave it for the morning.   i tried to help during the night but drew rather more attention to my efforts than i planned when a plate took a tumble onto the kitchen floor.  unfortunately the one bit of clearing up herself had managed was to secrete the curries in the fridge.   mind you, last time i ate too much curry there was a rather unfortunate incident with a pale carpet and a large luminous yellow stain, so this may have been for the best.

and today we are off to a dog show!  i will not be able to enter the waggiest tail contest as my tail is too sore.   i am off to the evil vet tomorrow to have it seen to.  it has to be sorted out, if only for the sake of the paintwork...