Your very good health

I drank rather a lot more than usual last night, due to the gas running out.

My grandson and his charming (I'm not allowed to say 'shaggable' these days, so 'charming' will have to do - it's much more appropriate in any case) girlfriend were due to come round for dinner, and I was half way through cooking it when the flames of the cooker dwindled down to nothing.

I had already drunk more than I had intended in the pub, because a friend who I had done a favour for insisted on buying me beer to say thank you, and I was already having the traditional glass of wine as I cooked.

Our street is possibly the only one in town not to be fitted with a mains gas supply and both of us have always hated cooking with electricity, so we have used a bottled butane cooker for ever. I knew the gas was getting low (I have known for weeks) so I had designed the meal (Porc Dijonaise) to be done on a couple of top rings rather than the extravagantly wasteful oven, and continued the age-old practice of optimistically ignoring the impending mini-crisis by not ordering any full bottles. Then, like I said, it ran out.

I thought this was a good excuse to drink some more wine, so I did, then phoned the boy to arrange to meet him at Pizza Express, knowing that I had a two-for-one voucher waiting to be printed out on the computor. Then I drank some more wine whilst printing it out.

We got to Pizza Express and I drank some more wine. For some reason, I ordered a salad rather than a pizza. I never order salads in restaurants, so I put this mistake down to having drunk more wine than was wise for me to do, and when the salad arrived I pulled out the couple of minuscule bits of chicken which the menu said it was bursting with, then left the rest to make room for more wine.

Being the only one whose mouth was not full for the entire course of the meal, I had to concentrate hard to stop myself making inappropriate comments about the boy's girlfriend, whilst at the same time entertaining everyone with my witty comments and generally interesting conversation. I ordered more wine to keep the machine running smoothly.

At the end of the dinner, I noticed that the charming girl had hardly touched her single glass of wine, so - having run out of my own - I finished it for her, then we paid the bill (or half of it) and left.

We wandered back to the house where there was a large quantity of wine waiting for us, and I put a massive dent in one bottle of it as we chatted around the kitchen table.

My last memory of the evening is of letting off an enormous and unpleasant fart in the cramped confines of our compact but adorable kitchenette, then I awoke at about 3.00 in the morning to find myself alone - H.I. having gone to bed and the two young things gone home in a taxi a few hours before. So I poured myself another glass of wine and ambled over to the computor to look at god-knows-what.

When I awoke this morning, I dashed over to the iMac to make sure I had not posted up anything unacceptable on the blog, and was relieved to find that I probably had not, but if any of you have found a filthy or suggestive comment on yours, please delete it for me would you?

I now have to drive to Bristol to get some more gas, then make sure we eat twice as much food tonight as we normally would, because I know that we are going out for dinner the following evening for H.I.'s birthday. I might even have a glass of wine to celebrate.