This Product May Contain Nuts

I’m having a great deal of trouble typing this because some twat tipped a whole gin & tonic over my keyboard on Saturday, and the top three rows of keys are all sticky. If I could restrict myself to typing things consisting only of the letters z x c v b n & m, then I’d be fine. For some time now I’ve had a suspicion that I do too much entertaining; now it has been confirmed. All anyone gets from throwing open their doors is a trashed home, groaning sacks to be transported to the bottle bank, and neighbours whose disturbed sleep causes them to cast you black looks in the corridor the next day. Might be some time before I do that again.

It’s been one of those weekends. Both daughters were home – staying with their mother – and I joined them for lunch on Saturday which was opened with champagne and closed with a round of ‘mad dogs’ (a powerful concoction first discovered in Poland). This was following an evening on Friday when a friend & I had watched the film version of ‘Cat On A Hot Tin Roof'. As if Elizabeth Taylor’s heaving bosom and Paul Newman’s smouldering blue eyes weren’t heady enough stuff, the prolific guzzling of whisky by said Mr Newman seduced us into believing that we should do the same, and it became a very late night indeed.

Back at my apartment, Saturday evening turned into a riot. It became more difficult to recover from the delirium tremors on Sunday, having lost an hour’s sleep from an already short time in bed. However, recover we had to because my father was celebrating his birthday by taking the entire family out to lunch. I had written a rather cheesy poem – an ‘Ode to Jimmy P’ - which I read to the assembled crowd. Both he & my mother were very touched by this, and the rest of the family thankfully didn’t notice the poor quality of the writing and concluded that I am a natural performer with flair, charm & wit. How wrong they are.

On Sunday evening I went for a few quiet drinks with a friend. Firstly we encountered a man who succeeded in masquerading as the stereotypical ‘pub bore’ without even being drunk. He spoke in incomprehensible metaphors, made even more unfathomable by his dense foreign accent. My friend and I decided to hide from the crowds by removing ourselves to an obscure pub – only to be confronted by more lunatics. We were approached by a strange man who pretended that we had previously made his acquaintance (we’d never seen him before in our lives) and what’s more, that we knew all of his friends too. He sat down as if to settle himself for the evening and so, because he was interrupting our conversation, I asked him to stand up again and depart. Later, a woman approached me who seemed to think that I could solve a very personal problem she had. No introduction, no ‘excuse me’, just: “Right, I’m in a serious relationship, okay? But he’s bastard, right? Well...”

Is it something about the way I look, do you think?

Horace said this: It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.