Fun Thing # 304 - Cleaning the Kitchen After A BIG Night Out

I say 'big', what I mean is a night out where you end up feeling like a sad, mothball smelling granny who no-one wants to visit because you make them eat mint imperials and tell the same story about wart removal over and over and over. It's no comfort to me that my plans of getting older do not, as yet, include either moth balls or warts; I'm anticipating being an old woman who smells of Chanel and bitterness.

Yes that's right- bitterness. I'm giving up all pretence at being a happy, normal, well adjusted person of the sort that welcomes friends into their tidy kitchen, slowly watches it disintegrate into a glass filled, booze-smelling hell hole, and gets up early the next morning to tidy. As yet the kitchen is still a mess, I'm grumpy because I haven't had breakfast and I refuse to make it when the counters are all covered in makeup, vodka, mayonnaise and party popper entrails. Oh and I missed the bloody bins again, bane of my life that they are.

As for the night out: not much went wrong really, I'm just being melodramatic and kicking myself for a really pathetic late night drunken text (not for the first time on here either).

I've vague recollections of seeing a brank or 'scold's bridle' at some museum or another - a barbaric medieval punishment device for people who talked too much. To qualify for this humiliation the scolder would have to be...

" a troublesome and angry woman who by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours breaks the public peace, increases discord and becomes a public nuisance to the neighbourhood."*

I'm not suggesting that a return to the 'good old' days of the literal curbing of free speech is in order, or that I brawl or wrangle, or even that I'm overly troublesome. I do think I may need my thumbs chopping off. It would be for my own good.

*Pettifer, E. 1992. Punishment of Former Days. Waterside Press.

Die of Mortification - Fun Thing # 34

It's a Saturday night, you've gone out for a few quiet whiskies... which have become slightly more raucous cocktails and even, (I shudder as I write this) a verbose cherry flavoured alcopop. You've met a man who has stolen a nickname from vintage Grange Hill, put up with a matchmaking barman, and uttered in , ahem, the meekest of tones, a desperate plea much akin to Abba's 'gimme, gimme, gimme' but slightly more explicit, which results in two very old men sitting in your kitchen drinking your single malt whisky. Bottomless old men with a huge capacity for quaffing. Be careful what you wish for.

Once you've gotten rid of them (when the bottles have been sucked dry) all that's left to do is register that it's 4am, you're wide awake, pretty waxed, and (the killer and crucial 'and') it is about time you sent a text. A drunken text.

The next day you die, die, die, die as you remember (quick delete it from your sent messages, so you never have to read the terrible words ever again)... exactly what you said. And to whom. Die. Turn your phone off. Die. Die. Die - the combined weight of chagrin, mortification and horror crushes your fragile soul.

It's a good job I self deprecate so well - but it is a result of all the practise. My sageous flatmate wisely said that no one is perfect all the time, but I would settle for averaging 10% - rather than the 3% I'm currently on.

I'd just like to add.... sometimes a drunken text gets you everywhere. Ahhhhhhh.