I went racing at Newmarket on Friday night. Dad had a couple of horses running, neither of which won, but coming in third and fourth they didn't disgrace themselves. Kate, Aly and I decided we were born to the lifestyle of sitting in the owners enclosure drinking champagne bought by other people. Aly suggested that we pool our winnings at the start of the evening. She's a clever girl as I won on the first race and then Kate on the third! Luckily she pulled it out of the bag on 'Tax Free' and we came away splitting a very respectable £115. Unfortunately, we had the taste for champagne by then and 115 quid doesn't last very long when Bar 62 have sold out of everything apart from vintage champagne and so it is unthinkable that you wouldn't buy that and would lower your class of drink later on in the evening...
According to my dear husband, I don't make enough of an effort to come in quietly when I've had a shandy or three so he offered to sleep in the spare room on Friday night so that I wouldn't wake him up. I'd already changed the bed for my ladies who were arriving on Saturday so he wasn't allowed to and I headed out the door at 5pm promising to come home late and loudly. Lucky chap. His main complaint is that I turn on every light in the house so I dutifully stumbled around the in dark instead probably making twice as much noise. He should be grateful I wasn't giggling, hiccuping or vomiting however, as all of the above have been known to happen on occasion.
Saturday morning I packed my husband and children off to Redditch and indulged in a couple of glasses of medicinal wine over lunch as I waited for my five best friends from Uni to arrive. We haven't been together for 9 years, as the last time was Lynsey's 30th. She was delighted to keep being reminded of this as we each individually clocked on to the fact that she must therefore be approaching 40. Poor old Clare is gestating a sproglet at the moment so I can imagine that we were suitably shouty and dull by about 9pm. All credit to her though she was up until nearly 2am when she firmly packed everybody off to bed.
We dined in 'The Cock' and were waited on some of the time by someone I used to teach GCSE drama to. This caused much hilarity at our table because although my St. Albans friends are pretty used to me falling (drunk) over ex-pupils, (and in fact Shelley is particularly adept at removing me from those sorts of situations if I'm a little too merry), my Uni friends still struggle I think with the concept of Nikki Stocker being a proper actual teacher, (don't really blame them). There was therefore a little bit of interrogation of this girl who then pointed out to me that a boy who used to be in my form and also worked there was seriously trying to hide from me. I left the poor chap alone, for a while anyway; after the third tequila rose I think there might have been a little bit of name-shouting and waving. Ugh.
It wouldn't be a night out with these girls without laughing till you cried (and for some I think, till you did a little wee-wee) and crying until you laughed. I stuck my foot right in it by drunkenly announcing that a girl we went to Uni with had died a few years ago (I'm available for hire to ruin all your parties). We all knew this, or so I thought, but apparently we all actually didn't. One of our table ended up in floods of tears and was beside herself for about 15 minutes until we thought it would be cathartic for her to look at a picture of the dead person in happier times on Facebook. At that point she realised it wasn't actually who she was thinking of and the tears dried up. Honestly, we are bad and nasty people.
My kids will be back in a few minutes now and it is time for me to stop pretending I'm 21 again and grow back into Mummy. Regression every once in a while keeps me sane though I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment