yum

Mr and Mrs Very Rich were knocking back the wine, and chortling, so presumably it was in pleasure rather than mere search of oblivion.
I was still giving thanks that, on their arrival, I hadn’t bobbed a curtsey and mumbled, “welcome to my ‘umble abode, sirr.” Nor had I snatched, too greedily, the stunningly beautiful and enormous bunch of flowers and the 2 bottles of wine which aren’t the stuff of 3 for a tenner.

For, in a moment of temporary weakness (other alcoholic beverages are available), I had seen my hand straying towards the mobile and from there texting Mrs VR asking if they’d like to come to supper and, be careful what you wish for, with obscene haste, they were saying YES. Just like that, in full-on, shouty CAPS. Finally I understood Victorian ladies and their propensity for fits of the vapours.

“What should we bring?” she asked.
I understood; they weren’t used to consorting with proles and needed a clue to our primitive little ways. Or, God, perhaps she thought I needed help, that I needed courses bringing.
“At the risk of sounding like an Alcoholic Annie, just yourselves and a bottle of wine,” I said.

Round about now 2 more ‘yes’s pinged into my phone. Bugger. T12 (T13 since yesterday) was having little mates for a sleepover that night, too. I felt like the Buckeroo donkey with a couple of extra pans on my back.

Mr and Mrs V Rich's house is the one with 2 downstairs lavatories, both featuring fireplaces; with a laundry room; an ironing room; a food room; a boot room; a utility room; a room for the children; a 70’ kitchen; 3? 4? 5? receps; a conservatory – but not as we know it. 3 staircases. I've not been up any of them.
If they’re not just off to South Africa on holiday, it’s because they’re on their way to Australia. Or France, or Canada, or Switzerland, or Cyprus, or the Caribbean or Tunisia. And that’s just in the last year. They are delightful, but there is something about such disparity of wealth which unnerves. They wouldn’t see themselves as rich at all. The pecking order totters upwards ever unto Midas.

We’ve been shovelling friends through, you see, those to whom we owe dinner. Ten at a time for weeks. We’d let it slip. Never again, not in such industrial quantities. (Despite any gross churlishness exhibited here, let it be understood that I am extremely fond of my friends. I just wish cheese sandwiches was all it took. I doubt, please? that I'm alone in this.)

Since there was the requisite vegetarian due, I was settling for dinky little canapés (of which I am pathetically proud), then a fish curry and a prawn curry, followed by pavlova, and a chocolate/coffee/cardamom thing that I made up by chance which sounds disgusting but isn’t.
The idea being that the lot tastes really quite good, but looks effortless. In order to look effortless I had had to start deveining prawns at lunchtime, a grim task which makes my legs itch. But all in the name of looking just knocked up.
Just knocked up had gone on the week before, too, or rather it hadn’t.

Another 10 had shuffled through the portals. A celiac one of the crew that time, along with that weekend’s vegetarian. This always makes me fret – is wheat in rice? I find myself asking, in eggs? Will she be dead by midnight and us kept up late waiting for the ambulance.
All was going well until doling up time when Mr Veg sidled up and said, “You do realise that Mrs Veg is a vegetarian?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, waving a patronising and boastful paw over my old friend the fish and prawn curries.
“No,” he said, and, friends, never has a No been invested with such lashings of pity, scorn and embarrassment, a small word which can burst at the seams with meaning. “No,” he said with studied patience, “A vegetarian. Not a [mere] pescatarian.”
“Oh,” I said, hushed, “a real vegetarian?”
“Yes,” he said. “I should have said. I saw you ladling meat [meat??!] in and should have said.” Then, “I thought you knew? You’ve always got it right before.”
Got it right.

FUCK! What I thought I knew, from a summer’s long experience, was that all vegetarians ate fish these days, besides not being above a spot of bacon or even chicken if the mood or vino took them. But no, I’d found a purist; serendipity explaining away past success. Buggeration and bollocks to it all.
“Can you just knock up a risotto?” he asked.
I love that ‘just.’
“I’ve just ‘knocked up’ this,” I said, “No!” (Believe me, it takes something approaching skill to insert italics AND 'quote marks' and bold into one short sentence.)

Knocked up, my arse. But fortune, or rather my earlier ineptitude, forsook its smirk and momentarily smiled on me. I spotted the little pile of vegetables I’d prepared for the curries, and then duly forgotten to sling in, and chucked them hasty into a pan, and swirled them round with a spoon.
“A bit of garlic?” he suggested. “Some bouillon?”

Some bad-tempered garlic was produced. I pretended to study the label of something or other in a bottle to eliminate the evils of a stray percentage of anchovy, claw or hoof and then shook some of that, whatever it was, in as well, and tipped the lot onto the rice.

“Milla,” hailed Mrs Veg, oblivious to my panic and waving a pleased fork rather wildly, “this is lovely.”
'Lovely' clearly means different things in vegetarian-land. It means serviceable, functionable, edible. All the ‘-ble’s. Just no bull. Ho.

Spooling forward, the day following Mr and Mrs Very Rich’s dining experience chez nous, I bumped into her, out with the dogs.
“Thank you so much!” she trilled, grasping my wrist. “We had a marvellous time!”
I preened everso slightly and might have gone a little pink. It had gone well, tank feck and God knows one thing I am alive to is nuance of disaster. An over-cooked prawn can give me conniptions for weeks, living on cruelly in that grim tease, my memory.
In the distance, Mrs Gossip loomed near. I dreaded her knowing that she’d been left out of something. Well you would, with a name like that.

“Shh,” I hissed, edging my head in explanation. What a waste, I was in need of a wallow, some basking in praise, some run-throughs of how wonderful I was.
She swept on. “But I just must say, I had no idea Mr VR was so very drunk! He nearly fell in the stream on the way home.”
I laughed. It was funny. A pitch black field, a stile, a stream, a bottle suddenly regretted, a slither of an expensive loafer. Besides which I had barely being able to lift the clanking recycling box that morning.

“You couldn’t tell,” I said. “He seemed fine.”She took this for proof that I, too, had but a hazy recollection of the night before. Wrong. Fear sharpens the senses.
(Mrs Gossip was all but upon us.)

“Well,” she said, collapsing her hands with a slap on her thighs, “that’s a relief, because he was SO embarrassed at talking about … you know … money!”
“It was fine,” I said – it had been one hell of an eye-opener. Fascinating.
She looked appalled: I had remembered! Oh, yes. Someone else’s turn to don the hair jacket of The Night Before.
“Very interesting,” I said, but what does it matter? “I’ve never been so close to all those millions. So many noughts, and none of them mine.”
Mrs Gossip beamed the face of one alive to a nugget, a scrap of a story. Mrs VR just goldfish popped her mouth, widened her eyes in a silent scream, and smiled the tight smile of one exposed.

"What are you 2 chatting about?" asked Mrs Gossip, with a caring syrup I have grown to dread.
"Nothing," we both said. A little too loudly.

gone but not quite forgotten

It being boiling hot, F9 has been drifting round in his dressing gown. Seems he needs no excuse to pop it on, but since this is the child who saw fit to wear 5 t-shirts and 13 pairs of shorts to a barbecue on the hottest day of July one year, despite a face like a tomato, I am no longer surprised.
“I want to be toasty!” he wailed, when I got a fit of the grapples and try to wrestle it off.

He makes you feel boiling just to look at him, and the pinkness of faces all round after the undressing fisticuffs is very princess.
“I need comfort,” he said.
I was sad, too. We all are.

For T11 has gone off on a week’s residential fun (archery to zip-wires) and we have been missing him terribly.

My missing peaked at about 2pm on Monday, which was crazy given that I wouldn’t normally even have picked him for another hour or so.

And we'd only been apart 90 minutes. I had spent the morning trying to make his MP3 player work before conceding that I was too old to continue and couldn't be bothered. I was staring, like Lolly, at bits of metal and plastic which I was never going to understand, and instead loaded all of his favourites onto my iPod Shuffle. It means that I will never be free of The Ping Pong Song but who cares.

So come 2 o'clock, I started mourning and panicking, imagining not gap-5 days, but gap years.

"Best thing for him," my mother said briskly. Try as I might, I cannot imagine her mourning my absence much.
“We have to let go, and at least we know they're all having a nice time; and that helps,” said wise, sensible, grown up friend, stating the bleeding obvious and making me feel foolish.

Something I compounded by clutching my hankie, my comfort rag, and whimpering, “I know all that, but I don’t care. I care about me.”

“You just need to relax,” she said in a way that made me appreciate F9’s need to carry a gun at all times. Just what IS Reasonable Force, I wondered, and what Provocation?

Meanwhile my aunt phoned to say that on Sunday evening, my cousin J had had her 4th baby (the others are 5, 4 and 2).
The house, friends, could not be smaller.
The car needs to be upgraded to a sort of bus.
The husband does not drive.
Even J now thinks that that enough was enough and she was only a day in.
Listening to myself wailing about being down to one, I pictured the nappies, the trailing round of 3 tinies and a baby. The laundry. If contemplating that lot doesn't exhaust you, you are no friend of mine. I glanced around and thought that things weren’t so bad.

I went outside and planted up some tubs for the front. No one came to ask for the computer password to be typed in or roll their eyes over my supper suggestion.

Lolly played football without any bossy child removing the ball from her busy jaws. For once, her game reached a natural conclusion. She collapsed, exhausted from actual toil, rather than it being the only option left to her, bewildered by the irritable re-ownership of the ball, uncertain, with the dim look of one suddenly bereft but of what, she's never sure, but stranded to contemplate instead taking up MP3 management. She snored on the ground, contented. (Her promotion to goldfish grade is pending: she's yet to prove her worth since she can't even swim in circles.)

Grabbing the optimistic end of the stick and things were suddenly all quite pleasant.

Oldest boy, whatever his name is, is missed, most indeedy. His luscious kissable skin for starters; the way his tiny freckles startle you and make you pleased because to see them means you are close to him, and he is so very beautiful that this is most gorgeous, flattering almost. And don't get me started on his eyelashes. My eyes brim...

Please don't tell me I'm relaxing, or I'll twitch for a weapon, but meal times are certainly calmer, there is no sly kicking, one of the other, under the table.

Internecine war does not exist with only one side available for duty, a side who has no need to unleash his inner pterodactyl and lapse into strange squawks (one of many tics to prompt a sad shake of the head from my mother, and a "he's not the ticket, you know") or shriek "T11 did it!" I am forced to wonder if, perhaps, indeed, F9 is right and T11 does do it, sometimes.

With no arguments to pacify, there has been no need for a soothing glass of wine. Really. All week. Easy sobriety.

F9 has no one to tell to shut up or to get lost or to be furious with for closing his tractor catalogue. Moreover F9 is into his 48th hour of speaking properly, without going into enraging loonytunes mode, although he does ask E with OCD frequency if he is contagious. Of what I dare not ask.

There is no peri-teenage ringtone nonsense.

At school, the granite features of two grim matrons fiddling with whiteboards lit up in happy memory of the day their children had left home.
“Sad, yes, for a bit,” said the grimmest, trying to look thoughtful and caring, “but the relief, too!” She and Not So Grim chortled.

It being Thursday I could afford for a teeny tiny chortle to stagger into life around my own lazy chops. After all, he's back tomorrow and the limbo waiting will be over. The nest will be full again and my bad temper can swarm back all content.

F9 looked up at me. "Toasty!" he said, in his best Northern accent.

"Toasty," I said.