Tea time tales...

We've had a flurry of birthdays in our little group of late, coupled with some lovely birthday tea nights out in own after work to celebrate. But tonight decided to stay closer to home and go very local! There's a new little Italian restaurant just opened in our village and we thought we'd give it a try. However, no matter where we go in the world and no matter how good the reviews are from everyone else - it always seems to be our group who end up saddled with catastrophe and bad service. Something ALWAYS goes wrong. It's like a law - we must have faces that say 'yes, please treat us badly, we don't mind at all!'

I have a whole host of appalling service stories. Taking the top spot however was the time when a waitress tipped a whole plate of spaghetti bolognaise down my friend S's back, ruining her dress. No apology. The saving grace was that it was cold spaghetti I suppose, so no 3rd degree burns - although the fact that she was serving it cold in the first place is not very comforting. And she tried to short change us. Tonight wasn't nearly as bad as that, but it wasn't great. I'm not going to name names as it's a very new restaurant and is entitled to some teething problems, but really. Why would you employ staff who can't be bothered to listen to what customers order, and make it up as they go along? (Two of our meals came out wrong, even though we repeated the order twice as the waitress seemed confuzzled.) And we'd all finished by the time my friend G's dish came out. And when it did - yep, you guessed it - it was also incorrect.

Somehow I don't think we'll be venturing into that restaurant for a wee while. Especially as I now have the knowledge that my friend J has spent the remainder of the evening since we parted ways and went home locked in the bathroom with her head down the loo, saying hello to her pasta again. How delightful. And it may just be that I know this fact now, and I may just be being paranoid and looking for things that might not be there - but now I've got a funny queasy feeling too. Great. I could really do without a night of crying huey in the bathroom.

Acceptable in the 80s...

Carnage, cocktails and costumes - the three Cs of a successful party! I feel surprisingly fine today. Maybe it's because we've only just finished clearing up the residual crap so have had something else to concentrate on all day - or maybe it's down to the fact that I gave up on the Del Boy cocktails and started drinking the non-alcoholic plain pineapple juice when it all became too much round about 11:30pm when the 80s dancing competition ended? Hmmm. Anyway, it was like, so totally awesome.

Fashion Wheel, Kerplunk, Spirograph, Screwball
Scramble, Operation, cocktail umbrellas, armbands,
neon...how many 80s relics do you remember?

Everybody made the effort to dress up which was brilliant. Neon Barbie and Ken (matching sun visors and vests!), Madonna (more bracelets and lace than you could shake a stick at), The Hoff (with curly wig, chest hair, leathers and orange skin), Alex Drake (Ashes to Ashes), the 1984 LA Olympics, many generic 80s costumes in varying neon colours featuring legwarmers and awful make-up - and we had two iconic 80s doctors in our presence - Ghostbuster Dr. Egon Spengler and Doc Emmett Brown, to bring a bit of science to the proceedings. Egon's proton pack was made from a cereal box wrapped in a bin liner with a vacuum hose poking out of it. Genius.

All you need for a DIY 80s party:

Food
Anything full of sugar, colourings, and leftover from primary school birthday parties - fairy cakes and crispy cakes, crisps (Space Invaders and Monster Munch), party rings, jammie dodgers, rocket lollies, pickled onions and cheese on sticks. I topped it off with a Mr. Men birthday cake.

Cocktails
'Del Boys' - pineapple and coconut juice, Malibu and pineapple slices (from a can of course). 'Club Tropicanas' - orange and mango juice, peach schnapps and lemonade. Decorate both to the hilt with mini umbrellas, those plastic monkeys, glittery streamers on sticks and fruit in the glass.

Music
My crap 80s iPod playlist came in VERY handy. Gather up as much electro-pop and synth as you can. Think Wham!, Cyndi Lauper, MJ, The Boss, A-ha, Kylie, one hit wonders plus film soundtracks. And make sure you have an 80s dancing competition.

Costumes
Several people picked an 80s character or icon, but most dressed in general 80s attire. Armbands, legwarmers, off-the-shoulder tops, big hair, crimped hair, lace, bangles, stilettos, and - would you believe it - as much neon as you could possibly wear.

Games
We all raided our garages to procure such relics as Fashion Wheel (still with its original coloured pencils!), Operation, Rubik's cubes, Kerplunk, Spirograph and Screwball Scramble. I also found a bag of Trolls. The drunken Kerplunk tournament was a particular highlight, however.

Decorations
Afore-mentioned bag of trolls came in handy to decorate the room. As did streamers and balloons in as garish-as-possible colours, luminous table confetti, Barbies, My Little Pony, (I think someone may have brought a Care Bear?) and just general neon-ness.

Dude. It was like, so totally tubular.

Happy birthday to me...

Howdilly ho. And happy birthday to me! (Well, yesterday.) I'm on a week's holiday from work and intend to string this birthday lark out as long as humanly possible to mark (or mask) the fact that I'm now fast approaching 30 and should be behaving in a bit more of a grown up manner. Or something. The flood disaster is almost all repaired (woohoo!) and the damage was not nearly as bad as we first thought, so now I'm knuckling down to trying out recipes from my new Hairy Bikers cookbook and that all-important task of planning my birthday party. (I don't have to grow up straight away, do I?)

So, what's it like being on the other side of 25? It's not so bad. I still consider myself to be mid-twenties. (I can get away with that for another year, surely?) And just to be contrary, so far there's nothing grown-up at all about my planned partay. The theme is the 80s - so we're having an all-out kitsch fest. 80s games, 80s clothes, 80s music, 80s cocktails, 80s crap party food - the works. I need to make a trip into some neon-clad shops very soon for supplies. I have a feeling this party may hurt everyone's eyes with the sheer amount of neon that'll be on display in the house.

Actually, I am being quite grown up at the minute - not only are The Other Half and I visiting his mum in hospital everyday (she's had a horrendous sounding operation to remove some vertebrae and have metal rods inserted in their place - and is on the mend), but I've pro-actively remembered to make myself an appointment with my doctor without receiving the shameful 'your 3-year check-up is now overdue' letters through the post. (Girls, you know which check-up I'm talking about. It's that not-painful-but-no-less-unpleasant procedure that's necessary yet icky.) So, I've got a nurse invading me with what can only be described as a miniature loo brush to look forward to tomorrow. Oh joy.

Masquerading as a luvvie, dahling...

It's been quite a while since I frequented the theatre. So long, in fact, I can't actually remember what the last performance I saw was. Tonight, a motley crew of us dusted off our high-brow hats and celebrated our friend's birthday with a visit to the theatre, dahling, to see An Inspector Calls. Oh, alright - it was via the pub, but hey - who says luvvies can't scoff curly fries? The play was interesting and the set looked fab (I remember seeing the old black and white flick many, many moons ago and loving that so I was trying not to compare the two in my head), but our seats were right up in the nosebleed section and were so high up that the people on stage looked like beetles in period costumes. Oh well, I suppose that's what you get when you masquerade as a arts critic on the cheap.

And that's apparently all I have to say this evening. I bid you goodnight.

Will you have a cup of tea, Father? Ah, go ON...

Times are hard. So hard in fact, that a group of friends and I have taken to hosting our own festival instead of buying tickets and trekking to the back end of beyond. Except this is a festival with a difference – it’s (DIY) TedFest 2009! And it had its first outing this weekend. You see, there's a birthday in our midst - my pal S, who is now no longer the nice round number of 25. And she's a big fan of Father Ted (who isn't? It's fantastic!). We really wanted to go to the actual TedFest in Ireland, but as we're all skint - this do-it-yourself job is (almost) the next best thing.

If you've never seen Father Ted before - hang your head in shame. I strongly recommend that you watch it. It's classic. Here's a bit of a scene-setter: three incompetent Irish priests - Ted, Dougal and Jack - live in a decrepit old parochial house on crazy Craggy Island with their bizarre housekeeper Mrs. Doyle, and get into all manner of mishaps and misunderstandings with the insane folk of their parish. So simple, yet it's got some of the best lines and catchphrases from comedy - ever! Anyhoo, I digress.

The night was a huge (if surreal) success and everyone made an effort with the costumes and scene-setting. S got into character easily as Mrs. Doyle the demented housekeeper, and served everyone their drinks from teapots all evening. We each brought a selection of sandwiches with us so a mountain of bread became the table centrepiece (again, if you've never seen the show, this will mean absolutely zilch to you); The Other Half did wear his new wig and take a pet brick along for company; and the room was generally filled with priests, nuns, weird villagers and Lovely Girls contestants. And we played the game I spent Saturday morning creating out of an old notice board, some embellishments and some pictures I found online of babies with inordinate amounts of hair...'Pin the 'tache on Pat Mustard's Hairy Babies'! A good time was had by all.

Pat Mustard's (the hairy, randy milkman of Craggy Island)
offspring...before they were studded with moustaches in a
'Pin the Tail on the Donkey' manner.

I'll be steering clear of sandwiches for a long time though, that’s for sure.

What's shakin' baby...

Things have been a tad hectic of late, so here's the craic from this week in easy-to-digest chunks:

The seven year itch?
Not a sign of it, huzzah! On Monday, The Other Half and I realised that it was 7 years to the day since we met. (Whilst very inebriated at a party.) Although not our 'official' anniversary (we started dating on St. Patrick's Day), we celebrated with homemade spicy Thai burgers. Well, why not?

The bathroom saga continues
By god, does it. Nothing is ever simple in our house - it's going to take a lot longer to finish than we all thought due to fiddly little jobs that are taking ages to do. The plus side is: we now have working lights in there, yessss! Now for the ceiling, the vanity unit and all the tiling and grouting...

Hospitals smell
The Other Half had his annual heart check-up at l'hopital on Thursday (hole in the heart baby with another weirdly named defect I can't remember how to spell). This was doubly good as they said all is well with him, and because I tagged along - this got me out of a hideous networking event with work. Groovy.

Birthdays times two
It was my Dad and his twin sister's birthday on Tuesday (happy birthday, Daddy) and last night there was a family get-together using the occasion as an excuse. (Not that they need one.) Thankfully this time, family members refrained from horrifying me with all-too-detailed tales about distant relatives' personal lives. And we had cake. Yum.

The wig hunt
Next week we're at a party for my friend's birthday (and a sort of housewarming in her new flat, too). The theme is Father Ted, probably the funniest show in the world ever bar none. I'm now rooting through all manner of junk in the house in an attempt to assemble costumes, but we still need to go on a wig hunt to replicate Father Jack's hair.

Blades of Glory and the Crash Test Dummies...

Yesterday I wound the clock back ten years and became a giggly teenager once again. And it felt great! I haven't laughed as much in one sitting in ages. A group of old chums and I decided to go ice skating for my friend C's birthday. (And as a sort of anti-Valnetine's Day thing.) Even my rickety, never-been-on-skates-before Other Half was persuaded to give it a go on the proviso that we're all pretty much novices, and since it'd been about a decade since any of us last hit the ice we'd all be as bad as each other. Give him his dues, he did try. And lasted all of four minutes before he did a lap of honour (clinging to the edges for dear life) and went off for coffee and to stand and point at us instead.

None of us fell over, we got a bit of speed skating going on once we all found our balance, and one mate, dubbed Christopher frickin' Dean, even attempted some fancy turns and arabesques. Show off. Not bad for a bunch of fast-approaching 30 year olds, all in all. But we had earned a drink or several by the end of the session and headed off for what turned out to be a very funny, very drunken lunch...which lead to impromptu late afternoon drinks...which led to an en-masse gathering at a mate's house...which led to muchos singing and wine until the small hours. The unplanned things are always the best. My head did not agree with that statement this morning, however.

And as for Christopher Dean, well - he kept breaking out into song throughout the day (if you can call his repeated renditions of the Crash Test Dummies' 'Mmmm mmmm mmmm mmmm' song, that is). In the pub when the rugby was on (cleared the bar). In the taxi going to our mate's house (almost had to get out and walk, the driver was so harassed by the ongoing verses). By the 14th performance in our mate's house, we knew it was home time. And I can't for the life of me remember WHY it was so funny or what it was in aid of. But I do know I never want to hear it again for a very long time.

The Golden Girls do tapas...

For the first time in a long while, I forgot all about work over the weekend and had a bloody good time. On Saturday it was my Other Half's birthday, and although he was going out early sans me (to - eurgh - a football match of all things, but it was his birthday and that's what he wanted to do, so hey ho) we still had presents and breakfast in bed before he headed off until the small hours of Sunday. But this left me to do one of my favouristist things ever - cook! And not just any old cooking - cooking for the girls! That's the best kind. Friday night I went shopping for lovely things. I'd decided to make tapas so the trolley was filled with lots of Mediterranean eats. And the ingredients for sangria. Oh yes, this was gonna be a good 'un.

Saturday daytime was great - a cloud of chorizo smells filling the house; me singing along badly (I can't sing any other way) to the radio; feeling a bit Nigella-ish and looking forward to a good girly gossip. They didn't disappoint. My sides hurt for hours with giggles. Over dinner (which, true to form, there was far too much of. 'Serves 4' my arse. I could have fed a stadium) the wine and the gossip started to flow. I think the tale of the horrendous blind date my friend S had with a monotone Irish dude (reminiscent of The Most Boring Voiced Priest in Father Ted) and his love of chamomile tea was my personal favourite. I tried to re-tell the tale the following day to my bemused Other Half and couldn't because of the giggles.

We'd all decided to bring some school memorabilia around for a laugh, so apres eats retired to the living room to the sounds of PJ and Duncan (an inspired CD choice from friend C) and collapsed into drunken laughter over old photos and letters as the sangria was poured. Flicking through hysterical letters from friend J, my awful photos, drawings from S and poems from C, we realised that we were all in fact evil cows at school and are going to hell because of it. Anyway, it was so worth it. I haven't laughed as much in ages. And - bonus - I hoped the two pints of water (and the ice I was trying to find for about an hour before twigging it was in the freezer) I downed before I went to sleep would dilute the sangria in my bloodstream enough for me not to be hungover on Sunday. And it worked - hurrah! I am invincible. And will be living on tapas for a week. If the Other Half doesn't polish it all off, that is.

Sometimes all you need is a girls' night to make things right. Here's to another 50 years of them at least. And to lazy Sundays watching Police Academy 4 on the sofa. There is no end to my classiness.