Post-party blues

From just a handful of our closest friends, to a party that threatened to be gatecrashed by all of Boyfriend’s office colleagues, partners, their children, and their friends…we spent all of Friday night in panic-mode. “Tell me: how many extra people have you invited?”, I said, “ummm just a few, but I couldn’t say no, it could be an extra ten people”. “WHAT?!!”

Saturday morning arrives. Boyfriend sets to work tidying the flat, while I try and make a cake. It was supposed to be a “kick-ass” cake, my French friend who bakes seriously delicious cakes said in her email. I had fun making it, but when it came to turning the cooked, slightly over-golden-browned, cake out of its tin I realised baking still isn’t something I’m meant for. The top half fell out of the tin and instantly crumbled into a million useless pieces, while the rest of it stayed resolutely stuck to the top of the cake tin, laughing at me. Luckily a good friend who shares similar baking-disaster stories picked up a delicious fruity, ice-cream cake from the local bakery.

By mid-afternoon friends started to arrive. It was beautifully sunny and hot. The flat looked great (apart from the dirty underwear strewn across the bathroom floor we’d forgotten to tidy) and the food looked delicious too. We had candles everywhere, good music, a photo album, and everyone seemed to get on well. Later on,when just the hard-core guests were left, conversation turned to stories we could remember from our childhood. Boyfriend took to the floor. First came the story about throwing loads of deodorant cans on the bonfire and ensuing fireworks….ha ha, very funny, most friends said. Then came the time Boyfriend tried to dry his socks in the microwave and set them on fire. Oh dear, they said. But then, the corker. Boyfriend and his younger brother were playing a game. Each of them took turns to pretend to hit the other one on the head, with a hammer. Boyfriend says to himself, “I wonder what would happen if I really hit him with this hammer?”. WHACK. Brother drops silently to the floor. Boyfriend then runs to get his dad and tells him younger brother hit himself on the head with the hammer. Oh the deception. Ha hah ahh ha, our friends laugh, this time a bit more cautiously, not really knowing whether this was a laughing matter or not, thinking that he must have been very young at the time. “So, how old were you?”, one says. “Oh about fourteen”, Boyfriend says giggling. Stunned silence. All heads turn to me. “Did you know this before?”. “Ummm, yes, but I didn’t know he was fourteen! Oh God!!”. Why oh why do you always find out about these things in company?

Housewarming party

Next week, after about two months of living in our nice big flat with a terasse in Brussels, Boyfriend and I are having a house warming party. By holding it on a weekend which is attached to a bank holiday, we are not doing too well as at least half of our guests can’t come. Maybe this is a good thing. With food, drink, music, candles, chairs and other things to organise, this could be fun. Keep checking for an update….

A few words about Boyfriend

Let me introduce you to Boyfriend. He’s Welsh (as you may have guessed) but without a Welsh accent. Just a northern twang. This is something which troubles him from time to time: “I wish I sounded more Welsh. Maybe I should start using a Welsh accent.” He likes: talking to himself — right now, in the background, I can hear him talking to a candle. “Don’t you just love watching a candle inside a jam jar, then cutting off its supply of oxygen. It looks just like death,” he says with a disturbing smirk on his face. He also likes cats. One moment I’ll be walking down an ordinary residential street in Brussels, where we live, holding his hand, and the next he is on his knees looking underneath a car (parked, luckily) after seeing a black cat, singing “hellloww, do you want to come home? now, pleeese.” It takes me a while to drag him away from the poor terrified cat who is definitely not willing to be Boyfriend’s newest friend.

Less dangerous activities he likes include feeling smug when someone just misses the Metro while he is comfortably on the train, then watching that person’s angry, dismayed face as the train pulls out, taking pictures of girl scouts, and knowing every lyric to every Beatles’ song ever. I decided, stupidly, to challenge him on that last point. We were sat at a studenty cafe with rainbow coloured chairs somewhere in central Brussels drinking mint tea one afternoon. I picked what I thought was a less-well-known Beatles song and got him to tell me the lyrics. Honey Pie (my favourite), Blackbird, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer - he knew them all, and not just the chorus.

Boyfriend is excellent at getting himself into situations that other, more practical, people probably would be able to avoid. Map reading is definitely one of his least developed skills. Ask him where north is and he’ll probably say something like “ummm, which way is the wind coming from?” This is, undoutedly, a theme that will reoccur in this blog. Other things he has been known to do include dropping his ipod into the bath (he was reaching forward for his watch, forgetting that his headphones were attached to something - and then hearing the ipod slip with a gentle splosh into the water) and window shopping - meaning taking a close look at ladies’ underwear and not realising the shop assistant was standing in the shop window until he looked up and saw her scornful face.

Meeting the not-so-small family - for the first time

Meeting your boyfriend’s family for the first time is one thing, but when that means meeting two brothers, one sister, sister’s boyfriend, grandparents and Most Adored cat, let alone the parents, it’s quite another experience. On top of this, the family house is right at the top of Wales in a relatively inaccessible village, at least compared to where I come from just a one hour train ride south of London.

Imagine: It’s winter. You’ve just spent a lovely Christmas day etc with your family in surroundings you know like the palm of your hand (or do you?), all is easy and relaxing. After rising at the crack of dawn, you’re on a train from Winchester to Birmingham. It’s sunny, the flatish countryside of southern England races by. But the further north you go the thicker the clouds become. By the time you’ve reached Birmingham and changed to Crewe, waited nearly an hour in the pouring rain to get on some train to the Middle of Nowhere in Wales — a train which has “request stops” - yes, you actually have to tell the conductor which station you are travelling to and ask him, kindly, to make the train stop there — you can feel the beginnings of a heavy cold scratching at your throat. Two hours later, you’ve met boyfriend at the station, been driven home by his Dad who seems keen to talk about the weather, but not the usual “terrible day today,” more like, “this low pressure has caused some heavy precipitation today, don’t you think?” and now you’re at the family dinner table….

The First Encounter with boyfriend’s family went well. You didn’t knock over any glasses of red wine, tell inappropriate jokes followed by extended silences, or find the only tough bit of meat in the stew loving prepared by Mother, that you then had to regurgitate. Phew. In fact you can’t remember much of the rest of the First Encounter because your cold developed into something nasty and you spent a large part of the time asleep, asleep in the back of the car with mouth open and making a loud snoring noise, or pretending to be awake.

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