medley of veg (part I)

phew. this may take a while. but the longer you leave a diary the longer it takes to catch up, so i might as well start now.

but crikes, have i got a lot to catch up on.

first things first. i got my essay done (hooray!) at about three and handed it in, then dashed back, made some lunch, had a very quick shower and started packing to go home. my dad arrived twenty minutes early (grr), so it my last minutes at york were all hurried goodbyes and snatched hugs. it was quite a quick journey home, i was there is just over an hour, and just as i flung open the front door i was confronted by a large glass of red wine and ordered to swig it as quickly as possible before we had to dash off to lee’s birthday dinner. ah. it was good to be back.

i was a bit apprehensive about the dinner, to be honest. after all, it was being in the company of a lot of people i didn’t know, and the people i did know were the head of the celebrations and i didn’t want anyone to feel they were obliged to be looking after me. but my eldest brother nick and i arrived at the restaurant at the same time as lee, his girlfriend and their friends. virtually all their friends are girls, and extremely beautiful ones at that – it’s pretty obvious that they were all part of the ‘popular crowd’ at school (i wasn’t, i was too nerdy). one of them is an actress – you might know her if you watched heartbeat the sunday before last, she want the head of a groups of mods or something (i’m not sure, i didn’t watch it). after a couple more glasses of wine, i managed to set my charm switch to ‘on’ and was entertaining half the people there. heh heh.

then we sat down to dinner, (and a mighty big table it was, there was eleven of us after all) and drank a lot and ordered food. by the time it arrived (fillet steak with rosemary potatoes, with a ‘medley of veg’, hilariously pretentious). i imagine it was gorgeous, but we were all getting through the wine very fast so i can’t really remember, although i do remember us sporadically (and loudly) breaking into ‘happy birthday’, much to the annoyance of the other diners, i expect.

we stumbled over to a nice bar called square one at a time i can’t remember, and i ended up having about five tequilas, and very nice they were too. i also ended up meeting a fabulous woman called jackie (going out with my brother’s friend) – thirty-three but looked ten years younger, stunningly beautiful, slim, black, incredibly intelligent woman. she’s at university right now (doing that holding down a job and having a young son i don’t know how), so we bonded instantly and spent the rest of the night together. if i met her now we probably wouldn’t have a clue over what to talk about, but you know some nights when you meet people and just click? it was like that.

but the night took a real sour turn soon after. i don’t really know the details or want to go into them exactly, but my brothers ended up getting into a scuffle with some little sod outside the bar. god, i was mortified. i’ve never raised my fist to anyone nor they to me, and it was bloody awful having to watch them act like complete scumbags when they’re not. i burst into tears, partly from shock, partly from humiliation, partly from being very worried about my brothers, and partly from the five tequilas i drank in a very short space of time.

it was closing time, but the night certainly wasn’t over yet.