140809 what doesn't kill you............

So this latest escapade, dear readers, does not involve sex. Well, unless you count a handful of half-dead Christopher Reeves-style winos telling me how pretty I look in my dress, whilst staring at my legs. She’s still got it.

To keep my aspirations high in this quaint seaside town, I embarked on a project with my friend Obstrovsky called Come Dine With Us.

Let’s get the locals to show off their talents, while tucking into a delectable three course meal in a BYO restaurant, we thought.

The planning was sporadic but thorough. I felt like a bore when holding a risk assessment meeting, but it will always be the unknowns that bite ya.

And bite they did! The fabulous Obstrovsky held true to her faith in humankind when I suggested that the bipolar manager’s friends could be twisted stewed old oddballs.

Our guests arrived – hers rather frumpy and overkeen (who was that tap-dancing pianist?) and mine supportive as ever, slightly grimacing at the prospect of what was to come.

Then his arrived. Late. Demanded the duck not on the set menu, which set my partner on fire.

“Look!” I hissed through grated teeth

“If they want to think they can ruin this thing then they can try, but I’m going to let them stew in their own juices”.

A bit of the old magic sorted that out – we opened a book on who would die first, Biggs or Thatcher, and I bonded ludicrously with some old tart who named herself Nellie Dean.

That was probably the most successful part of the night, though only a quick gesture on our part – be who you want for the evening, design your own badge.

Of course, I am the lovely lady godiva, but one of the old duffs wouldn’t answer to anything other than ‘loser’. Oh, how I enjoyed shouting that one in his face when demanding that he sat down.

I think it was at the point that someone spontaneously started dribbling out ‘my old man said follow the van’ that I realised we had given birth to Frankenstein’s monster. To my appallment, everyone joined in and kept telling me how great it was. I suddenly realised that we had drop-outs from Britain’s Got Talent, not the folkie talents we had dreamt of.

My day job is with the socially disadvantaged, and this was going to be one hell of a night shift. So I drank a whole bottle of red wine before the main, assumed a tragic alter-ego, and let hell break loose.

I remember, (just about), commenting to my dining partner ‘Orson Carte’, that one needn’t obtain special mushrooms nowadays to incur unnameable flashbacks at a later date.

Obstrovsky disappeared for the last two hours, leaving me and the other twenty to honk out all manner of twangy guitar tunes with Sandy the ‘chef’.

And they all keep talking about the next time…………………………

Snatching our cash from the till, Obstrovsky and I wandered stunned through the night streets, among showers of perseids hidden in the clouds, and did a quick stocktake.

‘I hid for the last two hours. You were brilliant. And cunning’, she told me.

Turns out a few of my other faces were required to round up the lost and drunken sheep, and she had been closely scrutinising my inauthentic actions.

One thing was clear. Never again. At least, not in a zoo where the owners friends are complete losers.

Favourite moment? The former owner of a stinkers pub reciting an epic poem about a lion called Wallace, (hopefully it was meant to be funny cos I was pissing myself), and an old trussed up turkey staggering outside for some stale air, finally having thought up a name for herself at near-midnight. Grace Jones. I’ve got the pic to prove it!

xx