After watching Obama being sworn in as President of the Free World, I had a drink with a new friend at The Electric which seemed the perfect thing to be doing on a cold Tuesday night in January and I had been looking forward to it with ridiculous levels of excitement.
'So is it a date?' asked one of the office Indians.
'No, it's a drink,'
'So it's a non-date, date.' She persisted.
'It's just a drink.' I said definitively. Lest we not forget I am a woman admired for her mind.
And in case the message needed to be hammered home, Claudia Schiffer was leaving the club as I arrived, a child in fairy wings on one hip, and upstairs in the bar a few other yummy mummies were shepherding offspring out of the door after what was obviously a West London birthday party of a sprog of the rich, groomed and famous. One of them was Mariella Frostrup but since I’m not the most plugged in of spot the sleb players, hers was the only face I recognised. In any case, I was much too busy using my startlingly sharp mind to dazzle my companion who sat so far away from me that we were practically using semaphore to communicate as he huddled further and further inside the depths of his chair (that keeps happening to me - why?).
Obviously my charm offensive was working.
Three drinks and no supper later I teetered out for the long walk home, changing my shoes in the street before striding out and eventually arriving home, cold, damp and starving, half an hour later. The house was in darkness. Youngest daughter had gone to her father, eldest was at work until 11.00pm and my son was slinging bottles of WKD at that well known metropolitan nightspot Vodka Uprising in trendy Acton until 3am. It was to be the first night I spend alone at home in the evening for months. I could hardly wait. I went straight to the kitchen, opened a package of strained-through-the-knickers-of-Cypriot-Virgins Halloumi from Waitrose's How Much Are You Willing to Pay for Cheese Range (brought by the ex who has a bigger shopping budget than I), took some pesto from the freezer (home made, this might not be the classiest sandwich there's no skimping), along with Sainsbury's Basics pitta bread (okay a teeny bit of skimping), sliced some tomatoes and layered it all up together before whacking it into the panini press. I looked at the bottle of vodka for a second, or maybe five - tops - before pouring myself a stiff glass of London Tap with a slice of lime. Then, while the bread was toasting little tram lines into its surface and the cheese was bubbling into salty, melting, deliciousness filling the kitchen with the fragrant scent of basil and pine nuts, I went next door to the sitting room to put to resume watching the BBC 24 coverage of Obama, The Second Coming. As long as I didn’t have to listen to that dire bloody poem again it was going to be Praise Song for a Sandwich and a pleasant night watching ball gowns on Telly.
I switched the light on.
What the…?
I couldn’t quite make sense of what I saw which was loads of white stuff covering the floor and a dust haze hovering across the room like a desert sand storm.
I blinked and looked again, half expecting a jeep with a machine gun on the back, but no.
Instead I found most of the sitting room ceiling strewn in large two inch thick chunks all across the floor, with a one meter wide swathe lying on the sofa exactly where my head and back were still imprinted upon the cushions within easy reach of the remote control and where, had I not gone out to meet my friend for a drink, my oh so brilliant mind would have been crushed to late Victorian lathe and plaster pulp. I think next time the drinks should be on me. If I can coax him out the back of the chair that is. I'm not sure how impressed he will be with the whole accidentally saving my life thing.
I called my ex who gave me a list of things to do and people to call to which I replied with my own single instruction: get here. He did and we spent the rest of the evening picking up parts of our house which I always knew was tumbling down around my ears, but not quite so literally.
The rest of it collapsed this morning.
