ME, Dinner Parties, and Other Miseries
The truth is that the ME has been biting rather hard* and is furthermore embodying its bulldog aspect as it shows no particular sign of letting go. Right before Christmas! Yaay! Decorate the tree at one-quarter speed!** More yaay! Wrap one present and lie down for half an hour! Okay, lack of yaay. It’s so boring I can’t, or anyway won’t, begin to tell you.*** I cancelled Connie again this past Saturday and if I have any sense at all I’ll cancel tomorrow too . . . but I don’t guarantee to have any sense at all. †
And it’s worse than that! Tomorrow is Peter’s birthday! †† And Peter decided to have A Dinner Party! –I think that’s what’s brought on the ME. I mean, you have people over and you put out food and they eat it, that’s fine. But A Dinner Party?? No, no, no! she wept. There will be only six of us–I know, I know, it hardly rates on the scale†††–Peter’s main bridge four plus two superfluous spouses.‡ They’re all perfectly nice people. But they’re all . . . English. And polite. We’re going to sit around and chat. British chat is an art form which I have totally failed to acquire.‡‡ The only alleviation amid the encircling gloom is that at least Peter decided to have it catered.‡‡‡ I know, this is totally unsporting and we’re going to be drummed out of the something or other and presented with white feathers. So be it. It’s still A DINNER PARTY. This time tomorrow . . . snivel. . . .
* * *
* Chomp chomp chomp. Please insert suitable sound effects. We want the full horror of the situation on display here.
** Of course Peter could do it. But he’d do it wrong.
*** Well. It’s not a total loss. I’ve been catching up a little on old homeopathic journals, although I read as slowly as I wrap^ presents. This involves lying on the sofa, restlessly punching the remote through the TV listings, deciding that there’s still nothing on, and then picking up the first one of the pile of magazines I have thoughtfully pre-provided, since there hasn’t been anything on TV in years and once I’m on the sofa I won’t be able to move again right away because I’ll be covered in hellhounds. Hellhounds like ME. They strongly approve of it. In their world ME makes their notoriously sofa-averse^^ hellgoddess go all lie-downy.
The funny thing about these guys is that Darkness gets too hot. With the whippets, once we were settled, which is to say me on the bottom and a daisy chain of three whippets on top, we were there for the duration.^^^ With the hellhounds we start out in a furry pile at one end of the sofa–Chaos usually nails the best spot first and Darkness stands there staring at me accusingly: Don’t give me that look! You want the best spot you can move a little faster next time!–but after about a quarter hour Darkness starts to pant, and then gets up–turning the Accusing Stare back on again–and flops down at the other end. Chaos and I, being the frail hothouse flowers, will probably stay huddled up together as we were, unless it’s August, in which case Chaos will also stare at me accusingly, for producing undesirable and inappropriate body heat.
^ I just typed ‘warp’. The way I wrap presents, that too.
^^ Maybe we could figure out a way to drag the sofa a little nearer the piano?
^^^ Peter has always been too fidgety for this game. He’d provide a sofa+ for the whippets for half an hour occasionally to show willing but he’s mostly too busy rushing around digging ponds and building walls and pruning apple trees and roasting chickens and writing stories, although this last can, as I know, be done on a sofa while covered in canines. The whippets adored the eighteen months I had acute ME. The hellhounds don’t know what they’re missing. May they remain in ignorance.
+ Remember the rules in this household(s) are no four-foots on the furniture unless a two-foot is there first and invites them. Mind you, if you’re going to sit on the sofa you’d better invite them.
† It will probably depend on how badly the world dips and swings when I get up tomorrow morning. Sigh. If I’m using tension on the leads to keep me upright when I walk hellhounds tomorrow morning^ I’ll probably cancel. Probably. The carrots are getting all wrinkly in the bottom of the fridge. Waaaah.
^ Not to mention the stark insanity of such behaviour
†† Speaking of wrapping presents. And of living with the Man Who Is Impossible to Buy Presents for and Who, Furthermore, Has a Birthday a Week Before Christmas. A situation I understand from comments to previous posts is far from unique. Perhaps we should have a support group and an acronym. As it happens, this year at this time I am having a visit from the ME ogre, I also have a Main Present which is sort of large and floppy and fighting down my fellow feeling I tied it up with string to give it some kind of shape I could conceivably put some warping paper around. I assure you it looks very warped indeed.
††† Some time I should tell you my Ultimate Dinner Party from Hell story. This was when I was newly over here, and meeting Peter’s old friends for the first time. Peter is still insisting, almost twenty years later, that these are very very nice people and they just lost it, for some reason, that particular evening. Well, they lost it conspicuously and comprehensively enough that their names on a Christmas card–almost twenty years later–still make me blanch.
‡ And two crucial hellhounds, of course.
‡‡ But then I’ve always been someone who’s floored by the question, How are you?, because I can’t learn to say, Fine, and you?
‡‡‡ The original menu had some damn raspberry thing for dessert. I said I wouldn’t come unless there was a chocolate dessert. So Peter rang up the nice lady and she changed it to chocolate. Rats.
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