Mon
05-Jan-2004

the world has turned and left me here

I'm back in London again after ten days in Devon with the family. It's been rather marvellous. Matt and I headed down on christmas eve, and we all had our biggest present overload year ever! Everyone had thoughtfully found things for everyone else, and we all drank champagne as we tore off bits of wrapping paper and exclaimed at how shiny everything was. We ate an enormous lunch, and then had goose on boxing day, and then Rachel made all kinds of nice stocks, rillettes and soups.

A couple of days later, Adam, Kayla and Henry came to stay, and me, Alex, Adam, Josh and Henry played some heavy Dungeons and Dragons. The adventurers descended into the Monastery of the Old Order, where the marilith (six-armed demon) that they had freed from her 900 year imprisonment had descended through the nine levels of the dungeon battling the black dragon living on the lowermost level and releasing all kinds of disruptive extraplanar creatures into the dungeon ecology. They were sorely tested, and at one point Josh's Dwarven character was slain by an angry young white dragon. The others rescued the body and found a glowing green statue that had the ability to regenerate him to life, though he wound up with much of his skin regrowing as chitin as a result.

At new year, we had a fantastic party. Adam and Henry's parents came along, as well as various notables like Abbie, Kate, Charles, Miranda and Steve. Alex's friends Dan and Matt also found their way down into the wilds of Devon, and Rachel invited Jeffrey who designs her magazine and his family. We all started drinking cava at about four o clock. By around seven, we were all hopelessly pissed, and had to resort to non-alcoholic drinks and other such strategies to avoid passing out by midnight. It was unashamedly drunken, and featured various classic moments, such as Josh letting off a few fireworks Matt and I had given him for christmas around nine o clock, dancing to the power of the blue Weezer album and worshipping the god of American alternative rock, dancing to the inspired Beatles version of Twist and Shout, with my mother turning it up so loud the speakers blew, torrential rain and wind around midnight which made it impossible to even open the door witout being blown back across the room and slammed against the wall like some kind of X-Man character, thus rendering a second waves of fireworks impractical, and of course a loud and emotional rendition of Auld Lang Syne. By three in the morning, Colin was making so-called Joshua Gins with the remaining spirits and mixers, causing already drunk people to become unnecessarily drunker. It was all great fun.

Everyone gradually departed over the next few days, and on Friday, Matt and I had a go with Rachel's new pasta rolling machine and made pasta, which we ate with garlic and chilli and oil. Josh and Matt tried out Rachel's new metal detector as well, and dug up the back garden discovering two copper coins from the reign of Thatcher, c 1986, the front half of a toy lorry, an old bullet, some metal squeezy paint tubes and various bits of wire.

We also all played a lot of table tennis on Josh's new exciting outdoor table tennis table.