Management has some really close English friends. They are all female, and although the husbands occasionally bump into each other, it generally is a women-only club.
This is a good thing from my viewpoint, particularly as one group meets up most Tuesdays for a ‘craft night’, which basically involves creating stuff like greeting cards or gifts while chatting away. As you can imagine, I would be a real hit at that.
Another group is two women she works with who are really great, although again, their husbands and I seldom meet. As they work at a school, they have a standing date whenever holidays start for a meal at a Thai restaurant where the food is good and the Prosecco cheap. They also do this on their respective birthdays, or whenever they get bored.
As this involves alcohol, husbands are the drivers. I pulled a fast one saying I worked first thing in the morning and needed early nights, so another husband got the short straw. Consequently, I now chauffeur them to said restaurant, which is on some obscure golf course, and the unlucky other husbands fetch. Once my one brat fetched them after being promised £10, and he said he had never before heard so much rubbish being spoken by three giggling ‘mature’ women. So my sympathies are with the guys on the late shift.
Last year the group went to Lyon in France on a package City Break and had such a blast they now want to do this each year. After a Prosecco or two, they re-named City Breaks with a rhyming slang that I cannot repeat in a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that the first letter of ‘city’ has been replaced with a ‘t’.
But it gets worse. They now want to do … er, city breaks in alphabetical order.
They are starting with Amsterdam and the planning going into it makes my fishing expeditions look spontaneous. It is the tulip season, so flower shows are the starting point, followed by canal cruises and extensive sampling of Dutch cuisine. They may even have time to sample a Dutch beer beginning with A – Amstel.
However, I did point out one minor flaw in this alphabet lark, and that was the 26 letters. In other words, they would only complete the City Breaks in 2042, which means the letter Z will probably be any city they can visit on a Zimmer Frame. It may also let them off the hook trying to find a city beginning with X, although there probably are a couple hidden away in China.
Management was a bit peeved at this revelation, but secretly also did the maths. So she has come up with a cunning solution; they will do TWO trips a year. This means the Zimmer Frame finale will only kick in during 2029.
I kept quiet about this in case she decided to make the City Breaks a triannual affair, which would have the added result of breaking my bank balance.
Anyway, once again I have struck a luck. In a fit of rare remorse at all the fun she and her mates are going to have ogling tulips, management suggested I go away for a weekend as well. Her lips had barely finished moving when I was on my computer doing a booking.
So, on the Friday the three tulip lovers leave for Amsterdam, I will be screaming up the Brecon Beacons in Wales to do wilderness fishing on some of the most remote waters in Europe. One even requires a hike in, as there are no roads.
I also found a campsite nearby called the Lone Wolf. This is their publicity blurb: “Many campers don’t even bring a tent, preferring to string up a tarp across the trees and sleep beneath it, thus getting as close to nature as it is possible to be, short of simply lying down in a bush and having birds make a nest in your hair.”
Much better than looking for tulips, don’t you reckon?