Quick -- as long as the house is still tidy!

The in-laws have set off again towards the South, having wandered through much of our poor, run-down, dozy, chavvy yet strangely likeable little town and declaring that what it really, desperately needed was a five-star hotel.

OH is nevertheless happy he could catch up with his folks and entice them into sampling his recent yeast-based liquid delights, which they did. And I'm happy and relieved that there were no major domestic disasters or arguments. It's true, they never did taste my allotment spinach quiche, calling out loudly from the sofa that "something's burning in the oven", but quiche really is the only culinary offering I have in my repertoire so if that's not good enough, nothing else will be, ever, apart from maybe a glass of tap water. I can serve that fairly safely. And that's more or less all I did that weekend -- trying hard -- trying hard to serve things OH cooked or brewed without spilling anything while trying hard to ward off Neuroticat who was forever trying to jump on the table, and generally trying very very hard not to start political bunfights with Father-in-Law whose Daily Telegraph-infused views make him say objectionable things about people on disability benefits, for example, or about the members of my occupation.


We showed the in-laws the house and the jungly garden and the by now very straggly allotment, in all their makeshift, temporary, unfinished, irrepressibly chaotic glory. My impression was that they were discreetly horrified. Fair enough, there probably are only very few houses whose hallway features a huge braid of allotment onions hanging from a picture rail hook right next to the living room door. I put that there only last week. It's a lovely wall feature, showcases OH's hard work in growing and braiding the onions and the warm orange of the onions goes terrifically well with the harsh black gloss paint and the new and very loud yellow of the walls. The view admittedly reminds one a little of that inn in Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers that had all the garlic dangling from the ceiling to ward off the bloodsucking aristocrats descending from the mountains.

Yes, I got the sense that there was a distinct dearth of praise for what we've achieved in and around the house on our careful budget. I can never help but come away from any meetings with the in-laws with a feeling of somehow having disappointed them terribly on almost every measure of daughter-in-lawness. I suppose every daughter-in-law is bound to do this simply by having managed to seduce the Only Boy away from his family and into her own messy yet accommodating lair where neither portions nor appetites are ever fully under control.

Whenever I could, I joined everyone downstairs as they chatted about obscure railway stations and watched recordings of railway programmes, and when I felt I was about to nod off, I woke myself up by surreptitiously proofreading the highly idiosyncratic and stylistically and thematically daring creative-writing output of our good friend D on my laptop. It was something I had promised to do for him back in June -- there are 1000s of pages of non-standard punctuation and "its" where "it's" should be, and I really needed to crack on with it. The 200-plus-page comic horror novel I was scanning yesterday afternoon featured hysterical vicars and the I-narrator graphically losing his virginity to a well-endowed middle-aged medical examiner in a "reverse cowgirl" (I had to google that one). Railways and reverse cowgirls. Sigmund Freud would say it's all going back to the same thing.

Now that the in-laws have continued on their travels, OH has reminded me quite rightly that the house being this tidy was a rare occasion, that it was not going to stay this tidy forever and that I should invite my friend M over for a drink. My good friend M loves even my limited cooking, so much so that she recently offered to pay for a tray full of my quiche. I thought that hugely flattering but also extraordinary, and we're going to settle instead on a trade: my tray of quiche against at least another month's worth of prosecco-and-posh-munchies evenings at her place because in all likelihood, I won't have managed to get round to hoovering our living room again, and OH won't have either.

So that's all good.