Ghosts in the 'machine'.

This morning, in my parent's dining room, I was watching the happenings on twitter (an addictive personality? Me?), and Boy #1 was indulging in a spot of Nintendo-love. Every now and again he would mutter something obscure like 'pink road', 'blue road' or 'I've got protection' (What?).

Now, I have to say that I have been eating slightly richer food here than I would normally do. My mother is a fantastic cook, and not only would it be foolish in the extreme to turn down her culinary offerings, it's more than my life as a beloved daughter is worth. So (have you guessed where I'm going with this?) my stomach is a little more 'volatile' than it would normally be. A little 'noisier'. A little - oh, alright. I'm more explosive than usual.

I've been trying not to share this too much with my children, but what the hell, a fart's a fart at the end of the day and I'm not going to leave the room for one; it's not like they do that for me, after all...

So, there we were, Nintendo and laptop keys singing along in happy unison when suddenly there was an unidentified (to Boy #1, at any rate) noise. A sort of a squeal, if I could call it that. Now, I knew where it came from. But Boy #1 - safely on the other side of the room - didn't.

He looked at me in surprise. "What was that?" "What was what?" (I know - I'm a charlatan). "That - that noise?" "I don't know..."

"Oh. Right. Do you think maybe it was... a ghost?"

Dear Internet, forgive me. My answer? "Gosh. Well, of course there are no such things really, but yes, I suppose it could have been..."

Will I burn in hell, do you think?

???

I can't promise much for this post. Possibly, you might already have guessed that by the fact I can't even think of a relevant title for it.

I spent the last 24 hours catching up with a group of girls I used to go on hockey tour with, and am feeling more than a little shabby this morning.

We met up in a fantastic beach house in Wittering on the south coast of England after I had driven down through beautiful West Sussex. I'm a West Country girl personally, but West Sussex has to be one of the most visually pleasing places in the country with it's hills, valleys, picturesque villages and leafy woods. I swear, in the spring sunshine yesterday it so much resembled my mental picture of The Shire (for those Tolkien fans amongst you) that I kept looking for hobbits and doors in grassy banks.

Once I arrived, we spent yesterday chatting, gossiping, reminiscing, drinking, eating too much chocolate (one of them works for a well-known chocolate brand and seemed to have bought most of last week's production run with her for our delictation), walking along the beach, feeling the burn in our thigh muscles as we remembered how hard it can be to walk on shingle, and drinking (again) to recover from the exertion.

Throw in a meal out, more wine, silly games, more drinking on the beach, some embarrassingly bad campfire singing (without the campfire - even 3 sheets to the wind we weren't foolish enough to attempt that) and a restorative cup of tea at 1am and you have the recipe for a rather sore head this morning...

I should have known what to expect, of course. And I should have known that it would do me no good. It never did when we were on hockey tour 10 years ago or more, and now that I'm 40 + why would that lethal combination - vodka redbull - have a lesser effect?

The coup de grace was the fact that I needed to be back in London by 11am today so that Husband could fly off for another week of wooing Mother Russia.

Looking after the Boys, solo, with a hangover.

What was I thinking?