Talking to Girls

When I was a young thing, as thin as a pin yet bursting with dreams, I had a very hard time meeting handsome young men. After I married, they appeared as if by magic. Absolute crowds, my dear, around the dinner table, filling the guests rooms, asking my advice about minor ailments. 

This may partly be because I had joined, through marriage, the Traditional Latin Mass community which, in Scotland, has a male majority. More recently it is also because I have advanced in the brotherhood of scribes and thus meet many young men with strong views on political subjects. During the course of my working day, I may contact them to ask "Should we care that Counsellor X has been chased into a McDonald's on Y Square by a baying mob, or is this just a normal Tuesday?"

To my diminishing surprise, the young men I speak to most eventually ask for my advice about girls. These are always Catholics, so their ultimate goal is to get married and have children. I am very sympathetic to these aims, and I am particularly sympathetic if the men are in their 30s and having an awkward time of it. 

By the way, the problem is not always that women don't notice them, but sometimes that the women who like them don't like what they like, and the chap can't contemplate a lifetime with a woman who doesn't appreciate classics of 1970s cinema or whatever. 

"Well, that's because you didn't love her, so that's okay," I said on a similar occasion.

"Really?" 

"Yes. If you had been really crazy about her, you wouldn't have cared less that she didn't know who Clint Eastwood was. So don't worry about it. I almost never say this, but have you considered Ave Maria Singles?"  

As a matter of fact, I really dislike dating websites because they remind me of those windows in the red light district of Amsterdam where women sit about being ogled by men. Men and women looking for true love should not be divorced from their contexts, by which I mean their families, friends, neighbourhoods, parishes, professions, teams, and everything else that goes into who they are. And although women are said not to be as visual as men, we are still visual when looking at dating websites, and instead of seeing a man on his own at a party, we see one face among dozens, if not hundreds, of other male faces. By the way, the ones in their 20s are so much better-looking than the ones in their 40s and 50s, it makes me sad. 

Therefore, my next piece of advice to men looking for wives is not to rely on the dating websites but to go where there are a lot of women and not necessarily many men. Benedict Ambrose caught my attention, not only because my English pal Aelianus mentioned him in his list of marriageable friends, but because he became a frequent commentator on my then-popular blog for Single women. 

One place women who like men will always want to find men is the partner-dance dance floor. And women who frequent partner-dance dance floors will almost always dread being wallflowers and will almost always be grateful to be rescued from this fate by a man who is clean, polite, reasonably well-dressed, and can dance reasonably well. If he can dance very well, so much the better. 

In my swing-dance days, I became so frustrated at not being asked to dance, I paid a tutor to teach me how to dance better. (I had noticed that the best women dancers were always asked.) If you are the kind of young man who has money to spend on a private dance tutor, I highly recommend doing the same. Pick your favourite kind of music, match it up with its dance, and take lessons. 

Being great at something both public and prized by women is a definite advantage. I recall being terribly impressed by how well Benedict Ambrose gave a tour of the Historical House. It was lucky for both of us that I had a chance to see him do something that he really excels at (public speaking, lecturing on historical topics) so soon after meeting him. It was also lucky that he lived in the Historical House, if we believe women are as prone to hypergamy as all that. 

One of the most controversial ideas about women, its controversy springing partly from the fact that this has long been used as a weapon against us, is that we would prefer to marry men who are richer, more educated, and higher up on the social scale than we are. If true, this may be down to social conditioning; I can't see why it would be innate. But I can see why, in days of yore, it would be obvious: until very recently women were poorer, less educated, and by definition lower on the social scale than men. The addresses of almost any bachelor must have been flattering to any spinster whose only other options for survival were domestic service or life-long dependency on her male relations. 

Old attitudes die hard, especially when they are enshrined in such female scriptures as Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, and the Anne books. I no longer think Elizabeth Bennett was joking when she said her feelings towards Mr Darcy began to change when she first saw his stupendous estate, for I will never forget the Historical House first rising up beyond the dark woods to greet me one September night. I already liked Benedict Ambrose, of course, but his house! Naturally, it wasn't really his house, but--to adopt the theory--try telling that to my reptile brain, or wherever it is that the hypogamic impulse lives. 

Instead of judging me, gentlemen, ponder what you have of symbolic value (a Chair at the university, a great-grandfather who was Prime Minister, a great-great-grandfather awarded the Victoria Cross, a two-bedroom flat overlooking Edinburgh Castle) that you could present tastefully.

And that brings me to my next point, which is about talking to girls. When talking to a lady, it is a very bad idea to talk about yourself too much. It is a very good idea to ask the lady about herself. After all, you are not talking to the lady for the sake of talking about yourself. You are on a quest. This quest is to find the Future Mrs You but ALSO to make many female friends along the way. These new female friends will know many more eligible women than you do. Your chances of marrying the friend of a friend are rather higher than marrying a woman off the internet.

Mrs McL: Suzie, this is Scooter. He has driven all the way from Lasswade to be with us today. Scooter, this is Suzie. She is one of our many highly prized university students. Excuse me while I make the tea. 

Suzie: Nice to meet you, Scooter. I don't actually know where Lasswade is. 

Scooter: Nobody does, really. It's about ten miles south. Are you from Edinburgh?

Oh, brilliant Scooter! He has turned the conversation to Suzie in his third sentence. 

Suzie: No, I'm from Fife, but I'm now living near the uni. I share a flat with Miriam, Jane and Georgie over there. 

Scooter: I hear Edinburgh rents are very high.

Suzie: They are atrocious. How are they in Lasswade?

Scooter: Well, I don't know. I do know the mortgage rates are ghastly. 

Oh, look: Scooter owns his home. He also, Mrs McL has dropped, has a car. Will this frighten Suzie, intrigue her, or leave her utterly indifferent? I'm not sure. It all depends on Suzie, and if Scooter is smart, he will leave it at that. He should be finding commonalities with Suzie, not obviously striving to impress her. He could ask "How did you meet Mrs McL?" or "How long have you been in Edinburgh?"or any other open-ended question. 

Suzie, like most women, is a genius at small talk, so she will be certain to ask Scooter more questions about himself, which he will answer as humbly (UK) or as impressively (US) as possible. 

Scooter (in UK): And so they gave me a promotion. The fools! I don't know what I'd doing, really. 

Scooter (in US): So now I'm the youngest Vice-President of Operations in company history.  

Well, that is quite enough advice from me. I now want to ask Benedict Ambrose if he would like to go to Lasswade,  as there is a mobility bathroom designer there. And that, by the way, is an opportunity to remind you all that marriage is serious stuff. There's a reason the Anglicans serve up the bad news along with the good in their wedding vows: poverty, sickness and bad times are guaranteed in this valley of tears. 

It is possible you could get along reasonably well in marriage with someone you just rather fancy, but should cancer arrive and disrupt your bower of bliss, you will need something rather stronger--like profound respect for a sterling character--to rely on. So develop one and don't marry until you find another one. That's my ultimate word on the subject. 

To recap:

1. When you are in love, you don't care if she's not interested in your dumb masculine interests. (That said, her not being interested in them is not a good reason not to ask her on a second date.)

2. Don't expect dating websites to give you an advantage over other marriage-minded men.

3. Go where the women are and want men to turn up.  

4. The renewed craze for partner-dancing has brought such places back.

5. Learn to dance or do something else very well that is public and valued by women.

6. Continue increasing your social capital through work and education or, in a pinch, association with stuff that the kind of woman you would like to marry finds impressive. (I imagine that in some communities chaining yourself to endangered trees or flinging yourself between the hunter and the baby seal is the thing to do.)

7. When talking to women, ask them about themselves sooner rather than later. Women want to feel that we are interesting as ourselves, not just as Potential Wife Material.

8. Pay strict attention to cultural expectations when presenting your accomplishments.  

9. Life is hard. Continue developing a good character, and marry a woman of good character. 

Yes, but have an emergency plan

This morning I took the bus to Edinburgh's west end to retrieve an important key I had misplaced despite years of careful husbandry and subsequently had hysterics. 

On the way home I looked at First Things on my mobile phone and came across a thoughtful article about the destruction of America's careful and (in general) fruitful democracy based on the complementarity of the sexes. The article gave me a lot of food for thought, and I agreed with it (in general). 

In fact, I even had in my handbag an old notebook dating to 2016, about a year before I took a full-time job. I had word-sketched there a moment of absolute peace I was experiencing in a friend's greenhouse. My friend (who has since died) lived in half of a house built for a duchess, and I was living in the attic of a house bought by a law lord a few decades after it was built. It was a warm and rainy April day. My delightful and perfectly healthy (we thought) husband was at work. I did not have to earn more (we thought) than I was already earning. Naturally it was sad not to have children, but I wasn't thinking about that as I sat sheltered from the rain.

A year later our whole world had turned upside down, and I thanked the Lord of History that a woman, even a woman my age, could, in fact, find a good professional job and be paid the same wage as a man.

So my answer to "Compulsory Feminism" is  "Yes, by all means let us work to bring back and support the traditional family, the traditional breadwinner, the traditional homemaker, and the traditional roles. Let us strive to make men and woman marriageable again. Let us teach young men how to woo women, and let us help young women to preserve their mental health. But at the same time, we must insist on an emergency plan. Husbands fall ill; fathers of young families die. The wives and children of sick men are vulnerable to predators; widows and orphans even more so.  Every woman longing to marry a good man and have a family must have an emergency plan. This could be income insurance. That could be an in-demand trade or profession. Whatever it is, let us be rooted in reality. Let us have, by all means, emergency plans."

UPDATE: Children get sick, too. If you're looking for somewhere to put your Lenten alms, you might want to consider this poor family. 

How to be Youthful

On Saturday Benedict Ambrose and I took the bus to an old-fashioned mobility aids shop and got the former a rollator. A rollator, if you happen not to live or work with elderly or sick people, is a kind of trolley that helps you walk as you push it along. It usually has a seat and it sometimes has its own work or shopping bag attached. The next time you are at a bus stop look out for a very elderly lady; she might very well have one. 

I have seen elderly ladies with rollators all week; having been in the market for such a device, I suddenly noticed them everywhere. I have also noticed many people who ought not to have been sitting in the seats for the disabled on the bus. Such people have never really caught my attention before.  But all of a sudden, the availability of the disabled seats on the bus is of city- (if not world-) shaking importance. 

Anyway, the kindly salesman, who did not appear to be that much older than B.A. and I, tried B.A. out on three different rollators, which B.A. pushed up and down the pavement outside the shop, and divined which one B.A. liked best before telling us the prices. B.A. liked the medium-priced one best. At one point, while B.A. was pushing a rollator out the door, the salesman mentioned to me sotto voce that the gentleman was patient and unusually easy to work with. 

"He's very practical," I said in response to this tribute, while thinking what a mercy it was to be working with a knowledgeable person instead of buying a rollator through eBay and hoping for the best. I also imagined crowds of stubborn 70- and 80-something men, all putting off getting walking sticks, let alone a rollator, because in their minds they are still the men who ran races or sailed boats or urged horses over fences. I am sympathetic to their point of view, though, for, as B.A. got on the bus home with his refolded new rollator and we took our seats in the disabled section, I felt about 75 years old. 

By the way, my first authentic memory of a historical event is probably the funeral of Paul VI, so although no spring chicken, I am a generation younger than I felt on Saturday. Wearing a tweed coat, spectacles, practical shoes, a beret, and zero makeup like a Scottish granny of the old school no longer seemed like such a great idea. 

Thus, B.A. and I, fast-forwarded into our 8th decade by misfortune, debated on how to be more youthful. 

"Complain on Tik-Tok about having to work a 40-hour week?" I suggested.

"We already go to the Traditional Latin Mass," B.A. observed.

"True," I said smugly but typed "how to be youthful" on my smartphone. Unfortunately, the internet thought I meant how to look more youthful, and presented two lists--one all about expensive moisturizers and cosmetics and the other about drinking lots of water and getting enough sleep. 

On Sunday morning I discovered I had mislaid an important key and, when I couldn't find it on our return home from Mass, became depressed and hysterical to the point of suicidal ideation which is, sad to say, rather youthful. Fortunately, today I got a message from someone who had found it, so I left off self-contempt and decided to blog. 

In Gigi, a charming film lying about high-class prostitution, Maurice Chevalier sings a song about being glad he's not young anymore. It's mostly about love stuff but the "feeling you're only two foot tall" can unfortunately continue into adulthood. Right now, the part of youth I most envy is the power of compound interest, which is why I bombard my younger relations with advice to save at least 50% of their earnings or pocket money and invest it when they can.  

I suppose planning ever more complicated dance parties is youthful. There's a school of thought that youthfulness involves going to dance clubs and rock concerts. However, I was scarred when I saw what middle-aged Goths look like after leaving a Sisters of Mercy concert in Glasgow that time. (It turned out the Sisters of Mercy were the early show, and we oldies left just as the younghies were queuing to get into the late show, and the contrast was just unspeakable.) Then there's the idea that to be youthful is to get on the floor with building blocks, or a train set, and entering fully into the interests of friends and family aged under 10. 

Well, what do you think? If you woke up feeling 75, what would you do to get back to your proper age? 

 

The February Dance Party

It is sad to contemplate that I cannot do everything; it feels like defeat. 

Not having a violinist for the upcoming Eastertide Dance, I seriously pondered how many years (and how much therapy) it would take me to learn the violin myself. Apparently, with steady practice it would take 5 years. Having discovered this, I then looked up the price of violin lessons. I swiftly realized that it would be a lot more economical to use that money to hire violinists. That said, I still haven't found a violinist. 

"You don't need a violinist," says Benedict Ambrose. "A piano is accompaniment enough." 

There is another factor. In his fascinating essay "A Different Drummer," Michael Platt mourns how amplification moved music out of "the home and similar small settings" to "halls, clubs, and honkey-tonks."

"Instead of people who know each other playing for each other, now a few strangers could entertain a crowd they did not know, and most of whom did not know each other. This was a big loss in community," Platt writes. 

Thus, ideally, we shouldn't hire strangers for the sake of a specific instrument, but accept whatever instruments can be played by friends or acquaintances. And I was absolutely delighted, by the way, that one of the young men who goes to our TLM was available to accompany yesterday's waltzing practise with his electric piano. 

Incidentally, I may stop being the After-Mass Tea and Coffee Tea Lady on Waltzing Party Sundays. Even with help (and I am most grateful for the help), it is too much to plan the dance party, plan the waltz lesson, canvas for RSVPs, make biscuits, pack 6 bags of supplies, buy the supplies for the After-Mass Tea and Coffee, get a lift, go to Mass, set up the After-Mass Tea and Coffee, serve the After-Mass Tea and Coffee, advertise the Eastertide Dance, remove the After-Mass Tea and Coffee, help with the dishes, make a thermos of coffee for the Waltzing Party, turn off the hot water machine, check that the wheelchair-accessible door is shut, check the hall for crumbs, chase out the stragglers, lock the door, and then hurry down the street to the new hall to teach a dance lesson, my deceased ballet and piano teachers turning in their graves. 

That said, nobody but me drank the coffee, so I think we can dispense with hot drinks at the parties, at least until the autumn.

After a fair number of RSVPs and changed RSVPs, in the end there were 17 dancers, including me, in the lovely big hall. Our program consisted of a waltz lesson, a ceilidh lesson, and a swing-dancing lesson. I reviewed Asking a Lady to Dance, the Box Step, the Natural Turn and the Reverse Turn. Then our Ceilidh teacher taught the progressive (i.e. changing partners) Canadian Barn Dance and how to add a Figure-8 to the Dashing White Sergeant. At 3:30 PM we had a 20-minute pause for refreshments. Then our professional swing-dance teachers spoke to us about marrying dance to music, reviewed the Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop, and showed us how to put them together.

Winter nights are long but Spring comes early to Edinburgh. It was so nice to see light still streaming through the pointed windows of the hall. I was also very pleased that there were 9 men to 8 women. Apologies to the chaps, but I think it ideal to have one "extra" man at a dance whereas to have one man too few is a terrible social solecism and a crime against my fellow women.      

Splendidly, pound notes and the heavier British coins found their way into the donations box.  This is especially important now that I am planning to find a professional waltzing instructor, too. I am finding it difficult to be a good hostess and a good teacher at the same time. There is only so much I can make myself learn from YouTube, and there is always the risk of losing my head. Of course, I shall never, ever employ the tactics of my most memorable ballet teacher; she used to pinch our insufficiently tense buttocks with her long, sharp fingernails, and she bent my toes back so far toward my heel that---.

I'll spare you that detail! 

Flowing forward

Today I finished reading Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published in 1990, it is cited in many pop psychology books today. 

Flow was fascinating and gave much insight into human behaviour. It was comforting to discover that ruminating on Everything That Can Go Wrong is what humans normally do when we are not concentrating on anything in particular. Psychic entropy is our default, and the way out and forward is to order our consciousness with absorbing challenges. 

I tried this out the other evening when worry was preventing sleep. Remembering the insights of Flow, I tried to recall the Polish declinations for anyone (ktoś) and anything (coś), which I had reviewed that morning. It worked like a charm. 

One wonderful thing about learning a foreign-to-you language, never mind two, is that it is a lifelong project. Even if you have an unusually quick grasp of languages, such that you develop C2 (near-native) fluency in 3 to 5 years, there will always be another, more complex language to learn. And once you have learned all the rules, you can learn how native speakers authentically break them. If you developed a lifetime goal to outdo Cardinal Mezzofanti, who spoke 30 languages fluently (and often), that would certainly order your consciousness and might give you sufficient meaning in your life to drive the blues away forever. 

Naturally, a meaningful long-term learning goal would not have to involve languages. Partner-dancing is thoroughly absorbing, there are dozens of partner dances to learn, and they are always slightly different, depending on who you were dancing with. Dancing has the advantage over language learning of being very good for your body as well as your brain. The more frequently you danced, the greater the chance you would still be able to do it at 90. Naturally, the more you dance the better a dancer you become. 

Flow says that our challenges should not be so complex as to cause anxiety. This reminds me of Dr. Jordan Peterson's advice to depressed young men to make their beds. Making a bed might be as much of a challenge as they need to cheer up a bit and look for some other challenge, like washing the dishes. Washing the dishes would hopefully get them positive feedback too, something else necessary for happiness. Having washed the dishes, they might go outside for a walk, stopping by the Job Centre to ask for help writing a resume. Telling a boy to get a job when he's too depressed to get out of bed would merely fill him with anxiety, I imagine. 

The idea of working up from small challenges to big challenges reminded me of a plan/wish I had some years ago to have a Grand Ball for all the TLM-going families of the United Kingdom with teenagers. Never having rented a flat, let alone a ballroom, in the UK, I didn't know where to start. And the idea of having to find Edinburgh accommodation for all the TLM-going families of the United Kingdom with teenagers was too daunting. Besides, what for Canadians is a quick trip of 100 km is a wild adventure of 60 miles to a British person. Obviously this was much too big a challenge. The teenage girls with whom I had shared this dream were somewhat disappointed. 

However, all was not lost. As you know, I decided to have a waltzing party in the parish hall last February, and it was successful enough to have another one after Easter. Then there was another and another, and I hit on the more complex idea of having a bigger dance in a bigger hall with live musicians and TLM-going families of All Scotland with teenagers. Including the musicians, there were 60 people, some who travelled from other Scottish cities. 

The entertainment of 60 people was well worth the work, but the hall increased its prices, so the next challenge is to increase the number of people who buy tickets. (Sadly, I realized that I had to raise the prices of teenagers' tickets, but I kept the adult tickets the same.) My goal is to attract between 70 - 100 people, some of whom might conceivable travel up from the North of England or, if they would like to visit Edinburgh friends over the weekend, London. To meet this challenge I have so far bought an advertisement in the next issue of Mass of Ages magazine.  

The self-appointed task of creating rational (and, incidentally, flow-creating) entertainments for TLM-going Catholics (while restoring Western Civilization along the way) throws up many, many challenges. One is actually teaching a dance myself. Talk about leaving one's comfort zone! Another is organizing a group trip to Vienna to waltz at a proper Catholic Viennese ball---a challenge so big as to be slightly insane.

Nevertheless, I spent part of last Saturday afternoon organizing my consciousness by working out the problems involved in taking young folk to Vienna and unleashing them upon the Viennese. I mentally picked the 6 candidates most likely to go, pondered how we could raise money, and found a dancing school in Vienna that could polish up their skills in an afternoon. I even sent an email to the St. Boniface Institute to ask if they were planning a ball for 2025.  

But then I found out that there is a charity Viennese Ball tonight in Denver to raise funds for the International Theological Institute, and I got cold feet. At first I was charmed that these plucky Americans were recreating in Colorado what I hoped to see in Austria. But then I saw the word Quadrille. It had not occurred to me that the Viennese dance anything but the waltz at their dances. I checked YouTube and, lo, quadrilles. How on earth would I teach my merry band of 6 quadrilles? And which quadrilles? 

"But we don't need quadrilles," boomed an ancestral voice in my head. "We have many square dances of Our Own. And we don't need Viennese Balls. An Edinburgher Ball would be good enough." 

Normally I get cross when people (even voices in my head) discourage me from doing things. But in this case, I think the ancestral voice was quite right. I shall wait until there is once again an actual Trad Catholic Ball in Vienna before I worry about taking people to one, and in the meantime I will work towards a proper Trad Catholic Ball of our own. It may take ten years, but I think it would be well worth working towards. 

The Chas. K & M (if M he be) Dinner

I looked forward to Benedict Ambrose's attendance at his friends' annual "Charles King and Martyr" dinner with some trepidation. 

To explain Chas. K&M: some Anglicans, Scottish Episcopalians and Catholic converts have a soft spot in their hearts for Charles I,  executed on January 30, 1649. Naturally Charles really was a king, but these Anglicans and ex-Anglicans maintain that Charles was also a martyr because the Scots handed him over to the Roundheads after he refused to swear to establish Presbyterianism in England. 

In short, Charles was a martyr for the Anglican religion, or so his adherents hold. And since old-fashioned Scottish Piskies are themselves a marginalized group, long snubbed by Catholics, long suspected (or even harassed) by Presbyterians, and then betrayed by their own now-woke communion, is it any wonder than they (even if now mostly Catholics) gather annually to commemorate Good King Charles? 

It is also an excuse to drink themselves paralytic, and you couldn't pay me enough to go, even if women were invited. And since BA can't get very far without a walking stick, and because the last time he drank alone with men where there were stairs he fell down them, I was a tad concerned. BA's phone call from A&E is a trauma I revisit every time he tells me he's going to the pub. Fortunately, this is only once a month or so, and he never drinks more than two pints. 

However, that pub has no stairs, and his host's flat is at the top of a lot of them. Thus, I popped out of my office yesterday to tell BA not to fall down these stairs and to remind him of the scar over his left eyebrow.

"If you're going to hold that over me every time I go out, I'll... I'll... just have to take it," said BA. 

But he was so incensed by my suggestion that he inform his host that he might need help getting down the stairs that I gave up my plan of secretly emailing the host myself. However, BA had reserved his taxi home and trousered the £25 I handed him, so I hoped for the best and went back to editing articles about the sharp decline of Western Civilization. 

When I was done, BA was at the party and I discovered we had no oregano. We might not have had it for some time because--brace yourselves, Gordonites--BA does almost all the cooking and his recipe for spaghetti sauce is entirely unlike my mum's. Anyway, I made myself a halfway house of a spaghetti sauce, cooked some pasta and settled down to watch The Gay Divorcee on the BBC.

The Gay Divorcee was over and I was watching International Lindy Hop Championship videos on YouTube when I heard a commotion at the front door and a voice that was not BA's. I got up to investigate and found BA propped up against the vestibule wall by his host. The host was looking very well, I must say, and was wearing a sharp jacket. Never one to ignore male pulchritude, I complimented the host on his appearance. 

But he had apparently seen better days, as he had had to carry BA (and his stick) from the taxi, and two of our neighbours, coming home from the pub, had had to come to his assistance. BA, fizzing with happiness and wonder, told me that it had also taken three men to get him down the tenement stairs. 

I imagined the scene with great wifely smugness. 

"I'm not drunk," said BA cheerfully as I slowly lugged him from the minute vestibule to the loo. "I didn't drink more than anyone else, but when my taxi cab came, my legs wouldn't work. It was as if someone had turned off a switch."

"In fact you were literally paralytic," I said. "How much did you drink?"  

"Two gin-and-tonics, three glasses of wine with dinner, then two glasses of dessert wine, and three ports."

"That's ten drinks. I think that's a week's worth of the NHS recommendation all at once."

"But I was able to walk from the dining room to the sitting room! It was after the singing. It was as if someone had turned off a switch." 

Fortunately, this switch turned off only everything from his knees down, so eventually I was able to get him from the loo to his bed. It did cross my mind that it was a mercy that I go to the gym five times a week.  

"I am going to blog about this tomorrow," I warned him. 

Nevertheless, he provided me with a wealth of detail about the dinner and how much he had eaten (ah, steroids) and how amazing the trifle was (made from hot cross buns--a brilliant idea we must try) and how [So-and-So] had sung "The Vicar of Bray", including the new verses BA had penned for him. Already very satisfied with life (and amazed rather than frightened about the off-switch), he was very pleased that I wasn't cross. 

And I wasn't cross because the deal was that he could go to the party but not end up in A&E. Also, this is the first time in 15 years that BA has had to be carried to and from a taxi by his hard-drinking pals, so it had all the charm of novelty. Plus, the dysfunction of his knees wasn't just the booze, obviously.  

All's well that ends well, and this morning his knees are working again.