Present Pong

I think the effects of a late-Thursday night must have lingered into the morning because I only got up with just about sufficient time to make the train to Rob’s birthday lunch at the Manor Arms; with a quick stop at M&S to pick up a couple of gifts for Lisa’s party that we were heading to later. 

PY and I were the first to arrive, but by the time I’d been to the bar and picked up a couple of glasses of wine, the others had arrived.  I found some menus and I went and placed the order.

My pork & smoked bacon scotch egg turned out to be turkey and apricot (although it was delicious) and the buttermilk chicken burger was just as crispy as I wanted it to be.  A lovely afternoon and back to M&R’s for  chocolate trifle dessert and Christmas songs on the TV.  We left a little later than we should have done.

The journey to Lisa’s took longer than the app said. Where we were expecting a joinery about about 1 hours and 15 minutes, the bus-tube-bus took closer to two hours and we felt bad for arriving so late. The ‘party was, we concluded, the first for four years and was a lot of fun. As always there's a fantastic spread (there was a range of roasts and all the veg from the buffet) and we always play the best games.  We played ‘present pong’ where the ball has to be bounced into a red cup to win the present (I won a pair of festive socks) but as the cups are eliminated it gets harder. They all got won, eventually.  Oven-glove pass-the-parcel is the funniest of games - and even better this year because there were people who’d never played it before and the top layer of paper was a high quality paper and very tough to rip.  We ended the evening with a round of ‘Who’s in the bag’.  It reminds me how much fun it is to play games at parties.

We chose a slight different route back; trying the Overground from Stoke Newington to Seven Sisters before the train from Vauxhall. We were back about 1am.