You Said What???

I have a mild hearing impairment. Not as severe as Debi's - but enough to make some similarly amusing anecdotes. Here's one for you.

My dear friend Lauren was having a New Year party last weekend, to which my Paramour and I were invited.

She rang me in a slight panic the week before Christmas. 'It's got a bit bigger than I expected. Any chance you could do a veggie chilli?'

'No problem,' I said. 'How many people?'

'Thirty or forty,' she said.

Right, I thought, I'll need to use my biggest stockpot.

So I spent the afternoon of the 30th making an enormous vat of veggie chilli. Well, it's always better the next day, and it didn't matter that the stockpot is too big to fit in the fridge as it was sub-zero outside.

When I arrived at Lauren's, staggering under the weight of several kilos of chilli, she boggled at the size of the stockpot. Good, I thought, she's suitably impressed by my Herculean efforts.

By nine pm there were only about a dozen people at Lauren's. This seemed odd to me, as here in the countryside the whole late thing isn't fashionable like in the metropolises.

'What time are you expecting the others?' I asked.

She consulted a list on the fridge. 'It's only Tim and Anna, they should be here any minute.'

'But... how many people did you say you were expecting?'

Lauren looked at me, surprised. 'Thirteen or fourteen,' she said.

My veggie chilli, though I say it myself, was excellent. Which is just as well, as there is rather a lot of it in our freezer.