The monthly scripwriters meal

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), the scriptwriters meal last Thursday had none of the drama of the previous months meal and was generally a pretty tame affair. The only time it looked like a fight could break out was when Sophie found herself sitting opposite Sheila and was unable not to make a, perhaps deliberately, provocative joke towards Sheila. The set up was, our lecturer John Foster had a little wine left in the bottle and was trying to offer it around. Sophie jokingly said "pour it on Sheila's head" (not particularly funny but it sent out a clear message), causing Sheila to aggresively retort saying "Would you like to find out what it's like to have a wine bottle shoved up your arse?"

Knowing Sophie, I knew she would have to respond to that. I gripped her leg under the table hoping it would send out some kind of message to her to stop and just leave it but I knew it wouldn't work. Instead she said "I don't need to find out, I already know, and I liked it."
Thankfully Sheila's didn't want to take it any further and she said something like "Okay, glad to hear that", and went back to her conversation with John.

After the meal was over and everybody was going home, two other students off our course called Lorraine and Sam came back with us to our house. Lorraine was enthusiastic about staying out and drinking more, and although I felt tired for much of the meal, I felt like I was up for more drinking now. When we got back to ours we decided to go to the summer house and play some texas hold'em poker, although Lorraine and Sam hadn't played before and would need to be told the rules.

However almost as soon as we started trying to play the game, I knew we had made a mistake. It seemed that while we were trying to teach Lorraine and Sam how to play, Paddy who has played poker many many times before, seemed to want to sabotage everything we were trying to teach them. He started questioning the betting procedure, saying we shouldn't play the blinds, or that everyone should put a blind in, or that you never have big blinds and little blinds. I don't know if it was just because he was drunk, or all the other times he's been playing poker people have been putting the blinds and the bets in for him (which is apparently what Sophie said of him after). Even Geoff, usually dependable and reliable in situations like this, seemed to become mischievous and adamant that he would throw a spanner into the works at everymoment possible. We would become confused about how much money there was in the pot because he would just throw random chips in when people weren't looking, or it wasn't his turn to bet.

Despite all this, Sam managed to pick the game up suprisingly quickly, while Lorraine hadn't a clue what was going on because of Paddy's confusion of the betting process, and also because she was very drunk by this point. She was at that stage of drunkeness when your legs decide not to work properly anymore and ended up having three very bad falls over the course of the evening. One of them, where she was spinning around and fell into the patio doors of the summer house and bashed her head on the window looked particularly painfull. Thankfully, it looked as though her intoxicated state was numbing the pain.

So, as poker became more difficult to play with the alchohol steadily regressing the mental age of the players, I remember turning to Sophie during the game and saying that it was like trying to organize a poker game with children at a McDonalds kids birthday party. It shouldn't have been a suprise to us then, that after we had given up on the poker game, a few of them started playing Snap!

By sometime after 4am, after some games of truth or dare and a dance off competition (I know, not exactly grown up - but if you can't beat em, join em) everyone was burnt out and Lorraine and Sam got a taxi home. My evening was finished off with an episode of Takashi's Castle and then I went to bed.