Of mice and men

It was the usual gathering last night at the Black Cat, plus two, who I do hope we didn't put off coming again by our raucous behaviour and lack of proper book discussion...

Don't get me wrong, we weren't totally out of order, we've been far louder (I remember at least one evening where singing was involved) and far drunker and somehow despite all our best intentions the books never get a proper doing over.

I had high hopes for last month's book, Fifty Shades of Grey.  For once almost everyone had read it, but we still managed only five minutes or so before someone diverted the conversation away. In fact we've probably talked more about this particular book over the previous weeks than we did last night.

A fair amount of the evening was spent chatting about the upcoming dragon boat race, hardly surprising really seeing as the majority of the team were there. Everyone seems to have decided to take it really seriously, Zumba-ing with arms weights on to build up triceps and biceps seems a little extreme to me, but who am I to judge?  The upshot of this enthusiasm is that I have to organise a proper training session with a boat and a trainer... the hardest part will be getting as many of us together as possible. The other issue, and possibly the more important issue, is that of costumes.  We want to look the part, most of the teams seem to think that co-ordinating T-shirts with the team name on suffices, but we have much grander designs, involving wigs and pink tulle.  With only six weeks to go we need to get our act together.

Another hot topic was our girlie London trip. At the end of November five of us expats are flying over for a girlie weekend, staying at SexpatEmmas sister's in Vauxhall and introducing one of us to the beauty of Britain, poor little American has never been to Blighty before so we're looking forward to indoctrinating her to proper curry and English pubs and warm beer, as well as shopping till we/our plastic can take no more!

I'm not quite sure how we ended up discussing boobs...I can remember the conversation, I just can't recall how we got onto the subject...maybe it followed on from changes to your body in pregnancy or was it breast feeding...somehow there were three of us, all with very different body shapes, one with definitely the largest cup size, who although being the winner in the 'how far down the alphabet' competition was last in the pertness without scaffolding. Which left me and my other friend eyeing each others chests and discussing whether our nipples pointed up or down and where our boobs ended up when they weren't firmly tethered to our ribcage by strips of lace and elastic. Bizarre.

Possibly more bizarre is the book choice for this month, something about mice and cheese, which shockingly my husband has even read (and he doesn't read books, not ever*). This morning bookgroup people seem surprised by our choice, but as I've pointed out, the blurb on Amazon says it only takes an hour to read, so even I should be able to manage that without tossing aside as pointless, although whether I then declare it to be a thief of my time** will have to be seen!

* this is the guy who failed his English Literature GCSE because he thought it would be sufficient just to read the study guides.

** see yesterday's blog.