I wore high heels for this?

Last weekend we went to a Gala Banquet Dinner Thing at Jo's uni, because he is the President of the Exchange Club, which makes me the First Lady of the Exchange Club*, which means I had to fulfill my duties by attending and smiling at people. That's how we do things in the political world. I may be an opinionated, intelligent, high powered career woman in my own right, but whether my husband achieves success, or cheats on me and fathers a love child, my job is to smile and stand by him.** In this picture I am failing in at least one of those requirements.

So I played the dutiful political wife, in spite of the fact that I had just lost my dog, my aunt, and a chunk of my hair within the preceding twenty-four hours. I thought that maybe going out and talking to actual people would cheer me up, when in fact it meant that I spent four hours gritting my teeth and necking cheap champagne in an effort not to start weeping into the (very tasteful) table arrangements.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. Little Lord Frenchelroy and his Deutsche Dame had had a bit of a tiff, so we took refuge in each other's sulkiness and sat in the corner drinking heavily for a while. Then, hooray, hooray! my snob buddy The Thin White Duke turned up, and we had a lovely time dissecting the latest episode of Game of Thrones and discussing Proust, because that's how we roll when we get together. High brow or low brow, but nothing in between.

After that it all gets a bit blurry. I smoked a Cuban cigar with Frenchelroy (because I am a fucking idiot and never learn that smoking cigars when I'm drunk will not end well). I spoke absolutely execrable Spanish to a girl from Pamplona, who turned to Jo and told him that, while his Spanish is very good, mine is utterly incomprehensible. To be fair, this was after four hours of drinking motivated by utter misery and social awkwardness, I think I'm usually a bit less... slurry. I met a guy from Denmark who speaks like the Swedish Chef. An entirely different, and very drunk, Spanish person screamed puta tu madre at me for reasons that seem to have more to do with the fact that the bar had just closed than anything in particular I had done. He then stole a water jug from the restaurant, and later confessed to having been sick in it in the cab on the way home, so I didn't take his suggestion about what I should do to my mother personally.

Then the young folk moved on to a bar, and Jo and I went to our hotel. What's that? Oh, that's right, we stayed in a hotel because we like to live the high life. Wait, did I say hotel? I meant hostel. An absurdly tiny room in a fire hazard of a hostel. A hostel in which they seemed to think it was appropriate to pipe loud music into our room at 3a.m. So not especially glam. 

And that's about it. Oh, and I saw this girl's nipples, but then so did everyone else in the room, so there's not much to tell there. Good times.

*I think I've about used up my quota of Needlessly Capitalised words for this post in that first sentence alone.

** For the record, to the best of my knowledge Jo hasn't been cheating on me with our live-in au pair and fathering bastards. For one thing, we don't have children, so hence no au pair for him to cheat with - the day he suggests we get an au pair, I'll know to be suspicious.