Sentence The Fivehundredandeleventh

This weekend saw the annual outing of the Morningside Ladies Dilettante Club to Melrose, with the usual Garden Party at Auntie Crist's; they came down in a classic Charabanc and we could hear their raucous singing long before they came into view; I suspected that they had been drinking and this was confirmed when someone called out for three more Boulevardiers, before being shushed with cries of "we're here!" and a mad scrambling and rattling of empties followed; but while they may be

dilettantes, there is nothing flippant about them, well, not all of them, although when Moira announced that she had just solved the mystery behind the Gecko's ability to walk upside down on a smooth ceiling and proposed to demonstrate and started to take off her shoes, Hilary managed to divert her with a question about Malcolm – calamity control; but needless to say. free-spirits such as

they do not knuckle under any sort of eutaxy, they resent dictatorships, oppose censorship, deplore Channel 5, wax lyrical over wartime rationing (although most were born well after the war), enthuse about the films of Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Orson Welless, get quite excited when Leonard Cohen's voice drifts across from the house, then realise it is from the radio in the kitchen; oh, and their Tombola stall raised £1,500 which, together with donations already received, means that the

whole event has raised £5,000 for Medecins Sans Frontieres' work in Syria; the evening held, apart from a lot of drinking, with cocktails mixed by Rusty Irons from The Ship Inn (she makes the best

cocktails in Melrose) accompanied by Dusty Douglas and Robyn Macnamara, concerns expressed about the disappearances of Gertie, Tammy, Bernie, Roxy, Tavish and Sir Pantagruel, considerable interest in the appearance out the blue of Thomas The Rhymer and Patience Scott, and the XXXCabaret featured lots of cameos from the club, with the highlight being a double act of thoroughly decadent WPC Isa Urquhart and her chum from the USA, Beth Ditto; it won't be a

surprise to any that Sunday was a Hangover Hotel day and most of the members didn't their shamefaced appearances until lunchtime, which was a relief for the residents who also got a long lie with whoever was sharing the room: of which, no names, no pack-drill, my lips are sealed with a kiss!