Any minute now, I'll be complaining that the policemen look so young, and then I'll just totter off to Cliche Corner

We went up to Belfast last month to a ball* with Abs and Jamie. Abs and I have known each other pretty much half our lives at this point and reckon the last time we went to a ball together must have been back at college, in 1991**. As we were "admiring" our pouffy taffeta ballgowns and pouffy hair in the photos that Abs, inexplicably, hadn't burned, it occurred to us to ask the babysitter what age she would have been in 1991. 

"Oh, I wasn't born yet"

O-kay then. Next stop, demanding that the neighbour kids turn down that damn music...

* unlike the balls of our past, this one didn't, as our friend Ilona so succinctly put it, involve pints of vodka and random snogging of random blokes in random corners of marquees. 

** I feel obliged somehow to make the point that I haven't exactly been whooping

it up in marquees 

in between, either. 

Just in case you were suddenly imagining me with a rack of gowns. 

Yeah, right.

(what is it about the word "rack" that always makes me want to snigger?

Apparently I am actually a 14-year-old boy...))