Torchlight

You would think that when seven women who live on boats moored in the middle of countryside go up the hill to the yurt for the second boaters book club that at least one of them would think to take a torch.  We remembered to take the bottles of wine and glasses.  We remembered to take the nibbles and the plates.  We even remembered which book we had been reading and managed to talk about it for at least half an hour. Then when we had drunk the wine and nibbled the nibbles and generally put the world to rights we decided to go back to our boats.  The sky was starlit but moonless and from our vantage point on the hill The Nene was a grey sliver stretching through the darkness beneath and somebody said ‘Has anybody got a torch?’ but none of us had.  So we staggered and slithered blindly down the uneven field and then down the track to the boats which were, by now, mostly in darkness and delivered some members safely home and three of us went back to my boat because I’d remembered I had some more wine on board.

This morning a fellow moorer said ‘Have you got my torch?’

‘What torch?’

‘The one I lent you on Thursday night when you were all drunk’

‘What do you mean drunk we weren’t drunk, how dare you say we were drunk’
‘
OK when you were trying to find you way home in the dark and making a lot of noise about it’

‘You didn’t lend me a torch, I would have remembered, I wasn’t drunk’

Then I went back on my boat made a cup of coffee, sat down and there in front of me on the bookshelf was a torch that didn’t belong to me but bore an uncanny resemblance to the one I’d denied all knowledge of.