Last night I went along to Howard’s for another night of network gaming. Unfortunately we weren’t blessed with the presence of Chris, as he was suffering from one of the pitfalls of being a teacher – picking up something nasty disease from a pupil. However he did join us between trips to the bathroom remotely. Anyway all this play seems to be improving my skill at UT2004, although I still can’t get the hang of moving and aiming straight at the same time, and also I do tend to get lost at times too, hence I get accused all the time of camping…

Ok, I have to admit, that the accusation is not totally unfounded. 😀 There are a few maps where I do quite deliberately camp out at certain points and use sniper tactics. Not that I’m the only one – both Phil and Chris used the same tactic at various points during the evening!

Anyway, instead of the usual shot of a load of blokes sitting around with laptops, I’ve included a picture that shows that despite what he maintains, Howard does know how to use his kitchen – although his fridge is still primarily filled with a vast selection of drinks and not much else!

Whilst the game playing was fun, the highlight of the evening had to be Phil pretty well ensuring that he was going to be sleeping on the sofa when he got home. Around midnight both he and I started packing up our respective sets of kit to head home. Phil started to get quite a bit of teasing from the remain three single guys, and Jarrod whose wife is back over in the USA, about how early he was going. Phil’s retort was effectively that at least he had someone to go home to, and he’d find a lot more interesting things to do than spend the night with a load of drunk blokes! At that point somebody asked the question as to whether Catherine would still be up when Phil got home, at which point Phil came back with a reply that probably isn’t suitable for a family blog, but that came over pretty much as a sort of alpha male type ‘I’ll do what I want with my wife in my house’ type statement, to which I replied that knowing Catherine that probably wasn’t overly accurate!

However, the BIG problem at this point though was that after somebody had questioned whether Catherine would still be awake, and without Phil noticing, Howard had called Catherine to see if she was still up – she was, and she had heard everything Phil had said, including that comment.

Having been told she was listening, Phil managed to look both embarrassed, nervous and sheepish, all at the same time, and took the phone off Howard. He then disappeared upstairs for a bit of fast talking I guess. He did come back down at one point – still talking – although went back upstairs again when he got the inevitable back-chat from the rest of us. We’ve yet to hear whether he did end up sleeping on the sofa last night…