In retrospect, it might have served me well to drop an Advil Liqui-gel into my flute the first time it was filled, allowing the anti-hangover drug to dissipate into the wine using the slow release approach. I wasn’t that smart and I was already feeling the effects of the alcohol, blurting out something about how happy I was that we were together.

Somebody mocked, “I love you guys” in their best slobbery drunk while I remained nose-deep in cheese.

I thought Greg had gone to so much trouble to organize, shop for platter items, pick up everyone in dirty-cab, this might be the only food we would be eating so I dove into a chunk of stilton like it was a loaded burger and didn’t look back.

About an hour later, 8pm, one hour before my usual bedtime, there was a knock at the door.

Pizza?

It was a stretched limo loaded with champagne flutes, cozy leather seats for the gang, so much cleaner than the caravan that had been demoted from “Grand” the minute the white capris hit the first stray Barbie shoe.

We started driving out of town, nobody worried about where we were going, it was already a great night and thirty minutes later, we had arrived at our favourite Indonesian restaurant.

We ate, we ordered platters to share, we told the server to select some of our entrees, knowing there were no wrong choices and truthfully, if I actually had to pick and say out loud that I wanted the Fred Flinstone sized portion of lamb shank the cheese would start bubbling back into my throat.

I was full before we walked in the door and even more so when they rolled me out.

Everything was delicious and unbelievably spicy. So much so, when I picked up the kids in the morning, my mother suggested I had eaten too much garlic. I was clearly well over the legal garlic limit despite having brushed my tongue several times. This might have been one of those times a shaved tongue made sense. I wasn’t going to cry over having garlic breath after a most perfect night like that.

That’s just what the onions would have wanted.