hot and spicy

Well, you heard it here first: it's been a relentlessly girlin' week of guzzling margaritas, wearing lots of tacky sparkly jewellery, talking like pirates and seeing very dark circles under my eyes reflecting at me when I peer in the mirror.

This rather unattractive (and downright scary, to be blunt) new look – a subtle combination of the night-dwelling pallor one generally associates with the undead, combined with the perpetual confusion of a stunned mullet – can be blamed, almost solely, on the exhaustion from racing around from one side of town to the other while meeting up for lunches and dinners with my fabulous female friends.

It seems that simple pleasures such as quietly catching up on gossip while snaffling the occasional slab of cheesecake does indeed take it out of someone of my advancing years.

Oh, and then there's that pesky little matter of accidentally imbibing a great deal of evil alcohol that tends to knock around even the most practiced aging goddesses with a formerly famed – hey, some might even say notorious – studied tolerance for such things.

Notably, I've just had a wild couple of days up in the mountains with my best girl V, who's been my most faithful and reliable partner-in-crime and stuffer-of-bastard-exes'-mailboxes-with-pudding-and-custard for many years, and who never fails to be insanely diverting in every respect.

Her one failing is that she refuses to drink rum, which always strikes me as a particularly odd character trait in a woman who has devoted an entire wall of her kitchen to her impressive collection of pirate figurines, pirate paintings, pirate Toby jugs, pirate books, Captain Sparrow dolls and Captain Blood photographs, and has even been known to swing from the odd yardarm or two.

What she lacks in rum she more than makes up for in tequila, however, and our time together these days is almost always spent assuming our Women Who Run With The Waring Blenders personas, drinking bucketloads of margaritas and playing "Fuck or Die" endlessly (because we're 12) until we either lose interest or fall over, which is pretty much what happened this week.

I wended my way on the long winding road up to the top of the range, secretly arranging my hands into flattering poses on the steering wheel the whole way so I could admire the shiny new rings that were dazzling away rather flamboyantly on my fingers. They (the rings, not my fingers) were presents from my sister's great friend J, a divinely extroverted Italian gold-and-diamond jeweller who'd arrived for lunch the day before with a tray full of her silver-and-cubic-zirconia "sample" pieces she said I could help myself to, being as she knows I am a shameless jewellery slut.

Baubles are like men, you know: the bigger the better, and one can never have too many.

So, after demurring for appearances' sakes so I didn't look too eager, I eventually allowed her to persuade me to take just two (oh, alright, it was eight, really, but only because she insisted) monstrous pieces set with glorious coloured faux gems – yellow, pink and champagne fake diamonds - which I spent most of Monday night polishing and playing with and cooing sweet nothings to.

Sadly, I was well and truly put in my place when V met me at her townhouse dressed a bit like Isadora Duncan and wearing a metre-long string of genuine pearls she'd shelled out a fucking fortune on that day, the show-offy bitch, which made me hugely jealous since regular readers of these tales may recall that my husband has yet to actually come good with the three-thousand-dollar opera-length string of antique Baroque pearls I've been coveting and dropping fairly blatant hints about for some time now.

Which, if he's reading this, is a situation he'd better rectify very soon if he knows what's good for him.

I guess it's true that cowboys would rather give you a song than diamonds or gold, after all.

Incidentally, when I mentioned V's extravagant new oyster-fruit purchase to J during a telephone conversation the next day, he generously offered both her and me as many pearl necklaces as we could handle (it's always been one of his little unspoken fantasies, apparently) and then asked if we'd had any naked pillow fights he should know about.

And, if not, perhaps I could make some up and relate them to him in minute detail?

Anyway, on our first evening together somehow V and I managed to get pretty darned mean and liquored-up by drinking margaritas solidly for, oh, 17 hours straight while solving each other's problems – including, oddly, many that actually hadn't occurred to us until we were rolling drunk, it seems, and which we couldn't quite recall the next day anyway – and orgasming repeatedly over Captain Sparrow, drowning out Jimmy Buffett (we do rather have to listen to "Pirate Looks at 40" and "Last Mango in Paris" five hundred times in row) and trying to loudly remember all the words to "Shaky Town" after I told her my interminable How-I-Snogged-Jackson-Browne-When-I-Was-16 story for the, oh, 34th time.

And after we'd grown a little bored with playing traditional-rules "Fuck or Die" about pretty much everyone in the Caribbean on the TV screen – because really, after a while, one pirate looks pretty much like another, you know – we segued into a somewhat more discriminating version.

This consisted of making really well-considered maturely insightful comments like, "I don't care if he's as interesting as a dirt sandwich, I'd do Dwight Yoakam" and "Kris Kristofferson? Yeah, I'd do him and read his entire William Blake thesis from Oxford at the same time – and I wouldn't even have to be drunk" and "Yep, I'd do Jonathan Pryce in a heartbeat – especially if he were willing to prove himself in a miraculous feat of strength and carry me up a really tall staircase in one take like he did with Madonna in 'Evita'" and "Have Val Kilmer washed and dried and brought to me immediately - duck-stomper or otherwise, I'd do him in or out of his Jim Morrison leather trousers" and "Whether he was dead in a bathroom or not, I'd do Elvis – as long as he could get it up and he sang 'Viva Las Vegas' to me" until we decided at 7 am that it was possibly a prudent idea to stop drinking immediately and go to sleep.

We were both a little too weary for even a half-hearted topless pillow fight, and besides, in the absence of Jonathan Pryce I knew I had no hope in hell in negotiating the townhouse staircase up to the guest bedroom, so V (who's had a tad more recent practice with drunken windy-steps-climbing than I) left me to my own devices and I wallowed away not unlike Migaloo the White Humpback Whale (except on land, obviously) in front of the fireplace on her luxurious white leather sofa, which was draped with dozens of white, beige, fawn, cream and ivory faux-fur throws and rather made me feel exactly as if I were a growly cave bear in Lascaux.

Since I was rather tired and emotional by that stage, I quite naturally ripped off all my clothes in a post-drunken frenzy (old habits dying hard) and wrapped my naked self in a very swish warm mink blankie. Surprisingly, I quickly fell asleep to the comforting sounds of my own snoring and snuffling, thinking briefly about how John Wesley Hardin shot a man for not much more of a noisy nocturnal transgression than I was engaged in then and there.

A couple of hours later I awoke, rather startled, to the beady eyes of the carpet cleaning man peering in the window at me and my heaving goddess bosoms, which somehow had fallen out of the blanket and were exposing not only my agave-inspired hard rosy nipples but a few smears of dried shiny margarita-drool, and were also pointing more or less directly to another huge patch of unsightly drool on the antique ecru linen pillow sham under my head.

A couple more hours later V emerged down the stairs, holding her head and moaning repeatedly, "Ohhhhhh, I'm an appalling host: I'm incapable of caring for you in any capacity, Hiss," while I lay with my drooly-bosoms covered modestly with my drooly-pillow, apologising weakly for my over-active saliva glands ("Hey, I've puked gallons of blue curacao all over your bathroom walls before; it's okay," V managed to croak graciously) and sub-vocalising to myself, "Make me a fucking cup of coffee this minute, you fucking evil lazy hungover slag, or I'll fucking kill you and all your family."

At any rate, we managed to make it through the afternoon and live, swallowed a few Cocksucking Cowboys as a very necessary Hair of the Dog and settled down to watch "Deadwood" that night - whereupon we resumed playing "Fuck or Die" about everyone on the TV screen until we realised that, really, after a while, one cowboy looks pretty much like another.

Next day I somehow managed to get up from the sofa and shower, de-drool and dress myself. I drove stoically down the mountain back to BrisVegas and up to the Sunshine Coast to briefly visit my mother (and eat multitudinous cakeys and cheeses and play her a quick selection on her piano of all the songs I could think of by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and Stephen Foster, with a dash of Jimmy Webb, a few maudlin Irish ballads and a couple of hymns thrown in for good measure ["Oh, my sweet baby Hissie, you've completely wasted your talents your whole life, you know..." she wailed over and over]), then back into the city to take my lovely 9-year old niece K to "Disney on Ice".

And yes, we both wore our sparkliest tiaras to the performance.

A source of endless fascination for me is that the gorgeous K is a sweet, kind and virtuous little Catholic convent-schoolgirl whose favourite subjects are Art, Dance and Religion: which at least always gives us many things to talk about when I'm not being forced to play Barbies with her and guess how many new teddy bears she's collected since my last visit. Despite this slightly disturbing stuffed-plush-animal business, she's a purely delightful child who gets voted "Most Popular Student" in her class every single year, and she's terribly diligent about rehearsing her newest dance moves with her friends, drawing and painting, taking care of the classroom guinea pigs and praying.

She's also fanatically interested in personalised licence plates on vehicles, so we spent many happy minutes reading them in the traffic on our way into town. Unfortunately, K seized that opportunity to reveal that when she gets her own car, she plans to have personalised plates that say "DOGGIE" – which, as you might imagine, made me bite my lips until they bled and stuff my entire fist into my mouth in an attempt not to drive off the road laughing.

I eventually suggested that perhaps that would be a very popular choice indeed and might even already be taken, and that maybe she should have a few others up her sleeve just in case. So she pondered it further and after a little while came up with "HORSIE" - which was, of course, a much better option.

Hey, it's amazing to me that we have anything in common to talk about at all, so I'm eternally grateful for small mercies. When I was nine, you see, I was terribly busy practising piano and reading "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "The Story of O" in my spare time (and flogging my dolls for being very naughty) while simultaneously fantasising about running off with a sadistic gamekeeper and planning which courses I was going to study at university and in which order I'd complete them.

And, of course, my choice for a personalised licence plate when I was nine almost certainly would have been "PONYGRL", I expect.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to spend time with K, as always, and like any good aunt I was able to give her some moral guidance and teach her a few things. For example, she's always up for an entertaining new game, so after I gave her a cursory run-down on the rules we played "Fuck or Die" about everyone on the Disney stage - until we realised that, really, after a while, one cartoon character looks pretty much like another.

Oh, I'm kidding.

In reality I bought her a Seven Dwarfs stuffed toy (no, I don't know which one – those dwarves really do all look scarily alike, and frankly I wouldn't do any of them no matter how drunk I was or how much bloody hi-hoing they did), a "Mulan" doll and a plastic Mickey mouse cup, and she seemed utterly thrilled with her haul.

And then it was back across town to my sister's farm to pack up the Toyota with my 700 new lipsticks, nail polishes, mascaras, perfumes and scented body butters (oh, all right – a few hundred books, DVDs, CDs and a couple of flibbertigibbety lacy teddies with crotchless knickers too) and apply a bit more cover-up to the attractive black circles under my eyes.

And now it really is just about time to get out of Dodge, leave Sin City and hit the highway to run down those thin white lines all the way to the quiet familiarity of Chez Hiss and my sweetheart of a husband.

There's a certain personalised licence plate I'm quite keen to discuss in detail with him for our next vehicle, you see...

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Check out these stupendous new "that's-a-big-ten-four" buddies:

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And remember to keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel, kittens!

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