The night the lights went out
(Sent by McFly, an advanced student from Buenos Aires, Argentina)

It was a lovely Summer night. My wife and I were enjoying some delicious chicken legs with mashed potatoes at the birthday party of the Morrisons' daughter. The place was really enormous. There were about two hundred people there. It was a party as we had never seen before.

As I made my way to the toilette, the lights suddenly went out and a great yell of desperation was heard at once. It was so dark that nobody attempted to move. However, I tried to go back to my table which was not so far. Walking past the salads table, I bumped into one of the twenty waiters and all the saucers, forks and knives he was carrying were soon on the floor, with a terrible boom.

People bursted out laughing in spite of not knowing exactly what had happened. I was going to apologize when the waiter, hiding his anger, said it had been his fault and was really sorry. He ordered me to sit back while he was down on his knees picking up the broken pots and muttering something which I could not hear. That had been a nerve-racking experience.

It was only after I sat at my table again that I was happy and safe. My wife did not imagine that I had been the guilty of that scene and I thought she was never going to know it.

For the next half an hour the party was in complete darkness until the waiters lit some candles which turned out to be very romantic. Everyone was feeling the same and there were some jokes to the owners of the house, who were not only disappointed but like bursting into tears.

As if all this was not enough, the candle which was on our table fell down on the table-cloth and it started burning. I tried putting it out with my shoe but a waiter soon brought some water and extinguished it.

As soon as we sat again, the lights came back to find out that my trousers were covered in tomato sauce and my table was completely gone. That was a night I will never forget.