what is the oddest thing someone has done when you have visited their house?

The first time I met PILs they insisted that DH (newish BF at the time) and I slept in their bed and they slept on an air bed on the lounge floor.
I was mortified!

at nearly all of these...

Eggs maybe that was their sure-fire winner way to make sure no hankypanky ever happened ever - who is going to use the condom recommended by the boys Dad!!?? Sounds like a bit of reverse psychology to me!! [buwink]

I was 15 and somewhat naive but was invited round with a group of friends (all boys) to one of the friend's parent's house to play pool.All seemed pretty normal until the mum took me aside to show me a drawer containing tampons, condoms, lube and vibrators and instructed me to help myself should I need to. If I thought that was bad the dad also showed me the drawer and proceeded to detail what his preferences were with regards to the condoms and vibrators and assured me that they wouldn't interrupt if the door was closed. We were a group of friends nothing more I wondered if every female visitor got showed the drawer but never ever went there again.

I'm pretty sure she knew what she was doing.

The road between my and Nan's house was well travelled by all our family so unlikely to slip her mind even if she wasn't aware what a horrendous journey the alternative would be.

She has form - she is 'eccentric' sometimes and often very very self-centred and selfish though that only became apparent to me when I was quite a bit older.

GP, do you think it was just a case of her completely not thinking - you got the bus & she was going out and it just didn't occur to her that you were travelling pretty much the same route?
Otherwise that's just mean!

Best thread ever! I keep coming back to read more.
:)

Mackeral your MIl has undergone quite the transformation!!

Remembered another.

Once when I was 14 or so I went to stay with my cousin I was close friends with for the weekend. She lives about 100 miles from me in a fairly rural place. Our families often saw each other and when my cousin visited us we would collect her from train station or drive her where she needed to be. Never saw her struggle to get home in any way. Have even been known to drive her the full 100 miles home.

On the monday I am due to leave and cousin gets bus to school (I am on different hols so not going to school myself)

I am left in the house with Aunty who I know is driving that day to My Nan / her Mum who lives about 3 miles from me. She and her Dp will be the only people in a large estate vehicle.
I (in my defence I am only 14) assume she will take me with her so I can either get the short bus ride from Nan's home (and maybe see my Nan) or she would actually drop me off home as only 3 miles out of the way of her 100 mile journey.

Mid-morning she chirps up - 'hadn't you be getting your bus now as we are leaving shortly and you can't have a key to lock up'

I was stunned [bushock] so said nothing and she tosses the bus timetable at me.

It is rural-ish, the buses are about 4 times a day, I look at the timetable to see I have about 10 minutes to get to the bus stop and the next one would be rather late to connect to the train home.

Cue mad dash to the bus stop, an hour bus ride to next town. A half hour bus to large town train station. A train journey to change-over station. A 4 hour delay due to a load being spilled on the line. Then 2 hour train ride to nearest station to home. Then another bus to home.

All in all it took me about 8 hours to get home, exhausted and starving as I had no money for drinks or snacks.

All to save her having me (Niece she has known well for years) in her car. She didn't even have to change her route. I had one small bag to carry. My parents have ferried her daughter about loads. We get on OK. [buconfused]

The oddest visit I ever had was just shortly after graduating from university. A uni friend had moved house and invited a bunch of us out to dinner. When we got there the place was a tip (other than a meticulously organised bookcase that we were haughtily told not to touch when I started browsing book spines!)

Dinner was a Thai green curry and whilst the host was cooking we quickly discovered the place was absolutely crawling with HUGE spiders. DP and others tried to usher out as many as possible while I had a medicinal to try to block it out.

Anyway, dinner arrived and it was fully of match heads. Not a couple, not just my plate - loads of match heads on everyone's plate. It was clear our host had chopped off the ends and stirred them in though he claimed he'd knocked some over and tried to pick them out. We were a bit by this point, but politely pushed our food round the plate and tried to be nice.

After dinner his really creepy mate produced a bottle of malt whisky and proceeded to offer everyone a glass (after giving me a loud & rather stern telling off for pronouncing it wrong which I didn't but not to worry).

He went off ostensibly to get glasses, but taking the bottle with him. Didn't think much of it, but he came back with a glass already poured for himself & a set of glasses for the rest of us into which he enthusiastically poured large whiskies. Some time later as we were getting ready to leave, the walls started 'rippling'. By the time I got back to my flat both myself and my DP had started hallucinating. We quickly figured he'd spiked the whisky.

The next days I called another friend to ask what had happened, but he wouldn't talk to me. About a month later, he invited us round for a coffee & explained that creepy friend thought we'd all been rude to him and wanted to teach us a lesson. The host (mr matchsticks) had some mental health issues and creepy friend had taken a number of drugs (including bloody lithium) and spiked the bloody whisky. I was extremely on account of the whole 'could've killed us with a cocktail of prescription drugs' thing... He hadn't wanted to tell us when he found out in case we called the police (bloody right I would have).

Suffice to say Mr Matchsticks gets a nod in the street if I see him & I have not seen Creepy Friend since!

My best friend once invited me and XH to dinner as her new BF had just moved in with her and she wanted to show him off.

She cooked pasta for us all, and the BF's portion was fractionally smaller than everyone else's. He threw a colossal strop and stomped the short distance to the bedroom, where he spent the evening sulking and 'playing' his bass (he wasn't very good). The flat was tiny and there was no bedroom door, so every time we left the sitting room we had to go past him.

My friend took a further 2 years to dump the little shit.

I have posted before about my, ahem, unusual PILs but I think they warrant a mention on this thread. DPs mum and stepdad live in what can best be described as a farm storage facility by the side of a main railway line and next to a strip of airfield/racetrack. They fashion themselves as kind of born-again hippies/eco-warriors and they have no running water, electricity, mains gas or toilet facilities in their 'house'.

They view washing as personal weakness, and comment frequently about my 'obsession' with washing whenever I am there (I wash about every 36-48 hours when I go there, which is far less than I would like!) They also added a seat to their compostable toilet 'for people like me' who would probably not want to squat over a pile of steaming turds to relieve themselves. Urination should ordinarily be performed outside leaning against a canopy thing, but they 'allow' me and the DCs to use the compostable toilet by special dispensation.

They also prefer to shun such 'conventions' as using plates and cutlery to eat food. They are perfectly nice people, just a bit bonkers. It's all the more baffling since when I first met DP, MIL lived in a lovely, modern well-appointed house and would always make sure she had tealights and fancy bath oils for me to have a luxurious soak whenever I went to stay.

ovaltine no, he's not a coke head. I think he goes to the loo & falls asleep. He did it once at work when hungover, walked into a meeting 40 mins late & you could see the mark on his cheek where he'd been resting his head on the wall of the loo cubicle!

Marking place!

Marking place. Loving this thread.

We have some friends in our social circle who are extremely good hosts and have thrown some excellent parties over the years. However we discovered, quite early on, there is always an element of the guests having to 'sing for their supper', so to speak. They always insist on a party game. Not something silly, like Twister, or some random game of chance ... oh no, it's always some type of quiz or intellectual mind game. And there's no getting out of it, everyone has to participate whether they like it or not.

But the worst thing is, the host is extremely competitive - and not at all gracious with it. So at every correct answer by him, he crows exultantly at his cleverness. Every incorrect answer by someone else, he makes some smug remark about their stupidity. And if someone gets a question correct that he wouldn't expect them to get, he then makes some incredulous remark implying that you couldn't possibly have known that and it must have been a lucky guess.

We've stopped accepting their invitations.

This is a bit crap compared to some - just marking my place really ... Years ago a uni friend (A) and I went to stay with another uni friend (B) and her family overnight. B was really a friend of A's rather than mine and it was soon clear I'd been invited along mainly so I could provide transport Anyway, we turned up and had a relatively pleasant evening I think (sleep deprivation means I can't remember a huge amount about it). B's dad is a relatively famous author and had dinner with us and B and her mum - he was quite entertaining in a fairly childish way, lots of swearing and being affectionately reined in by his wife and daughter etc. After a bit we went off to bed in an ancient part of the house ... I was shown to my room, which had a wooden floor, high ceiling and was absolutely littered with insect carcasses. B explained that there were bats in the rafters who spent the entire night sucking the insides out of wasps etc and dropping the remains. Luckily the bed was a four poster with a canopy over it so I didn't get dry wings fluttering down onto my face, but I still got to lie there all night in the dark on my own listening to the crunch and drift of empty moth husks. Meanwhile, A and B went to another room and spent the night tucked up in bed together having a warm, snuggly chat and gossip.

We got up to find that B's dad had had a "bad" review of his latest book in the paper and had locked himself in his study in a rage, so A and I were swiftly ushered out of the house by whispering B and her mum. (I read the review when I got home and seemed fine to me but I googled last night to see whether I could find it and learned that he's been diagnosed as bipolar so feeling slightly guilty now.)

I'm sure I have more tales of weird hostship if only I could remember through the fug of baby brain ...

DP has a cousin who is a bit like a brother (or was), married a totally different sort of person who the whole family dislike, intensely, but just get on with it.

There was a family party and they asked if they could stay over with us - no problem. We gave them a room, a meal in the evening, got up in the morning and waited for them to stir. Nothing. Eventually we had to go out, so left a note saying where we were. Came back, they'd gone.

Thought that was weirdly rude but suspected hangovers. Then they came to stay with us when we moved quite far away. Exactly the same thing: took a nice meal off us, wine, had a laugh in the evening, went to bed, waited for us to go, then left. NOTHING, not even a note to say thanks. Never spoke of it again.

We've seen them since and never had so much as a word of conversation about us putting them up, let alone thanks. Obviously it's not a big deal compared to some of the stuff on here but it bugs me that they think that's normal.

Marks place

Yeah I feel a bit sorry for him too.

ha ha Marshmallow blatantly doing coke in there

If someone brought guinea pigs round to my house I'd be delighted. You can arrange playdates with me & guinea pigs any time you like....bless their wuffly little faces.

Not got any very good stories to add but i do have a friend who (when drunk) is capable of disappearing into the loo for around 45 minutes at a time. He did it once at my flat after we'd had a couple of bottles of wine....fine....but another time in a restaurant when we'd both just ordered food. I sat there picking at my meal & wondering if he was going to come back...

DH and I went to stay with a uni friend of mine and her DP. We were all sat watching television, us on one sofa and them on the other. DH leant against me (as you do). Friend took me aside later to ask if we could not have so much physical contact as it was upsetting her DP. He was very odd...!

Carpe, I think I feel more sorry for your BIL, tbh...