"What was that?" squawked my fiancée to whom I had been speaking.
   "The chair," I groaned.
   "How many's that?" she asked.
   "Three," I replied, hauling myself off the tiles and exploring the back of my skull for cracks, lumps and contusions. "I think, perhaps, I should look around for a new outdoor setting," I said as I dragged the chair to the corner of the balcony and stacked it with the wreckage of the other two that had previously collapsed.

Sitting outdoors at Casa Willems & Leenstra was becoming life-threatening. There were three chairs remaining. Which would be the next one to go? It was not unusual, when visiting our place, for the company at the table to suddenly decrease by one as a face dipped from sight accompanied by the familiar sound of wood shattering.

As I regarded the accumulated wreckage, it occurred to me that I could turn dining at our place into a game of chance, placing bets on who would be the next person to go crashing to the ground courtesy of my secondhand chairs. I was still amusing myself with this thought when it occurred to me that we had already invited guests around for the following weekend which was but two days away, so I made a mental note, which I immediately lost, to give serious consideration to buying a new outdoor setting and hobbled back inside.

Come the day and my would-be missus, an astute woman, pointed out that with six for lunch and but three chairs remaining, there appeared to be a shortfall seating-wise.

   "We could tell them that, as a surprise, we were going to play musical chairs," she suggested.
   "Brilliant!" I said.
   "I was joking, Marc," she replied.
   "Of course," I said, privately warming to the idea of stopping the music with the CD player remote control and watching our guests scramble for a chair.

When all seemed lost I was blessed with inspiration, remembering two collapsible chairs I had obtained during a lengthy flirtation with the great outdoors. I went camping dozens of times, I think, before realising the absolute folly of it all, but I still had the chairs.

   "I've got collapsible chairs!" I cried.
   "I know," said Kassya. "All your chairs are collapsible," leaving me to explain that while these really were collapsible, they would not do so spontaneously.

The one slight flaw in this plan was that collapsible camp chairs are rather low to the ground, being designed for sitting around campfires rather than at tables, which meant that anyone using one would find his or her nose level with the table.

   "They could lift their chins over the table edge to eat," I suggested.
   "Or we could get them to sit back from the table with their mouths open and those on the real chairs could toss sausages and pieces of steak down their throats," offered my fiancée.
   "Wouldn't that be hazardous?" I asked.
   "Idiot," she said, and I retreated to the chairs graveyard to see what I could salvage from the wreckage.

They were, however, beyond help and so I activated Plan C.

I thought the afternoon went quite well, although Kassya insisted that the tableau - three guests sitting nervously on normal chairs, two on camp chairs with their foreheads barely protruding above the table and the sixth perched high above the rest on a borrowed dining room chair, like an archbishop looking over his flock, was the maddest thing she'd ever seen.