My mother didn't believe in parties.
She didn't believe in long hair, mess, fuss, waste, hire-purchase, mail-order catalogues, clothing that showed dirt or praise either. However, since her hair-brushing techniques could have been applied as torture methods for the Vietcong, Rapunzel-like tresses were never going to be an option in our house, and all other prohibited activities were mere unattainable dreams - so the only sanction that really had much of an impact on my life was her distaste for anything vaguely celebratory.
I spent my youth being the only person in sensible clothes at birthday parties surrounded with girls dressed in pastel frocks with net skirts (waste and mail-order catalogues) wearing their waist-length ringlets (fuss) tied up in pink satin bows (dirt-attracting). Their kitchens would be transformed into party grottos with the help of a paper tablecloth (waste) draped over a wallpapering table, and festooned with paper plates (even more waste), streamers, paper chains and concertina fans (craven, teeth-sucking waste) and plastic cups (waste that could nevertheless be thriftily washed and used again. And again. We had plastic cups that were almost heirlooms.) The table in turn would be laden with fairy cakes (fuss), caramel cakes (made with condensed milk boiled in the can, mess and fuss) and tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off (fuss, waste and mess).
On my own birthday parties were verboten. Parties meant mess. No decorations in casa Calvin - because sellotape might damage the walls and pins left holes in the plaster and gifts would have to be useful. Who can forget the gift of time in the alarm clock year of 1972? Or the duvet of 1975? The excitement of the pile of socks, underwear and books, that I had usually found months earlier hidden under the bed and already read, waiting unwrapped on the sofa (to avoid waste of gift-wrap) was hard to contain, as you can imagine. And later - the birthday tea consisting of a dumpling with a lucky silver sixpence inserted into its depths which was removed and carefully washed to be reused the next year (though I never figured out was supposed to be so bloody lucky about it, except that you didn't choke on it). I didn't even like dumpling, but nevertheless it had to be eaten (waste).
I'll stop now before I get overly sentimental about the hardships of a Scottish Presbyterian childhood and the joys of lukewarm dumpling, flecked with raisings like clammy flesh wtih a skin disease and skip forward several decades to now.
Unlike my mother, I like fuss, can't get enough of it. I positively adore waste. My whole personal economy is built on credit and mail-order catalogues (albeit of the on-line shopping variety) and though I still struggle with the concept of praise and can only tolerate mess when I'm the person who has made it, parties are something I really, really love. Well, at least until thirty minutes before all the guests arrive and I'm standing in my newly cleaned house setting out all the plastic glasses and paper plates, wondering what the * I was thinking of when I decided to invite 50 of my closest never-see-them-from-one-year-to-the-other acquaintances to eat fiddly, fussy food that I have spent the previous two days slaving over.
It's strange how it suddenly seems like an absolutely terrible idea just when it's too late to disinvite everyone.
And that's how you find me last Friday night, hurriedly piling 48 cup cakes with icing that will not set onto a three tiered cake stand that drips white sticky guano all over the floor while the microwave pings, and the barbecue smoulders (my son decided to light it two hours before people were due to arrive and it has now gone out again because - yes - you've guessed it, it is also POURING with rain), just as a friend who was supposed to be helping calls from the car to say she's running late and can I put the oven on and assemble three baking trays for her (this is helping?). Then the lighter burns my fingers as I singe of most of my eyebrows trying to light the candles, and I worry alternately that I don't have enough food and then that I have too much, and can't remember who, if anyone I've invited.
Remind me, why does a deprived childhood mean that you have to massively overcompensate for the rest of your life and waaaay beyond the time that having birthdays is appropriate?
My fellow Indians are the first to arrive, em masse, sodden, bedraggled, tired after the long schlep to the postal district beyond the furthest reaches of civilization, clutching a bottle and many packets of cigarettes. The smokers look around them anxiously wondering how quickly they can excuse themselves to disappear outside under the garden umbrella and light up. Disconcertingly the others all sit down in the kitchen as though expecting an entertainer. After fifteen minutes of spectacular fussing with plates of food and cups and bottle openers I realise that this would be me. What? I have to talk to them? Isn't it enough that I ply them with drinks? Isn't that my husband's job? Why the hell does he have to be having a philandering mid-life crisis now, when he could be much more usefully passing round wine?
I try to enlist one of my sons while the other is in the garden, unsuccesfully, making fire since the charcoal is now damp. 'Offer people drinks!' I hiss, but his response is to look at me as if I had suggested he might like to give me one of his kidneys. Let's just hope I never need a transplant. The youngest daughter whose chore this was supposed to be has brought in a friend for reinforcements but they have decided they need to be in full make up and wearing as little as possible before this task can be properly undertaken, and resultingly, are in their bedroom, in the dark, smoking cigarettes out of the window, deciding what not to wear. Office smokers are standing outside in the rain. I pray none of them offer advice to fire-starter who is liable to walk off in a strop if criticised. Instead I think I hear one of our merry band of Indians incite him, not to the use of dry kindling, but to insurrection, suggesting that - poor thing - he shouldn't need to be there, bent double over a hot stove, when others were swilling beer, having a nice time, and being sympathetic. Smoke is coming out of my ears now. Don't ruddy sympathise with him, he didn't get up until noon. He has been slaying Orks for most of the last year. Let him bring home the bacon sandwiches, please, just for a change.
Another half an hour passes. Graham Rawle arrives and... em, that's about it. It's almost eight o'clock and nobody else has come. I fear the Indians think I have no friends and that they have been invited along as rent a crowd. This is true, but I hoped it would be slightly less obvious.
I'm smiling with a glass in each hand which are both for me and running through the guest list in my head. Who did I invite? Did I, in fact, invite anyone? Are they going to turn up at all? How can friends you don't have and haven't invited pitch up to a party they don't know about. My mind is a blank of humiliating over-catering. How stupid am I going to look when I'm left with fifty hand made spinach fatayer, fifty bacon rolls,sixty falafel, three dips, polenta and a hundred cheesy circles? What shall I do with all the poignantly unused plastic wine glasses sitting waiting for the ghostly guests who don't come? I let the smokers light up inside just to make the place look full and then try to encourage them to go into the other room which looks like the Marie Celeste with candles which flicker eerily in the draught like something out of a Vincent Price movie.
And then the doorbell rings.
Relief.
People.
Real live breathing eating drinking smiling kissing people who remember my name and have indeed been invited. Loads of them. Lovely, lovely, friends from as far away as Finsbury Park. A couple of publishers, an agent, a few spare men, many, many women under thirty, a banker, an academic, a museum curator, a smattering of artists and a lot of Pedants.
Only two people failed to turn up and you know who you are...
The last couple left at two am. I rewashed all the plastic glasses in the dishwasher (frugality and waste), threw away all the paper plates (pure waste) and ate what little food remained so as to avoid waste (finally my mother is smiling at me from heaven), cleaned up the empty bottles (see ma, no mess - ah, she's straightening the antimaccasers up there in the great OCD mansion in the sky, brimming with approval though, naturally, stopping short of actually praise...) and went to bed.
I woke the next morning, ever so slightly fatigued, staggered to the bathroom for a glass of water, regarded myself in the mirror, another year older and deeper in debt, and recoiled like I had been hit from behind by a speeding reality check car... Despite the many tenners and hours I had spent at the hairdressers the day before having my tresses straightened out whilst listening to a S'th 'frican girl tell me about the healing power of crystals and the pyramid she has erected in her flat to protect her from microwave rays, it occurs to me that though my mother was absolutely wrong about fuss, dirt, credit, waste and parties...
I'll give her the long-hair.
