Tuesday, January 17, 2006

For the last few years David and I have moved away from celebrating the arrival of the New Year in a club or a bar to bringing the whole celebration to us; in the form of a big dinner party where in exchange for one bottle of good champagne per head we'll give our 10-12 guests a great evening of celebration and a three course meal. The guest-list is fairly fluid each year. Some people are lucky enough to be invited every year while others come and go. It's always a blast.

Having done these parties for a few years we're pretty wise about the multitude of setbacks that can befall us. We've enjoyed fire and flood in the past and are still waiting for pestilence to make its entrance (probably in the form of some hard to lose STD). This year the champagne obviously got to people far too quickly as by midnight we'd already had at least 6 champagne glasses smashed and enough bubbly was spilt onto the living room carpet to fill a whole bottle.

Once of the guests (who will remain nameless) felt the desire to hold Court on the stairs wearing nothing except a pair of white briefs and a very big smile. For a good hour he was the star of the show with other gayers circling round him like sharks waiting to attack. Luckily before they could get their teeth into him he was dragged off to a side-room to be sobered up just enough so that he could toast the New Year in.

At about half one someone got a bit heavy-handed with the volume knob on the stereo when their favourite tune came on... pop went the bass speakers and all we were left with was the fizzing and popping of the tweeters. Tunes were only restored once we'd gone up into the loft and rummaged around for a spare pair of JBL Creature speakers.

One of our guests drank so much that she had to lie down for an hour and then woke up believing aliens had abducted her. She was clearly shaken by the experience; so much so that she proceeded to fall off of the sofa, hitting her head on a large candelabra on the way down. For a few seconds (as, one by one, the candles fell from the candelabra hitting her as she lay on the floor) you couldn't do anything other than laugh. The next 30 minutes spent dealing with NHS Direct wasn't so fun.

The last guest got off to bed at 9am and David (always the last man standing) managed to stay awake until 11am when finally everything caught up with him. That afternoon he was found fast asleep in the living room with the last of the champagne in one hand and TV remote in the other.

Must have been a great party then.

Posted by Antz at 11:57 PM | Permalink | | |

Previous Posts