Fancy Mess

Well, folks, it’s been a while.  Almost 6 months to be exact and I wish I could tell y’all the that the hiatus was due to a glamorous sabbatical world tour extravaganza, a whirlwind romance ending in happily ever after or a lottery win that led to 180 days of being sozzled on pink fizz.

But, no, just took a break to sort out some things in my real life – the one that (nearly!) pays the bills, goes to work, has hangovers and heartache and isn’t always as funny and fabulous as Countrydropper is – but, fear not, with the advent of spring (and, yes, I am aware that it is mid-June.  I live in London, after all.  Home to two seasons – grey, wet and cold and grey, wet and warm.  As it is less cold than warm, it must be spring. It damn sure ain’t summer.)  I am back on the funny wagon.  Or, at least the “I think I am” funny wagon.  But, you must be mildly amused or you wouldn’t have gotten this far!

So, here I sit contemplating my Saturday night plans – a house party.  Now,  for all y’all back home, that may mean something akin to a 90s Moby event replete with glow sticks and bad dancing, but for those of us city dwellers it just means a party at someone’s “house” (AKA flat) as opposed to a pub or bar.  Which really means, bring your own booze and no 11 pm closing time.  My kinda shindig.  But, another aspect of the London House Party is fancy dress. 

What, you Amerixan (see what I did there?  I kept the Texas while still including the America as all my friends know that a Texan is a Texan first, an American second. But, some of y’all didn’t have the good luck to be from God’s Country, so I lump y’all in there, too) folks will be thinking, who wears a cocktail formal to someone’s house?   But, no, fancy dress is code for costume as opposed to black tie, which is code for, well, black tie.

Yes, the Brits love to dress up like every day is Halloween.  Which is ironic as Halloween here is a real let down.  For people who invented irony, the hallmark of Halloween, they certainly don’t get the point on October 31.  No, people seem to think that is has to be something “scary” so you see a bunch of people in costumes with some fake blood and gore added to it. You haven’t seen anything til you have seen a zombie Michael Jackson or a corpse Taylor Swift.  As an aside, my best British Halloween costume ever was during the election year in 2008 when I went as Sarah Palin. Scary and ironic all at once. Result.

So, as there is nothing ironic or clever about Halloween, these fancy dress parties abound.  I, myself, have had not too few, the first being a Bad Taste party, which was one of the best soirees I have had.  Well, until the panic moment when my two terrorist bedecked friends decided to fire their toy guns outside my flat.  Which was next door to the Chilean Embassy and across the street from the Turkish Embassy.  Probably not a good idea to have a balaclava and flak jacketed “IRA” dude exchanging fire with the thobe clad “Muslim” outside my front door.  (And, no, I don’t know why I used the quotation marks for my friend, who actually is Muslim, and yes, I did have to google “Muslim man’s robe” to learn that it was actually called a thobe.) 

But, I digress.

So, tonight’s fancy dress theme is The Great Gatsby.  Now, I have long hair and a curvy figure, so I am already at a disadvantage for the 20s when women were supposed to look like sparkly bejewelled little boys.  Not much I can do about that, so my uber lame costume is an art deco necklace and a black dress.  I am sure I have a feather boa and some black silk gloves in my fancy dress box. 

(Yes, I am 40 years old and I have a toy box. It has a pink silk witch’s hat, a sparkly American flag cowboy hat, devil’s horns, said boa and gloves etc.  One can never be too prepared for an impromptu fancy dress affair.)

I am looking forward to this party, but with some trepidation.  The last fancy dress themed event that I (and many of tonight’s guests) attended was my Fabulous 40s Party in December.  A fantastic event, with bottles of champagne, waiters with amazing hors d’oeuvres and nibbles, the world’s largest cheese plate and the most amazing 1940s themed costumes ever (including a cameo appearance by an 8 month old Winston Churchill, munching on his pacifier/dummy turned cigar).  We danced and drank and celebrated in a magnificent country manor house in Suffolk until the wee hours of the morning.  We had a wonderful brunch the next morning with homemade pancakes, roasted chicken, stuffing, potatoes, mimosas and more wine.

It was the perfect weekend.

And, then…the Kraken was unleashed.

Otherwise known as Norovirus or the winter vomiting bug, it starts off subtly with a “hmm, I feel a bit NQR." (not quite right for the non-Aussies)  Must be having a delayed onset of a hangover…maybe I will just lie down….to a “wow, maybe I am still drunk as that was some serious projectile vomiting, I better chug a big pint of water"….to an, "uh-oh…."

To put it more delicately, my friend Rich said he felt like a tube of toothpaste squeezed out both ends.

So, some of us were still out in the country, some had actually made it home, some were en-route.  But, all of us (bar 3) were struck down at some point in varying degrees of horrific-ness. I was still in the House of Hell (as it came to be known in my mind) along with a few friends and we had to alter travel plans and stay an extra night as one friend (who shall remain nameless!) was unable to leave the safety of indoor plumbing.  Now, you would think that the nice folks who rented the house to us would have let us stay for free given the medical necessity, but, no, the money grubbers insisted on charging my friend for the night.

I take comfort in the fact that the virus can live for up to 14 days on surfaces and that the owners were staying in the house the next weekend for their family Christmas.  Karma is a b*tch.

So, a technicolor end to what had been a glorious weekend and party. I will certainly never forget turning 40.  Nor will my friends I suspect, as every time we have gotten together since that night, the Kraken has come up in conversation like an old war story at a VFW event.  We endured and we survived, but we are all a little marked by the event.

In hindsight, maybe having a fancy dress theme based on a war wasn’t such a great idea. Maybe staying in village that had been home to the strategic military encampment of the US Air Force during World War 2 was tempting fate a bit. And, maybe, just maybe, having a friend who (randomly) dressed as a priest and staying in a former monastery was a bit irreverent.  

I am sure tonight will be different – what could be better than the Roaring 20s?   

I can’t imagine an illustrious ending to a Great Gatsby themed affair.  Nothing fortuitous about that, right?

At least it isn’t the Hamptons.  Or summer.