When times feel bleak and difficult, it is sometimes nice to retreat into the past in your own way, and think about some enjoyable or at least interesting times you remember fondly. For me, some of the most memorable occasions in my Past Life involved parties.
Growing up, as a kid, I always worked on the sort of assumption that a "party" was a celebratory thing you did when there was a particular occasion to… well, celebrate. Usually a birthday. I remember several birthday parties I attended as a child, usually at the "Reading Room" in the village, and they typically involved playing Pass the Parcel, that weird game where you had to put on a coat, scarf and hat and then eat a chocolate bar with a knife and fork, and, on a couple of occasions, actual entertainers. This kind of party I associate with cake, for probably obvious reasons.
As you get a bit older, though, the "celebration" bit of parties fades in favour of it simply being a "social gathering" of sorts. I must confess I still have the somewhat childish definition in my head whenever I hear the word "party", but, of course, I have experienced non-celebratory parties on a number of occasions in the past.
A lot of these occasions from my university days sort of blur into one another at this point, because the non-celebratory party, in my experience, tended to be an occasion with one primary activity: drinking until your brain spontaneously combusted. As such, many of my memories of parties from that period are somewhat fragmented, and I'm not sure what happened at which party. I guess it doesn't matter all that much; all that really does matter is that the experience happened, and I, for one reason or another, happen to remember it.
One party I do remember with a certain degree of specificity is an occasion when we, for some reason, ended up around at "Geography Beki's" house. I didn't know Geography Beki well — she was a classmate of one of my friends, so I had encountered her a couple of times, but not to any degree beyond "passing acquaintance" — but somehow everyone from my immediate friendship group ended up attending this party.
As parties went, it was relatively unremarkable, as I recall. The highlight of the evening was getting slowly more and more drunk in someone's bedroom, repeatedly listening to one track on Moby's Play album, because one of our number kept yelling "TRACK FIVE!" every time track five came to its conclusion. I say "highlight" of the evening; what I really mean is "this is the only thing I really remember in any great detail".
Another party I remember in somewhat blurry detail is one where I'm not even sure whose house it was or what I was doing there; my sole recollection of it was someone — possibly me, though I'm not even entirely sure of that — being sick out of a bedroom window and onto the corrugated plastic roof of the conservatory below. I believe a mop was hung out of the window in an attempt to get rid of the worst of the mess before it became a permanent feature on the rooftop.
Thinking about it, this may have been the same party at which two of my friends, each of whom were attending some form of martial arts club at the university, decided to try some moves on one another, and it escalated into at least one of the pair taking things rather more seriously than the event warranted. I recall the friend in question having an oddly furious look on their face, while the other just looked sort of bemused and amused at what was unfolding. It ended without any permanent damage happening to either of them.
These little events are all minor, stupid things, but I remember those moments oddly vividly, more than 20 years later in many cases. I don't really know why, either; I wouldn't describe them as particularly noteworthy incidents and definitely not things that went on to shape who I am today. But I do sort of miss them; I do sort of miss the normality of a whole bunch of people bundling around someone's house for no other reason than 1) it gave them somewhere out of the ordinary to get plastered and 2) perhaps to hang out with people whose company they could, at the very least, tolerate.
I don't know if I could handle a party like that these days. Probably not; as a socially anxious person, I often didn't handle those parties back then in the best way, and that social anxiety has only developed as I've got older and the Way The World Is has just pushed us all further apart from one another. But I still sort of miss them. If I could go back, I would probably try and enjoy those occasions a little more; evidently something about those times has remained precious enough to me to remember them for this long.
But anyway. I guess my meetup with my friends on Friday is going to be an extremely small-scale non-celebratory party of sorts. Except the only people in attendance are people I know and like. Sounds like an ideal solution to me!
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