To a party last night to celebrate Mary and Hugo's marriage, hosted by Hugo's parents at The Orangery in the highly landscaped grounds of Holland Park. Lots of champagne and lovely canapés in the lofty stone and glass surroundings of the ex-orangery hall.
Matt and I headed over to Play Bar in Old Street last night for Miranda and Charlie's engagement party, jointly held with those other South London engagees Rob and Cecilia.
Abbie and Jim joined us there, as well as Kal and Jenny. Jon and Rose turned up later. It was very drunken, at least for me. I had one of those appalling hangovers this morning where it's randomly out of all proportion to the amount I had been drinking.
It was amusing seeing Charlie in the uncomfortable environs of a classic dark noisy Hoxton bar. A long way from his usual comfort zone of a spacious quiet civilised pub. I quite enjoyed battling the near pitch darkness and ridiculously loud music levels to maintain various drunken one on one conversations... We left around midnight - Pete and Charlie were bouncing around to the techno maelstrom at that point - hopefully it all ended gloriously!
Just had lots of birthdays! Friday night was Dan H's birthday at a nice spacious upstairs room at the Fentiman Arms near Oval. I went down with Alex, having had a couple of drinks with Fares in Soho. Kate B joined us there too - first time I've seen her since she got back from Argentina! Hannah H was back from her South American travels too, now living in Macclesfield rather than London for a while.
Saturday was Tom P's birthday at the North London Tavern in Kilburn, dark and loud, but fun with good beer. Saw Tom G from school, which was a surprise, and Nick and Neil were there, which was nice. Nick is now working for his sister instead of at MTV - sounds like much more fun. There's lots to be said for working with family, at least after you've been at a huge corporation for many years.
Went from Tom's pub to Shepherd's Bush, to Vesbar, where Ema was celebrating her birthday. The place was closing when I got there, but we went on to their flat, with Michal, Alex, Agata, Zanest and Gaz. We pooled random bits of K and pills people had, ground it all up and snorted it! Great fun! We ended up chatting about the cultural frame switching that often occurs when you speak more than one language, with values and style shifting depending on the register and resources of the language you're using. And Michal had a rant about English people not getting to the point.
Today, Matt and I went to Spitalfields Market, looking very swanky these days but still useful, and then met up with Francis at Liverpool Street for a few pints and a chat.
Jordan hosted us at his flat last night, along with Kat, Phil, Roz and Benjie, for his pre leaving the country for San Diego party.
Matt and I made a chocolate cheesecake for him, and we all gathered around 8.30pm and started to drink cava and take Es and whizz. We watched the final hours of Big Brother, getting more and more emotional as Glyn and Pete left the Big Brother house and the drugs we'd taken started to kick in.
Then we started singing on the Playstation karaoke game which Roz had brought with her, dancing to various bits of music, and generally running around the flat enjoying the hilarity of everything.
At some point we started taking G, which made things even more emotional and hilarious, and I lost the ability to form coherent sentences sometime around 4am. I regained this useful ability around 5am though, and while the others went to bed, Jordan, Phil and I stayed up into the morning, exploring the profound nature of friendship, love and how extremely fucked we were. The others started to get up around 10am, and we all decamped to the living room to drink beer and watch Benny and Joon and then Victor/Victoria, which were suitably easy going and relaxing. I tried to institute a viewing of Wild Zero, the rock'n'roll alien zombie love movie, but it was deemed a bit "too hectic" to be watching while recovering from heavy drug abuse.
Matt and I headed off home late afternoon, brilliant and exhausted. I suspect we will be sleeping for much of tomorrow!
We have emerged from a glorious weekend: Carnivale, the circus that has seen better days.
We began to assemble in Devon a week ago and spent several days leisurely preparing the barn and getting things ready. We were able to build on last year's Beltane party to decorate and light the barn really effectively, and the theme was generally a joy to work with.
Our general advice to guests when they enquired about the dress code was "tattered opulence" and "camp it up". When they started arriving around 6pm on Saturday, there were soon lots of fabulous outfits on display, including one or two very circus themed ones such as the lion and his tamer, a mime artist and the knife thrower's assistant. Charles came as Death, who made an amusingly sombre contrast to most other guests, in his long black robes and death white makeup covered face.
Our ceilidh band for the evening was Fox Amongst the Chickens, who led us ably through lots of traditional country dancing. Rachel had prepared lots of amazing food, and we had stockpiles of cava, beer, cider and wine. Check out the photo gallery for pictures from the beginning to the end, compiled from various sources. Thanks to Ondre, James G, Tom P, Benjie and Jo and Andy for the photos.
On Sunday and Monday, people drifted home more slowly than last year, and on Monday those of us left all went for an idyllic swim in the River Exe in glorious hot sunshine, bobbing about in the fresh water amongst the bright blue damselflies and shady trees on the banks.
Matt and I saw Modern Times at the NFT earlier – truly a magnificent film. Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker in a ruthlessly capitalist and bureaucratic modern city and holds up a very funny mirror to society. Although it was the era of talkies by the time he made this film, he plays it mostly as a silent movie, building up to this amazing scene where he sings a nonsense song before a cafe audience. It's very weird seeing him actually make a noise.
Next we headed down to Clapham to Matt's old house and had fun chatting to Jossy and checking out how Clapham has changed in the last couple of years.
Then we took the tube out to the wilds of Northfields in west London, to Jordan and Kat's rather charming flat. This is where we are now ensconced, with Jordan's brother Benjy, their friend Ros, and Phil. We are alternating between pop and rock videos, with occasional bursts of synchronised dancing!
On Saturday we all headed up to the lovely upstairs room at the Hemingford Arms for Kate's farewell pre-Argentina party! It was glorious fun, and we got to hand over the ipod which 26 of us had been contributing to filling up over the past week. I took a few rather random sepia photographs too...
Having slept all day recovering from Fiction, Alex came round to our flat to use the shower, and the three of us headed out to Abbie's birthday drinks at Aman, a stylish cocktail lounge sort of bar on Chapel Market. I had a Saigon Mistress, which combined the cucumber coolness of Hendrick's Gin and the bite of ginger ale most satisfyingly. Lots of lovely people were there, but we couldn't stay long, and Matt and I headed off to Croydon, leaving Alex to join Abbie's crew at Cafe Gallipoli for dinner.
Down in Croydon, we forged through the howling, well, fairly frisky, winds of the concrete suburbs to Dan's flat. Here we began with a bottle of rose cava, followed up closely with liberal doses of MDMA powder. We roamed around the room and chatted to various interesting people, including Andi's boyfriend Brendan, as people gradually drifted away, and we were left sitting around dribbling at about 5am, sporadically yelping "Jackie!" in homage to Sylvester Stallone's mom. Me and Matt caught the first morning Thameslink all the way to Kentish Town.
Meanwhile, Abbie's birthday reportedly went well, with a big, hearty dinner, followed by MDMA-powered debauchery at the Belitha house. All the elements of a classic night, with Mary passing out on the couch, Kate and Abbie getting highly emotional, Alex consuming too much K and having to be sent home in a taxi, where he discovered that eight police had raided Helmet Row after Tref and Dave climbed up on the roof to hurl a television into the nearby car park and fiddle with people's TV aerials. Luckily, they denied everything and no-one was arrested. "The Glory!!!" as Jim said at the time.
Last night was the joint birthday party madness down at Jamie's flat in Putney. We all got rather trashed, and it was a great night. Not as crowded as last year's, and just right. Josh H turned up, the only Oxford person, and we spent lots of time catching up, which was nice. He also bonded with Aaron over being from Essex, and leafed through that classic gay publication - Vulcan magazine. We met Wesley's new beau, Mark, and Daniel's long distance lover, Charlie. Juicy ran around introducing everyone to everyone else, which was certainly a very useful service for those who didn't know everyone else. The Poles were there in force, and quite fucked even before I arrived. We finally passed out in the early morning light, catching a few hours sleep on the living room floor before rising to do some cleaning.
The day after returning from Italy we had a Sunday afternoon Brazilian themed flat warming party, at which Daniel prepared huge amounts of meat Brazilian style and we drank lots of caipirinhas. Quite late and messy for a Sunday, as the barbecue set fire to the table outside, the carpet emerged a rather different (darker) colour, and we ended up cavorting around the living room around 11pm on K and Diana Ross.
Matt, Alex and I got up fairly early on Saturday morning, took the 'Oxford Espress' to Oxford and met Angharad and Kevin at the Isis Tavern on the river at Iffley end of town for lunch and a couple of pints of ale. It was also the last day of Eights Week and there were lots of rowers going up and down the river doing their rowing thing.
After that, we took the bus out to Adam and Kayla's shared house somewhere out past Marston Road for Adam's birthday barbecue. Heather and Henry were also there, along with the Bell parents, various friends of Kayla's from her course and friends of Adam's from Blackwells. We took turns cooking and burning the meat and vegetables, drank Pimms, wine and beer, paid a visit on Cooper, admired Kayla's friends' newborn babies and bounced up and down to Weezer songs. Classic evening! We caught the coach back to London after midnight...
I went down to Devon last Wednesday, Matt following soon behind, as we prepared for our Beltane Party Extravaganza on Saturday. We spent three very pleasant days preparing - sweeping the barn, preparing food, putting up decorations, making signs, spray-painting a Beltane mural, doing the lights, putting out chairs and tables. Matt orchestrated the making of the wicker man from bundles of withies which we had ordered from Somerset, and Glyn and Anna came on Friday night to help out too. It was thoroughly enjoyable, and we began to be quite sad that sooner or later the actual party was going to begin.
We were surrounded by young animal life. The farm cat had kittens on Thursday, and we were pestered by the orphan lambs, while Alice and the older kitten played around the barn, and the hens strutted about looking silly.
We were not treated kindly by the weather, which may have been inflicted by a envious Judeo-Christian God angered by the Pagan attention being lavished upon Bel in this rebellious corner of the South West. Luckily the Patriarchal doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths were no match for the glorious excesses of this party. Here, women were strong, gay marriage was the power and the glory, ethnic minorities ran riot and there was a big keg of local Devonian ale. Nothing could stop us!
Dozens of people were filling up the barn by around 8pm; we were joined by the Lucy Lastic Band, a marvellous Devonshire ceilidh outfit who fiddled for us and got people dancing. Soon, we were all pissed and whirling around like confused morris men. Matt's glorious larger-than-life wicker man loomed over the gathering, suspended on one of the barn's pillar supports.
People fell upon Rachel's magnificant food - two roast hams, a roast turkey, a whole salmon, asparagus, tomatoes, potatoes, bowls of fruit and hunks of cheese vied with each other for gustationary supremacy.
After midnight, the Lucy Lastic band headed off, and a more DJ-centered phase of the night began. The dancing continued, and at some point a friend of Kyle's leapt up and decapitated the penis of the wicker man!
At first I was shocked and dismayed. John S climbed up to try and re-affix the severed member, but it was knocked off again and then the whole figure hurled bodily from the pillar. I realised then that Bel was coming to claim his own.
Adam B grabbed the wicker man and began circling the friend of Kyle's, who performed a drunken martial arts dancing fight against the effigy. The two of them whirled around and around on the dance floor till Kyle's friend suddenly grabbed the body and hurled it to the ground.
Rachel came up behind me. "We've lit the fires!" she cried, "he must burn!" Matt and I went and lit the torches and handed them out and we made a solemn procession out the back of the barn to the small fire out the back. A spontaneous Gregorian chanting accompanied us as we hurled the wicker man on to the fire to enthusiastic cries of "burn him!"
From that point on, the crowd thinned out to a smaller crew who hijacked the music system and leapt around madly for most of the night, calming down long enough to watch the sun come up over the hill.
Matt and I spent the day recovering from Friday night, lounging about feeling spaced out. In the evening, we went to Clapham North to see two of Matt's friends from school, Julia and Tamsin, and then headed on down to Croydon for Dan M's birthday party. It was a freezing night, and the wind lashed our frail bodies as we staggered along the concrete streets of Croydon, but Dan's flat was the reward at the end of it, and it was cosy and lit with stylish red lights. All kinds of people were there, and we spent much of the evening chatting to the inimitable Gail and Andy.
I joined Jon and Charles on Friday evening and we headed down to Southampton for the beginning stages of Ceri's stag weekend. We met lots of his Southampton friends and his brothers, admired his pert attempt at cross dressing, and roamed through a number of pubs and ended up eating a drunken curry before passing out.
I had to get up quite early to go back to London for a DSA conference, but Charles remained in Southampton and they all embarked on a massive D-Day landings style paintballing adventure.
Lots of people came down to Devon for a 1920s party. Every single person made the effort to dress up and the effect was really cool, as if we'd all been transported to a land of heady glamour, bubbles and much use of the word 'darling' ... simply fabulous!
The next day, the Poles and Wesley stayed a little longer and we all went to look for fossils on Charmouth beach.
The ripples and eddies of retro alco alto glasto continue to stir our quiet computer-bound lives as Alex kicked off a poetry response to Abbie. He did however, nick a lot of this from some poor woman who really likes Hay of Wye, but I'm sure she won't mind.
Sheltered in a valley with hills that tower round,
a little town called Hay-on-Wye, its beauty is renowned.
The partly ruined castle on elevated ground,
Richard Booth is the owner, he's known the world around.
With Richard, Morelli and others, the town is full of books,
in every hole and corner, there's books and still more books.
In May, the "Literary Festival " of nationwide acclaim,
with writers, orators and linguists, mostly from the hall of fame.
They read their books and poetry for interested folks to hear,
the pianists and instrumentalists are a joy to the ear,
Classical, country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues,
Scientists, Psychiatrists, Broadcasters reading the news.
Orchards thick with fruit trees, fields of waving corn,
Black Mountains in the distance, majestic, yet forlorn.
With Hay's historical places and beautiful scenery round,
Go to Tom B's cottage and get wasted.
This was followed by a little ditty in celebration of country weekends, after Mary spent one in Dorset.
In Dorset, as in Hay,
We capped a rainy day
With revelry and drugs,
Then several dozen mugs
Of tea, in the morning,
Reflecting on the dawning
Of another day of Summer.
Finally, John turned his fluorescent and highly charged literary mind to producing what may be the final word on the matter...
The gauntlet cast down
By the Allens and Elliot,
With a giggle and a frown,
Come, Muse, and embellish it.
******
Alas, with no 'shrooms, or MDMA,
But with tender memories, some vibrant, some shady,
How may I paint the glory that was Hay?
The apple award to which choicest lady?
Lads were there too, just as bonny and sweet,
Two noble brothers, and a master of ales,
And plenty of bohemians whom I just failed to meet,
So addled were my wits, and tortuous my travails.
Chemical pleasure ferments in the brain,
But garnered with that was the truth of the heart,
A talk in the loft, twelve drinks on the train,
As the pill starts to weaken, a friendship may start.
Another weekend, I had by that Wye,
With revellers less fucked, but possibly less sober,
Of years more advanced, but of spirits as high,
Though none there could contrive a Bell-like hangover.
O zealots of pleasure, Abbie, Mary, Kate,
O priests of indulgence, Al, Tom and Dan,
Under which stars may we such abandon recreate?
Step up, a master of ceremonies, and give us a plan.
But now this wan scribe, his powers all are lost,
Must be wedded to markets and unit elasticity,
To optimisation, and benefit, and cost,
Too far from the West, mourning lost felicity.
*****
My story now done,
You six blushing and hail,
Summon a new one,
Bright, sweet, Abigail?
A motley crew descended upon the countryside near Hay on Wye last weekend for the almighty celebrations known to many as 'Alto Glasto'. Kate, Abbie, Mary and John S took a train down on Friday night, Rosie and Steve drove there in a car, while Dan, Alex and myself took a train there early on Saturday morning. Fearful that we might wuss out in the bleak light of a soul-chilling early morning, Abbie wrote us a charming poem to get us up and moving:
Ode to the Saturday Trippers
Twas a rainy day in 2004
when Rosie, Mary, Abbie and more
decided that the time was nigh
to venture to Hay on Wye
With Dr Wellsely's smile on board
and Mary's wit, and the hoard
of substances that Kate had packed
despite all this, they something lacked
For how much merriment can
one have without a hardcore Buffy fan?
What cheer is there, without a pair
of brothers with perennially re-dyed hair?
None, comes the answer, o'er hills and dales
None, speaks the wind from the depths of Wales
Though we may have Simon, Jezzer and Pippa
there's no Alto Glasto without Saturday trippers.
Disgruntled by my ever so slightly late arrival at Paddington and by Dan's characteristic jollity, Alex was in a rather bad mood with us all the way to Hereford, but he slowly thawed out as the day went on. Once at Hereford, we met Rosie and Abbie and all of went to a very large supermarket to buy food and booze and babycham before heading on to the house.
Tom B's house, site of the party, was marvellous. An amazing isolated little cottage tucked away at the top of a hill overlooking the green hills and vales of Merry Wales. We all started drinking and chatting and then lots of us went out for a bracing afternoon walk. Rosie and Kate invented a game called Falling Backwards Into The Ferns And Hoping We Won't Land In Any Nettles. Steve tried to fly his kite, but the wind was too irregular. He did, however, look pretty cool with the rolled-up kite slung across his shoulder. Legolas would have been proud.
By nightfall, the house was filling up with all kinds of people most of whom gamely began to take all kinds of narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. It was a pleasure and joy to behold.
The house was definitely suited to these adventures. There was a comfortable, stone-floor kitchen with a good aga for leaning against, a good-sized living room or two, a long attic with space for everyone to crash out in, a couple of tents in the garden and a pit out the back with a blazing fire that provided a primeval focus all night. The survivors of the night clustered around the fire as the sun came up, mostly us lot along with another quite random guy who Abbie became convinced was called 'Bayo', even though he kept assuring her that he wasn't.
The train back on Sunday was an amusing occasion as Dan, John, Abbie, Mary, Kate, Alex and I restored our bashed in bodies and minds with incredibly expensive alcoholic drinks from the train trolley. We idly played games, chatted and read bits of newspaper. By the time we arrived at Paddington, our section of the carriage was a remarkable rubbish dump of newspapers, magazines, bottles, cans and food packets. The dispersal at Paddington was a sad affair, as we drifted off into the London night like ragged butterflies.
We had an Inside Out and Upside Down party on Friday. It was one of our more fun parties, lots of people but not so many that everything went pear shaped. Lots of drugs, all kinds of people I hadn't seen in quite a while, speed punch and all kinds of merriment. In the morning, Jim, Dan, Kal and Steve stayed on to help clean up and we all went for a walk down by the canal in the Saturday morning sunshine.
We enjoyed the glory of Abbie's birthday last night! Matt, Alex, Michal and I all took a little speed in Babushka on Caledonian road and then rolled on through the evening, first at the Hemingford Arms, where Abbie got them to open the fabulous airy, 1920s, big-leather-sofas upstairs room for us, and then at Belitha Villas. It was great fun, with lots of people there I don't often see, and with the exciting culmination of Kate setting her hair on fire around two in the morning. Michal noticed luckily and beat it out with his hands while she just looked vaguely bemused and pissed, and other very fucked people wandered around commenting that the place smelt a bit funny...
