In which I am a grown-up and thus hold a fancy-dress party.

I realise I'm yet to actually write about my birthday, which was absolutely wonderful, but this is because I needed to nab the pictures off Pat, who was photographer-in-chief for the evening. Now I've got them, I will say that apparently my birthday was the place to be over the weekend. Hackery rules, etc. (Although one of my favourite moments of the night was foreverdirt pointing to Wolfgang and Wisconsin Sam and asking me how I knew them. It turned out they were the only people at the entire shindig to be guilty of PPE at Balliol.)

In fact, the party was really a wonderful success. It started off as a bit of a disaster, because it was meant to begin with a dinner party which never materialised. We were late starting, and I'd spent the afternoon making fairy cakes with Maria and roasting parsnips whilst my flatmates went on a mysterious shopping expedition I wasn't allowed to accompany them on, and when they got back it was getting dark. What with one thing and another, them being mysterious and me being terrified that hathy_col and pinkishmew were lost somewhere in the dark, by the time I actually got back home people had started arriving.

Which is how I was wearing my coat and scarf when faced with my birthday cake:( Read more... )

People were arriving in costume, it should be added. lilka appeared first, with Ronan, dressed as Thursday Next and the Crow respectively, and pretty soon narahttbbs appeared as Scully, foulds and sir_rosealot as a Flaming Lips album cover, James as a pigtailed-and-adorable Pippi Longstocking... I could go on, but I'll go on forever. foreverdirt appeared looking amazing, but I didn't know what she was supposed to be. Having foreseen this possibility, she handed me "The Dot And The Line: A Romance In Lower Mathematics", a book which rapidly did the rounds and prompted sighs of contentment at the successful resolution of the story, which details the doomed love of a line for a dot who prefers to date a squiggle.

(It is, incidentally, a myth that mathmos can't socialise. Mathmos can socialise just fine. With other mathmos. dougs (Father Mulcahy) and zeta_of_s (Arthur Dent, the radio version) stood in a corner for hours and talked about maths, and later I was shown the geometry of a circle in three dimensions sketched in tube icing on a cookie, which I'm pleased to say I almost understood.)

PPEists, too, are pretty good at socialising. kuteki made a perfect Daria, jacinthsong was Four and offered people jellybabies with a certain solemnity of comic timing, and I was the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I really could go on about the costumes for hours, actually. slasheuse made a wonderful pirate, and steerpikelet had to go to London, but before she went, she did a marvellous turn as Tonks. And other people unconsciously got their costumes to gel, I don't know how; absinthe_shadow came as Virginia Woolf and Maria as Orlando; David as Oz-from-Buffy and Claire as Oz-from-Buffy-being-God. ("Oh," I said, "a meta-costume." Later on pinkishmew said the same thing, almost word for word, which amused Claire all evening.)

Speaking of pinkishmew, she was one of the people who came stupid amounts of distance to see me, and it was lovely to see her. Hers was the sort of costume you had to think twice about, but resolved perfectly once you were told: Simon Tam, from Firefly! Another person who came a long way was dougs, who made an awesome Father Mulcahy, and got me the most awesome gift - a Lurpak butter toast rack! (Where on earth did you get it?) It's now doing sterling service for the whole flat, who are now eating toast with even greater enthusiasm, if that's possible.

Somewhere in the middle of the party, foreverdirt asked if we could have silence for a minute. I obliged by banging a spoon against a glass - here I am doing it: ( Read more... )

- without realising everyone would fall silent and look at me. And then someone in the back yelled, "Speeeech!" and in five minutes they were all doing it. I said, not at all rhetorically, "Do you really want me to make a speech?" and the answer was undoubtedly in the affirmative.

I think this is the first time I've ever had to make an off-the-cuff speech to thirty-five people. So I thanked them all for coming, and for going to such beautiful, glittery effort to pander to my whim, and for being wonderful people. And I observed that no one had kissed or killed anyone else. And then I gave up and said, "Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a two-tonne block of cheese."

(I'm pretty sure that at this point I heard someone say, "And a wheat thin the size of Lake Tahoe", but I'm not sure who.)

"It was there for the hungry, it was there for the voiceless, it was there for whoever wanted it. And in the spirit of Andrew Jackson and his two-tonne block of cheese..."

...they all came to my party, and dressed up and brought food and made friends and drank and made merry and reminded me of how much I love them. And then I opened the floor for foreverdirt, who got up next to me and pointed to Wisconsin Sam. "Who here tonight," she demanded, "has had their heart broken by this man?"

A brief pause, and every straight woman and gay man in the flat raised their hand. And so did everyone else. Poor Sam, judging from the shade of red he went, isn't going to recover from this in a hurry. (For the record: he looked adorable. He always does. But his hair was especially adorable.)

(A few random ones: ( Read more... )

Moving on, yes. The party wound down in the wee small hours in Claire's room, where people gave me gifts and watched me get very excited about them. Mostly, people gave me books. Chick-lit from Claire, Nights At The Circus from lilka, the gift of her company from hathy_col - here she is as Rosie Palm, with zeta_of_s and five daughters (!):( Read more... )

- having come six hundred miles to be with me on my birthday, and I also got a lovely new journal, a volume of feminist poetry and a lot of alcohol and chocolate. My flatmates collectively gave me a talking TARDIS piggy bank, a new pair of gloves (to stop me moaning about cold hands) and season three of The West Wing! (Much excitement.) This is my favourite photo of the bunch:( Read more... )

The gloves are wonderful. Apparently they deliberately picked out a pair for people with ridiculously long fingers. I love my friends.

No, I really, really do. I did some statistics, because I am that much of a geek. Of the about-forty people at the party, there was a mix of people that really didn't match the general population - about two thirds were fannish and two thirds were queeer, and not the same two thirds - and my flatmates were different degrees of astonished. But they all got on, mundane and fannish alike, and made friends with gay abandon, and I have to admit I was worried about that. By far my favourite moment of the evening was Maria coming up to me and saying, "Iona, you know an amazing selection of people."

(A brief digression for a moment - someone, possibly narahttbbs or foreverdirt, noted that at your average party, the geeks congregate in the kitchen; I attempted to circumvent this by holding the party in the kitchen, but there were still people huddling over the cooker and in the corridor, away from the food. There needs to be some sort of a study done on this.)

The sentiment was repeated once or twice - narahttbbs confessed to eavesdropping on all the wonderful conversation going on, something I was doing as well, and Claire seemed bemused ("I knew you knew all these people, sort of, but all together they're... wow.") - and, well, I do, don't I? I do know extraordinary people, and they all came to my birthday party, and I had a lovely lovely time.

Colleen had to get the bus at six (!), so I walked across town with her barely two hours after the party broke up, and we had the whole city to ourselves. No one is up at five thirty on a Sunday, it seems. And then she went back up to Scotland, travelling more hours than she was actually here, but she was here, and I was so happy she came.

Ditto pinkishmew, who left at lunchtime, having got up at a reasonable hour, and I curled up into bed once she'd gone and slept all day. We cleared the kitchen in the evening, and short of a few discarded costume items, some icing on the surfaces and a whole lot of plastic cups, it was fine.

Ah, it was more than fine, it was wonderful. I'm going to do this again next year. Next year is my last milestone birthday in that now, aged twenty, I am too young to run for political office, and then my twenty-second birthday, January 20th, 2009, is the day that person-who-is-not-George-W.-Bush takes office as President of the United States.

And that's got to be worth a party.