The HUGE party that wasn't

With a couple of weeks to go to our departure my host dad announced that he would hold a party in our honour, for all the volunteers and their host parents to say goodbye to us all.

As the time drew nearer his plans got ever more elaborate and I greatly doubted them. Apparently there was to be a priest to bless our air travel and a local council member. All of this in our dusty  back yard, I couldn’t imagine it.

On the day itself I turned up at 5pm and was absolutely amazed to find that there were a couple of hundred people in a marquee in my back yard. Where had they all come from?! I only live in a little village! They were all sat patiently on white plastic chairs, presumably awaiting my arrival. I hurried across the ‘stage’ in order to get to my bedroom door and put my bags down. Apparently everyone else had been told that the party would start at 2pm and so by their reckoning I was quite late, but not as late as my fellow volunteers, most of whom hadn’t arrived yet. No sooner had this message been conveyed than it started to rain. Heavily. Before I knew it ‘the party that wasn’t’ became ‘the party that was, in my bedroom’ as 100s of people scrambled to find somewhere to shelter – the marquee wouldn’t take all of them.

It was a bit awkward, hosting so many unknown people our bedroom, slightly wondering if anything would get stolen and cooking alive with the heat of so many bodies in so little space.

After about an hour of this the rain subsided, it was decided that there would be no more party, blessings, speeches, presents or dancing, just food. I helped to distribute this in a generally chaotic way (not chaotic due to my presence you understand, it just was). My host sister’s bedroom had been converted into a kitchen and it was like a Mary Poppins’ larder – I had no idea what we had available, but the food kept coming and I kept putting it on plates (my host dad was absolutely delighted that HIS white person would lower herself to the standard of a woman by helping to serve). When the plates ran out we reused those from people who had finished eating. It was a feast by anyone’s reckoning.

Once fed, the crowd melted away.

It was humbling to think that they would wait 5 hours and brave a rainstorm all for a free dinner.

How to party like a Kenyan!

After the monumental low that preceded the pitching document deadline came the post-deadline party, which I attended in a state of wild sleep deprivation and spent a good deal of the night wondering if I was drunk or just manically tired. Katie and I were warmly welcomed back to the group of volunteers, who of course hadn't seen us in a long while (4 days is ages in that kind of close community!) It was held in a 3-sided marquee in a field, with a food buffet at one end and a DJ at the other. Tequila kicked the night off.

At about 7pm I found Melissa on the floor, amongst the bags, behind the plastic chairs, saying that she was drunk. I hadn't started drinking at this stage, so I wasn't in danger of spilling anything at all by lying down next to her, having a hug, and generally ensuring that she wasn't the only one sprawled on the floor. Tim was very quickly out of his mind, asked Amy if she wanted a hug and then bit her, which she thought was hilarious and dined out on the story for the rest of the evening, made better by the fact that her audience kept forgetting and needed to be told again. The tent was soon full of dancers. Hamish was struggling to stay upright, but still managed to dance by holding on to a tent pole.  I resolved to write a formal letter of appreciation to the DJ. Catherine, always dignified, was currently experiencing drunkenness for the first time; maintaining a meek countenance like no one else alive, she danced by herself in a corner, thereby saying nothing silly to anyone. Meanwhile, it had started to rain outside, heavily, in the way that I'd only ever seen in Kenya. The locals stayed sensibly under the tent shelter, but the volunteers (including several Kenyan ones) came out to dance in the rain. It's a wonderful sensation. It also makes you feel about 1.5x more drunk than you really are. A little like reality has been partly suspended and you're in a music video. I was soon soaked through and I didn't care.

I found Kenyan dancing a bit tough, but it was OK because so did my friend Jane and she is the benchmark for dance floor morality as far I am concerned. The reason that such a benchmark was needed, was that in UK terms, Kenyan dancing is incredibly sexual. If a Kenyan friend came to visit me at home, I couldn't take them to a night club because their moves would almost certainly be mistaken for premature foreplay. One of my Kenyan friends helpfully explained the etiquette: "you just have to give them a hard-on Clare, and then leave them". This very helpful piece of advice certainly explained why so many of the men were running round with erections, but it didn't make dancing with them much easier. I resolved that as long as I was well out of my comfort zone I was probably doing it right, but problematically this benchmark didn't stay steady and the more vodka I drank, the more challenging dance moves I was required to undertake to ensure that I was always being stretched in a risque direction. While Kenyans don't attribute any significance to dance floor antics and don't see it as particularly sexual, I eventually had to extricate myself from what I felt was becoming a threesome, rather than a dance, and went off in pursuit of more vodka.

Eventually it was time to leave. At least one of the party had to be carried out of the gate, because he was sound asleep, despite the very loud music. As I stepped out into the road, I was startled to find my friend Helen, squatting down and relieving herself in a pothole. At exactly the same time our taxi arrived. Helen hared past me with the speed of a Kenyan sprinter (perhaps not coincidentally) and left a group of us to laugh uncontrollably in her wake. When we got into the taxi, it was Catherine's turn, "I need a wee". This state of affairs got more urgent until we arrived at my house and I invited her into our garden to use our hole-in-the-ground, she stepped out of the taxi behind me but the next thing I heard was "MATT DON'T LOOK!" Never before or since have I heard her sound so fierce. Clearly Helen wasn't the only one to water the road that evening.

According to her roommate, Catherine was out like a lamp that evening but was so excited by her drunken dreams that her roommate was woken hourly to be told about them.

I wish there was a moral to this story, or something intelligent to conclude with, but really this is just an important progression in the story: We'd had a tough time and we needed a break.

You can't shock a chippie. Fact

There comes a point in the night after which, drunk people should stay on the dance floor where they can't embarrass themselves becasue no one can hear them talk and their flails look like wild moves if only lit by a strobe. When they stray off it to get chips, that's when the trouble starts...

A few weekends ago I was at a fundraising party for a charity in Kenya (my own fundraising party, in fact) and all the guests were tasked with completing certain missions before the night was up in order to earn points. Some missions were easy and earned few points (hug a bouncer), others were more more challenging and so earned lots of points (turn a team of 5 people upside down in any way you like). On my way home with a few fellow party-survivors I  was very happy (not least because it wasn't my home I was going to but a friend's, thereby ensuring that the social spectacular would last another day). Much mischief had been achieved, much wine had been drunk and much funding had been raised. To make matters even better it was snowing and none of us were sober enough to feel the cold. Win, win.
You might think at this point that we were on the pinnacle of drunken satisfaction, but no, as we skipped through the snowflakes we came across a chip shop, still open at 3am. Marvellous! And once inside, with my sufficiently greasy order placed, I realised that there were still one more challenge that could be completed. Hurah! This in fact was a much more exciting pursuit than food, which I soon forgot about. It was imperative that I exercise the opportunity to take of an item of underwear and wave it in the air (thereby earning 5 more points for my team). Actually, better still, everyone ought to join in, that would be more appropriate. One female friend was keen but the other required a bit of cajoling. The boys weren't invited to join in - we needed them to hold our jackets and be the photographer. Bras were waved vigorously in the air. What a triumph! As the scene unfolded the man behind the chip shop counter tried in vain to attract our attention to tell us our food was ready (not that we were at all interested. Let's face it, it's not every night you get to wave your bra about, but it's fairly commonplace to eat cheesy chips) he was not remotely sympathetic and seemed slightly irritated that we were taking so long to leave the premises. The fact that we were in the middle of something more important clearly didn't register. It must be the case that the staff of late night take-aways have seen it all before. Customers enthralled in the tasks of being eccentric can in no way surprise them. They see the most idiotic of human antics, probably quite regularly.

Some might say, it was out of pure respect, we didn't waste his time but ran out into the night, chips in one hand underwear in the other.

Sinterklaas is coming to town

First of all, let me set the scene. A couple of weekends ago I was in Monaco for a sailing competition (which I’ll admit is not as glamorous as it sounds) and we were all gathered for a black tie dinner on the Saturday night (also not as glamorous as it sounds, I’ll justify this in a future blog post one day). There were eight international teams there (each made up of 8 people: 4 males, 4 females) and it was early December, which as I was soon to learn, is coincidentally when the Dutch celebrate Christmas.

I was alerted to the fact that it was time for the secret Santa, just after dinner, when a handful of gingerbread flew through the air and hit me in the eye. It had been thrown by a very tall elf. I was surprised then to catch sight of ‘Sinterklaas’ and realised he was to be joining us. Visually he looked like a cross between Santa and a cardinal, with a little more emphasis on the latter. He was also very tall, spoke with a Dutch accent and when his hat fell off, which it did regularly (due to the quantity of wine consumed), you could see blond hair underneath.

The Dutch team tried to explain to us who this fellow was. Apparently in Holland they have this chap who visits all the good boys and girls on the first weekend of December. In the past it was said that he removed naughty children in his sack, but now he’s more inclined to use the sack to bring presents to well behave ones. He is an arch rival of Santa Claus and they have a fight the following day after which Sinterklaas goes back to his house in Spain…or something like that*. No one was very sober at the time and so I thought the explanation might make more sense the following day. It didn’t.

Apparently in Holland they don’t really go in for present giving, they focus more on the writing and giving of poems and so this is what we all had to do. A secret Santa of poem giving. Some of the poems were great, some were terrible and some teams technically had the distinct advantage that they had a member locked in jail for part of the day who were therefore able to apply themselves fully to the task of poetry writing. Nevertheless, the most awful poet was Eddie who introduced his masterpiece with the melodramatic explanation that he’d written it during his “incarceration” and then he proceeded to read out the shortest and least sensical poem of the lot while the opportunistically formed Free Eddie Party heckled throughout with drunken shouts of “Free Eddie!” (It was apparently much more satisfying shouting this now there was the man himself to shout it at). Once the poem was finished, it was loudly remarked that, after a day behind bars, he should have come up with something better.

Over on the UK team, we had drawn Rome in the secret Santa and had also struggled to write our poem. When it was our turn to send a representative to go and sit on Sinterklaas’ knee (good old Benjie) we explained that it would be an ‘interactive poem’ and was to require audience participation. It was also the type of poem that had a repetitive theme. I was impressed at the way Benjie sold it. The Rome team would be required to come to the front and the name of the poem was ‘I have never’…you may be familiar with it. It went down a storm.





* For anyone interested in finding out about Sinterklaas through a less confused lens. Here's a link to a well explained page. It does not however explain the fight between him and Santa Claus. I have yet to get to the bottom of that!

Also if you're interested in seeing the full story of that Monaco trip, it's accumulating here #ClareInMonaco

Fancy dress is temporary. Unless you're from Plymouth.

One of the other things that made me laugh this weekend was Plymouth university, who decided to dress up as Native Indians. Freshers and graduates alike had all put a lot of effort in to look the part and as a group their turnout was fantastic. Actually, if anything, they had put in too much effort, as they had decided to decorate themselves with henna in order to create the right tribal effect. In the morning they found their arms, legs and (in some cases) faces were stained black and are now due to stay that way for at least a month. If only they had any skill (/modest sobriety) at applying their patterns in the first place their predicament might now be slightly better. As it is, I think there are going to be some awkward young graduates at work right now!

Henna done right. It's pretty hard for a drunken novice to emulate.

Not all Scientists are created equally Sexy

Last night at the university windsurfers' reunion we all dressed up as sexy scientists. The boys’ interpretation of this was to wear lab coats with alarming degrees of nothingness underneath. Christo was by far the worst as he was wearing leopard print boxers, a stick on moustache, an Einstein wig, an Anne Summers 'flogger' and a type of ladies underwear I’ve never seen or heard of before – it was like a pair of tights that were semi opaque, came up to his arm pits, had shoulder straps and no crotch (presumably to help female wearers go to the toilet – not so helpful for Christo though who found his manly parts all came through the hole, which acted like an inefficient tourniquet). The boys who had been planning to go out looking respectable almost all changed their minds when they saw Christo and so the ladies were called on to provide enough provocative items of underwear to transform them. We obliged and soon the caravan was full of, um, what had better be described as ‘alarmingly sexy scientists’. The girls meanwhile went out in little black dresses under lab coats and enjoyed the warmest, most practical, evening we’d had in a long time. It's nice to turn the tables every once in a while!

I can't show the boys out of consideration for public decency!

Surprised by my drunken self

I got an email at work today from a chap I don't know called Mark. Apparently I'd given him my company email address (not sure why!) on Saturday night while quite drunk and he also appeared to be under the impression I'd instructed him to use it in order to start a game of noughts and crosses. Better still, he clearly felt some need to tell me that his name wasn't Hector (I didn't like to ask why!) It's just not the sort of thing you expect to catch up with you at work on a Tuesday afternoon! I think maybe I put 'noughts and crosses' next to my name in his phone as a reminder of who I was as we had just played a game on a big toy set in a children's playground (which is where the (now not so literally located) house party had ended up). Looking back, the fact that I then asked to borrow his jeans in order to climb a large plastic palm tree, before magnanimously giving him my dress in exchange when he agreed, probably made me a little more memorable still. I hadn't thought of that. Remembering this, I put my cross in bottom left. It's the least I could do.