Party, Party

It turned out it wasn’t the smart dinner party we needed to bring a jumper for. It was perfect in every way, temperature included, thanks to a huge fire, ranks of candles in silver candle sticks and being snuggled up with twenty nine others at a table narrow enough to flirt with the people opposite as well as those on either side. Very good planning. The husband who organised it is an ex-soldier and there was evidence everywhere of military-standard logistics of the type that I failed to implement for feeding the same number at my son’s recent birthday party. Enough people to dole out food to that number, for example. A table plan. Which put me between two intelligent interesting men. Enough knives and forks. Water glasses. Enough plates. Enough courses. Ice cold kummel in respectable receptacles. (At my son’s shambolic birthday dinner I broke out the home-made strawberry vodka intended for New Year and sloshed it out at room temperature in plastic tumblers. The Eminent Surgeon suggested owlishly that it needed to taste more like alcohol.)

The army were much in evidence at the regimental ball but hadn’t thought to warn us to bring a jumper, or that the bar and sitting area were outside. Early September in this part of Scotland is winter. Maybe as a Scottish regiment holding their party in an ancient castle they assumed all the guests would be as hardy as them or that we would know to come in skiing gear with bivvy bags instead of handbags.

We arrived in our inadequate clothes after dinner. Getting into a chilly car to batter half way across the county in the dark might not sound like the ideal after dinner activity but I loved it. It reminded me of the days when I used to spend all night in a pub then go off to a club – yippee! I still struggle to escape a feeling of failure if a dinner party I have given ends before 5 am or without dancing but there was no chance of our host suffering from any such feelings that night. (He is a little way past the difficult age I am at now, so no doubt is better adjusted anyway.)

The kind of bitter youthful experience outlined in my last posting taught me not to wear silly dresses to balls but the teenagers at this ball were a sensible bunch. And sober too. All of the girls were in dreary high cut dresses that looked like belted silk sacks, rather like mine. But I am thirty eight, twenty years older than them. It was evident that we were in the company of the generation who go to University to work hard and pass exams. And that we were amongst the oldest people there. Did we, the Blonde Bombshell and I wondered, appear to them as the veritable old dames of the neighbourhood had appeared to us fifteen or twenty years ago?

Any group of people gathered together to take part in Scottish country dancing will include roughly 10 percent Ball Frowns. We had one in our Reel of the 51st Battalion. They used to fill me with mouth-drying fear and embarrassment but the little red one we encountered on Friday just made me giggle. And not only when she poked the Bombshell with a stubby finger. She reckoned that my husband and I had not kept dancing our way down the set far enough and had therefore robbed her and her partner of their turn. It is unlikely that we got it wrong as my husband is posh enough to have been well-drilled in reeling from an early age. Its never the posh ones who are the Frowns anyway, they’re too polite and they can dress up and do reels whenever they like. In their own ballrooms. Ball Frowns take part in Scottish country dancing simply to boss people around. That is how they derive their pleasure from the evening. I wonder how they teach their children to dance: set to your partner, cast off one place down the set , set and turn your first corner, roll your eyes when they end up facing the wrong way. Manhandle English people and people in white kilt socks into the correct positions. Never smile. Ever. If they could they would sacrifice anyone who puts a foot wrong straight after the dance. The whole set would frogmarch those who made a wrong move outside the hall (all in step and in time to the music) and burn them at the stake. They might have to watch a perfect foursome as the flames began to lick at their ankles.

Too late we discovered that there was another bar inside, in the brightly-lit regimental musem. I was regaled with a long story about the car park at a northern branch of Aldi which persuaded me, in case the teller had a sister in there, to go back outside where I was forced to remind myself (with an object lesson, obviously) that smoking doesn’t keep you warm and that I’ve gone off it anyway. I met a girl who I hadn’t seen for years and congratulated her on being a QC. She thanked me then looked a little panicked as she tried to remember what I did. “And you’ve got two children!” she beamed. The second and last cigarette of the night wasn’t any better than the first.