I have told a small white lie. Again. I started the practice a good few years ago and felt, at the age of 48, that it was just a part of growing up. No longer an angel, ken?
The white lies under advisement only ever concern one thing: house parties. I cannot abide them. For some reason, they just make me unbearably uncomfortable. The last one I attended, about 15 years ago, saw me making my escape through the bathroom window. I dreeped down to the ground and, walking along the street afterwards, breathed in deeply the sweet air of freedom and vowed: ”Never again.”
For a while after that, I adopted a policy of direct honesty, telling would-be hosts: “No, I will not be attending your house party as I believe the phenomenon to be evil.” However, it rarely went down well. Party holders tend not to accept satanic explanations for declining to attend.
So, I started making up the sort of prosaic excuses that they seem more willing to accept: I’m washing my toenails that night; chairing a meeting of the United Nations; attending a jumble sale in Germany.
Of course, I don’t really believe house-parties to be evil. They are arguably valid and pleasant occasions in which one’s tribe may gather to break bread and crockery.
No, the fault is all mine. I don’t actually know what it is. I’m not sociophobic. Last weekend, I was out with friends on Friday and Saturday, and, indeed, again on Monday for lunch. I love meeting my friends. But I prefer to meet them in small groups.
Perhaps, at house parties, it’s just the press of bodies in a confined space. But I don’t get the same sense of panic down the pub or at the football (though, come to think of it, I’ve nearly fainted there twice). I must have some kind of phobia and wish I could put a name to it. Folks seem to wear these things like a badge of honour. Plus, it would be a big help if, instead of telling white lies, I could produce a doctor’s line.
One other aspect of house parties that I do really deplore is the sense of compulsion that comes with them. If someone declares they’re having a house party, it comes more or less as a command. You have to attend. But I am a free spirit. And, besides, Match of the Day is on.
Perhaps I’ll go to parties when I’m reincarnated, preferably just as me but with a better physique, more money and a certain je ne sais quoi rather than just, as at present, a quoi. I’d be wearing the correct clothes a la mode (ie no wellies), dazzle with my conversational skills, and move easily from group to group. I wouldn’t muck up the cheek-kissing thing at the start, ask for Tennent’s lager when offered a range of fine wines, or get into a fist-fight about pacifism.
But what would happen to my seemingly in-built instinct for open spaces? I guess the best citizens are comfortable both in and oot, as it were. No need for everything to be either-or. Oh boy, I can feel a new me stirring already. And that’s no word of a lie.
