#this is a 15 minute pose because i am unwell about them

[redwayfarers]

updated husbands

[gaiatheorist]

I’m getting too old for this.

(Disclaimer, I haven’t grown up, or anything, don’t worry.)

I don’t have a raging hangover, I have no unexplained bruises, and I didn’t expose any body-parts, despite starting drinking at about half past three in the afternoon yesterday. Hang on, THAT sounds grown-up.

Yesterday was the 40th birthday party of a girl I went to school with, she invited me months ago, and I gave her a ‘maybe’, in case I genuinely was too ill to go, but I’d set it in my mind as a Thing To Do, one of my weird challenge-targets. She messaged me a few days ago, to check whether I was ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’, once I’d stopped laughing at her enquiry as to whether I’d be bringing a +1, I gave her a ‘yes.’ I then descended into a couple of days of sheer, unadulterated panic. No unlikely scenario exists that I didn’t have a risk-assessment/management-plan for. I’m not joking, “What if my hair catches fire?” and “What if a goat gets in my tent?”, instead of “What if I become unwell, and ‘lose my words’, how will I convey the need for an ambulance?”

To that end, it was quite difficult to fasten my bag. I had a spare blanket, pain-killers, a Swiss Army Knife, tissues, a pen, a spare pen, a spare-spare pen, caffeine-drinks, water, muesli  bars, and all manner of other crap in there. I’d also taken great pains to wear an outfit that would make flashing my tattoos difficult, and forced myself to eat, despite the anxiety-belly, before I left. The birthday girl’s parents picked me up, they live locally, and when we arrived at her house, we’d been there all of five minutes before there was an explosive exchange of the three of them telling each other to “Fuck off.” No malice in it, it’s how they’ve always communicated. I probably am as socially anxious/awkward as my son is, I just have more years of experience covering it up. I’d challenged myself to go to the party, but hadn’t looked up how far away from home it was. In distance, it’s only about 15 miles, but most of that was motorway, and the bungalow was WELL in the countryside, no ‘walking home’, and no sign of a bus-stop for miles. I caught myself panicking, and started ‘helping’ to move things into the garden, as a distraction. I then had nothing to ‘do’, so started drinking, because everyone else already had.

I was about to say “It wasn’t so bad at first.”, but it was. It wasn’t them, it was me, I’ve spent so long on my own, and only having contact with one person at a time, that following a conversation between six people at once was difficult. They’d had shared experiences that I hadn’t been part of, so I initially sat there nodding, trying to smile politely, and having nothing to contribute, I must have looked like an abandoned ginger garden gnome. I made one of the women laugh, with a brain surgery anecdote, and refused to tattoo a man’s arse, even though he said it didn’t matter that I wasn’t licensed. (It does, it REALLY does.) That swung the topic of conversation to my tattoos, with the girl’s Mum asking how drunk I’d have to get before I started showing them to people. (She’s known me since before I had tattoos, and a fair few of those years included drunk-flashing behaviour.) I rescued a beetle that had flown into a man’s beard, and I drank too much, too quickly, because going to the other end of the garden, where the drinks-table was gave my overwhelmed brain a chance to escape from the multiple conversations, the music, and, well, the party. 

The photographs are up on Facebook, in a closed group, and I have absolutely no recollection of two of them being taken. (We did all laugh that we were ‘getting old’, when the phrase “Shall we take the photos now, before it’s obvious that we’re smashed?” came out of the host’s mouth. There was no denying that people were going to drink too much, and act like arses, but the very grown-up decision that none of the REALLY drunk photos would go on Facebook.) I was evidently already really-drunk, because I don’t remember getting out of my seat to pose for the photographs, but, there I am. (The colour of my dress DID compliment the colour of my hair rather well.) I also have no recollection of getting in the tent, or why I’d taken my boots and socks off in the main party-area, trailing all manner of bits of grass and garden-detritus into my sleeping bag. (When I eventually remembered that the sleeping bag was for sleeping in, not for use as a pillow, after feeling cold and uncomfortable.)

The ‘getting too old for this’ revolves around the time I poured my drunken self into the tent. (She’d originally said she’d put me up a single pop-up, but, due to numbers, I ended up in a ‘family’ tent with a couple, one of them was a VERY loud snorer.) It was probably about 7pm, and, although I was overwhelmed by the people, and the noise, and the activity of the party, it hadn’t really gotten into full-swing at that point. Part of it was the sensory overload, but a bigger part of it was self-preservation mode kicking in. Even though I can’t remember getting in the tent, I’d gone in there as much to reduce the risk of me doing something inappropriate as I had to get away from the noise. (Approximately six metres away from the noise, so not in any way shape or form ‘away’ from it.)

Now, the majority of the people at the party were linked to ‘care’ professions, they’d noted my absence, and realised I’d taken myself to bed, I can’t imagine how rude that must have looked, but the alternatives were even more unthinkable. Between the potential for me to start showing that my underwear co-ordinated with my blue dress and my pink boots, the inevitability of me getting my tattoos out, and the high probability that I’d fall in the campfire, ‘bed’ was the safest place for me to be. Some of them knew I had brain injuries, and some of them probably didn’t want me to miss out on the fun, so they kept ‘checking’ on me. By shouting at me, and bringing me drinks of water, and asking me if I was OK. (I’m NEVER OK when somebody wakes me up to check I’m OK, but I suppose they didn’t want me vomiting in the tent, that would have been rancid.) I don’t know how many of them stuck their heads in the unzipped fly-screen of my sleeping compartment to have a bit of a shout at me, or what mumbo-jumbo fell out of my face to re-assure any of them that I was just drunk, and not dead, but the ‘checking’ carried on for hours. I’ve messaged the host to apologise, and she’s apologised for being so drunk that she couldn’t get off the floor to see me off when I left, because everything was STILL spinning the next day.

I managed to stay awake for the henna tattoos, which I didn’t partake in, because the only parts of me not covered-in-clothes were my hands and face, but I did paint my own face, bugger having other people touching me. I was in the tent before the campfire was lit, and I missed all of the shenanigans, like someone being too drunk to put her own shoes back on when her taxi arrived, and someone else’s ex showing up, and being confrontational, after everyone else had been told to ‘behave’, and the person-whose-ex-it-was telling the other guests to keep the birthday girl ‘quiet, and out of the way.’ I missed the circus-skills, and the hula-hooping. I say I ‘missed’ it, but tents aren’t sound-proof, and I sleep lightly at the best of times. Having drunk people, with a fire, juggling, hula-hooping, and falling off their chairs isn’t the ‘best of times’ for me to sleep. Apparently the girl’s Dad ‘shot’ a number of guests by throwing whole party-poppers into the fire, I’m glad I missed that bit, because I would have gone into auto-Health-and-Safety mode, and nobody likes a bore. The party wound up at around 3am, with the birthday girl announcing loudly that she couldn’t believe they’d drunk ALL of the Sambucca. I wasn’t properly asleep, and the unknown-couple taking up residence in the other end of the tent meant I couldn’t get back to sleep, especially when one of them started snoring, and just didn’t stop. Whichever one of them wasn’t snoring must have been either INCREDIBLY drunk, or a bit deaf, I could hear it from the other end of the garden.

I was at the other end of the garden by about 4am, because I started the tidying-up. I’m not sure why I took so much care not to drop the glass bottles into the recycling bin, if people were sleeping through the snoring, a bit of a clink wouldn’t have woken them. I went onto auto-pilot, stacking plates, picking up the jam-jars everyone had been drinking out of, and borderline-obsessively placing ‘like’ items together. I drew the line at picking up other people’s footwear, AND, when the birthday girl’s Mum suggested we hide her daughter’s flip-flops, I didn’t actually peg them to the washing line, although we all agreed it would be hilarious. Other people didn’t start waking up until about 8am, by which time there wasn’t anything else left to tidy away that didn’t mean going into the house. There was talk of bacon sandwiches, but nobody could really be arsed, birthday girl is vegan, so, out of respect for that, the bacon would need to be cooked on a barbecue in the garden. The bacon-bringers had apparently brought ‘loads’ of bacon, because they didn’t know how many people would want it, and they took it all back home with them. There was tons of food left over, I hadn’t been the only one who hadn’t eaten anything, and some people, some ‘meat-eaters’, had brought their own food with them. There had, apparently, been ‘scenes’, when one of the ‘meat-eaters’ had used the birthday girl’s special pan to denature a lump of raw corpse in. 

OK, I said I was going to do it, and I did it, I don’t have to do it again now, especially the whole ‘games’ and ‘circus skills’, but also the camping-in-someone’s-garden. I ‘can’ go out without hitting the self-preservation off-switch, but I’m getting too old for 3am finishes. That’s what time I start.