I think I might not be very well.
This is not due to anything blameless, like a repeat performance of bat flu, but to reckless overindulgence and general misbehaviour.
We did not work last night.
Of course, it was Saturday night, and we absolutely should have been at work, but we reasoned to ourselves that the weekend after Bank Holiday is inevitably fairly quiet, and so we might justifiably shirk, just for once.
Also it was a special occasion.
You might know that this year, being 2025, it will be my sixtieth birthday. It is still a few weeks away, but I am vaguely aware that old age is steaming down upon me all the same. So far I have made no plans for an event to mark the occasion, and it is entirely possible that I won’t. I imagine that a couple of weeks beforehand we will contemplate our joint birthday celebrations – because Mark’s birthday is a couple of weeks before mine – wonder what we ought to do, and then forget all about it until the last minute at which point we will probably just go to the Indian restaurant and eat mango butter chicken, as usual.
However, of course this is not just my sixtieth year, but the sixtieth birthday of everybody who was in my class at school. This weekend two of the boys, who are not exactly boys anywhere except in my recollections now, joined forces to throw a sixtieth birthday party, actually for them but really for everybody, and that was where we went.
And what a party it was.
I am still feeling mildly unwell this evening.
We have had the most magnificent time. I mean really, truly magnificent.
I am sitting quietly on the taxi rank enjoying the peaceful relief.
It was not close enough to our house for us to drive there and back, and in any case this sort of arrangement does not facilitate joyous acceptance of a third glass, so we booked ourselves into a local pub, about ten minutes’ walk from the party.
We were interested in this because we do not make a habit of lodging in pubs, and so it was a New Adventure. As it turned out it would have been quite a pleasant adventure, our room was entirely civilised although decorated with wallpaper that we recognised as being B&Q 2008, but they turned out not to be very good at catering.
We had a day of flapping about and did not eat before we got there, a couple of hours before the party was due to erupt, and we were starving, so we changed and dived into the restaurant.
We waited for an hour.
During the hour they brought us a glass of wine and took our orders.
At the end of the hour they came back to the table and told us that the meals we had ordered were not available and so would we like the menu again so that we could order something else. We did not want to wait for another hour, so we declined, and left.
We were ravenous by then.
We walked across the hillside to the party which was, as has been mentioned, ace. The host, who has grown into a perfectly charming sort of sixty-year-old gentleman, instantly endeared himself to me by telling me that I was looking nice, and sounding like he really meant it. I like flattery very much, and promptly forgot about being hungry in the happiness of discovering a well-stocked, pre-paid bar.
Wine is pretty good for stopping you feeling hungry, and you will not be surprised to hear that we immediately drank two glasses whilst excitedly bouncing around rediscovering old school friends, the consequence of which was instant merry intoxication.
There were dozens of long-lost comrades, one or two of whom I had not seen since I was fifteen, which the mathematicians amongst you will be able to work out was a jolly long time ago. We talked and talked, some of them have had some very exciting adventures indeed.
It is so lovely to be grown up and to be able to be friends with people without worrying about all of the things that bother you when you are fifteen, like whether you should still talk to the person who doesn’t like punk music or the person who wouldn’t pass you the ball in netball or the person who told the boy in 3DY that you fancied him when you didn’t, or who didn’t tell the other boy that you fancied him when you did, or the person who might have copied your answers in the history test, or the person who covered their paper up so you couldn’t copy their answers in the French test, the rotter. All of these issues were of scowling, anxious importance when we were first friends, and now have melted into the insignificance that is shared by more or less everything that seemed important when you were fifteen.
Also it was a party not a history test, which helped.
I have been to several of these events and it never ceases to fill me with happiness to rediscover what funny, charming, clever and remarkably good-looking grown-ups my old school friends eventually became. Of course they might have been all of those things when we were fifteen but of course I was far too self-absorbed to have noticed then. We danced, and laughed, and exchanged stories, and after a while the most magnificent buffet appeared, upon which we dived despite being already intoxicated.
I don’t know who did the buffet, but if I were getting married, which I am not because of already being perfectly happily married, I would ask for their phone number, because it was excellent. There were sausages and spiced chicken, salads and pies and the most divine sandwiches, and small nuggets of things that I could not identify but ate anyway, and they were ace.
We ate and danced and then drank some more, and eventually, at some time after midnight, staggered back over the hill to our pub bedroom, where we collapsed into bed like the elderly drunken oafs we were.
We groaned a great deal over breakfast this morning, and drove home slowly, feeling full of joyful good times and happy memories and rekindled friendships and alcohol-related indigestion.
I am on the taxi rank now, sighing with the pleasure of it all.
Getting old is turning out to be far, far better than I could ever have imagined when I was at school. Indeed, if this being sixty, then I am looking forward to it, apart from the indigestion.
I have got some wonderful friends, and we had an utterly wonderful time.
It has been brilliant.
