Lucy Lord
Party Night
Table of Contents
New Year’s Eve in London can be riotously good fun.
But most of the time it sucks. Gridlocked traffic, hideous bar queues, monstrously inflated prices. I mean, why put yourself through it? I’m not too bothered about the enforced-jollity aspect – as far as I’m concerned, jollity, enforced or not, is always a good thing. It’s just that it could be so much jollier without the circumstances dictated by the time of year.
Last year I made the mistake of going to Soho, where I lost my friends and abandoned any hope of finding them after all the phone networks went down. With no taxis available, I waited for the night bus home in evil weather for nearly two hours, surrounded by Dutch tourists in stupid jester hats. Not that I have anything against Dutch tourists – in fact, they are pretty high up on my ‘what’s not to like?’ list – but, once gallons of booze have been replaced by gallons of rain, even the most amiable, even-featured tall people can start to get on your tits.
This year, I hope, will be better. My brother Max has decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party at Divine Comedy, the insanely popular bar/club/restaurant/whatever, that he owns and runs in Hoxton. It’s a bugger for me to get to (I live just off the dodgy end of Portobello Road), but worth it. Max has managed to capture some kind of zeitgeist – ‘a bit Berlin, a bit Studio 54, a bit Jagger and Pallenberg in Performance’, as he puts it. Poncy git. Last year, he declared New Year’s Eve ‘too much hassle’ and fucked off to Brazil with his boyfriend, Paolo.
I only returned to London this afternoon, after way too much Christmas spirit at my mother’s house in Oxfordshire, and am still feeling like shit. For the last month, no normal rules have applied to diet, exercise or sanity. Too hung over for breakfast, incapable of anything resembling physical activity until it’s time to dance on tables, I’ve found myself wondering whether mulled wine and mince pies could conceivably comprise a couple of my five a day. Jetlag has nothing on the way my body clock is buggered, and I am actively looking forward to the dreary January detox.
As I pull on my new pink tights, I put my left foot into a full ashtray on the floor.
‘Yuck, fuck!’ I mutter. There wasn’t time to tidy up before I went home for Christmas and my tiny flat is still in the repulsive state I left it in just over a week ago.
My gaze falls on my thighs, encased in shocking pink Lycra, and I say, ‘Yuck, fuck!’ again. I’ll have to fall back on my trusty black opaques – as far as I’m concerned, ‘flattering’ beats ‘directional’ every time.
I take off the horrible pink tights and wander into my kitchen to get some more wine out of the fridge, clad only in my new matching bra and knickers. In fact my only matching bra and knickers, a Christmas present to myself after pondering the sorry state of my underwear drawer a couple of weeks ago. The brightly coloured spotty, stripy, gingham, floral and animal-print knickers, uniformly trimmed in lurid Day-Glo lace from Primark, may have seemed comfortable and cheery when I bought them, but are unlikely to do me any favours in the seduction stakes. Especially when paired with ‘nude’ (beige) underwired bras bought solely for their shape-enhancing properties.
Oh, OK, I’ve been single for about three months now and – between you and me – I’m gagging for a shag. My last ex, dull Rupert, dumped me for not being ‘corporate wife material’. A lucky escape, I’m sure you’ll agree (although, looking around my flat now, I may have to concede he had a point). But being dumped is always a blow, whatever manner of bastard does it to you. The most annoying thing was that I really wasn’t that into him to start with. His eyes were too close together and he overcompensated for being an Old Etonian banker by using terms like ‘sick’ and ‘da Bomb’.
I had never even considered going out with a banker, but he wore down my defences by constantly telling me how beautiful and special and lovely I was. It wasn’t the flowers and fabulous dinners at restaurants I couldn’t possibly afford that did it – though they were nice, of course. It was the intoxicating adoration with which he showered me: if somebody tells you enough times how wonderful you are, you eventually start to believe it yourself.
(There could also be the fact that I’d just turned thirty-one and was getting desperate.)
Anyway, as soon as he knew I’d capitulated, he lost interest. Why do the bastards do that? Why?
I take the wine out of the fridge and fill my glass nearly to the brim. It’s about bloody time the hair of the dog started to work. I take a huge swig that nearly makes me gag, and try to cheer myself up by thinking about Ben, the most gorgeous man in the world. And, to be scrupulously honest, the real reason for my beautiful new underwear.
Ben is my best friend Poppy’s boyfriend’s best friend (got that?), and the four of us have been hanging out together ever since Poppy and Damian first hooked up, nearly five years ago. He is an actor and occasional model, and permanently surrounded by fawning females, but, as far as I’m concerned, our friendship transcends his multiple flings – I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. He split up with the last one, a supremely irritating MTV presenter with a voice like Fearne Cotton’s, a couple of weeks ago. And now, for the first time in God knows how long, we are both single at the same time.
Maybe tonight will be my lucky night, after all.
I cheer myself up still further by picking up the dress I discovered in my mother’s attic on Christmas Eve. Mum was a Biba model when she met my father, a photographer, in the seventies. With woeful lack of imagination, Dad married her, then went on to cheat on her with countless other models. It hasn’t given me much faith in men.
But it’s given me some great dresses. And this one is to die for: high-necked and floaty, with a skirt as short as the balloon sleeves are long. Its faded coral pink silk, embellished with a splashy daisy print in shades of orange, red and fuchsia, looks great against my dark hair and eyes, I have to admit.
I’ve put my iPod on shuffle and now Abba is blaring out – ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. I prance around, singing to myself and thinking about Ben as I pull the dress over my head, before turning to the boring task of making up my face. Tonight, after the ravages of the last month, it’s more damage limitation than gilding the lily.
By the time I’ve finished (after another glass of wine), I think I look pretty A-OK and thank God for the wonders that are Benefit, Laura Mercier and Lancôme. I’ve gone down the smoky-eye/neutral-lip route, and, having wrestled my unruly long hair into a cheekbone-flattering half-up, half-down style, I reckon I’m just the right side of retro. The wine is clearly working its magic.
Abba segues into Dusty Springfield singing ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and I giggle to myself: Abba? Dusty? I’m quite clearly a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Glass in hand, I dance into my bedroom to look for my Topshop knee-high boots, which I eventually unearth under a heap of clothes, Sunday supplements and – oh Christ, I’m repulsive – a half-empty bottle of Baileys.