OK, here’s the New Year’s Eve recap! I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for this with bated breath. “Just how drunk did she get?” you’ve been thinking. “I bet she made a capital-T tit out of herself!” I know how you love to delight in my abject humiliation and self-abasement, you sadistic fucks, and hey! I hate to disappoint. So here you go.
Holy shit. Was I ever fucking drunk.
Wow.
…What, you want more detail? Jesus Christ.
I spent over an hour making myself pretty (yes, it takes that long, oh ha HA fuck you) and headed over to the lads’ to meet V. ‘The lads’’, by the way, is Kilburn’s Official Party Destination – a flat occupied by V’s Irish boyfriend and about fifty (no wait, hang on, four) of his Irish friends. They’d all brought reinforcements back from Ireland for the occasion, and when I arrived at the flat there were about fifty (OK, fine, seven) Irish boys hanging around inhaling lager like oxygen and talking fifteen to the dozen and basically being Irish. So that was good. V made herself pretty, which only took about five minutes goddamn her, and we went to the Good Ship, ostensibly just to stop in and say hi to our friends on the way to Party Number One. Of course the quick escape didn’t happen, and we got stuck there for the countdown (not that there was an actual countdown – the DJ forgot about the whole concept and everyone just sort of looked at their watches and went “Wa-hey! 2006!” and started making a ruckus), which was fine – I got hauled off my feet by a Dane the approximate size of, well, Denmark (I think they kicked him out to make more room in the country). And his flatmate snapped my bra strap: primitive mating behaviour, granted, but it’ll do in a pinch. He was pretty cute.
Anyway, the ‘ringing in the new year’ hoopla was really just a preamble for the real business of the evening, i.e. Getting Way Fucked. V and I headed to Party Number One, which was being held at the flat of some actor friend of hers. And by ‘actor’, I think she actually meant ‘drug dealer’, because for real, nobody has a flat that nice in London unless they are famous enough for me to have heard of them, or they’re trafficking class-A drugs. Fucking 'ell it was posh. Two floors, rooftop balcony with mind-blowing view, the lot. I fit in there pretty much not at all, but I managed to have a good time regardless. Some nice young lad from Birmingham (sorry, just outside Birmingham, he was quick to specify) told me that he thought we had “a real bond”, but I had trouble taking him seriously because of his accent. How do people from Birmingham ever get laid? I guess that’s why they stay in Birmingham. Can’t think of any other possible reason.
At about four in the morning we figured that we should make an entrance at Party Number Two, back at the lads’. We were worried that it might have begun to peter out by that time, but ha! Not so much. I think the whole of Kilburn was squeezed into the place. The queue for the bathroom stretched down the block. People were practically hanging from the rafters. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room for an impromptu dance floor – one girl stayed up there flailing wildly for several hours, periodically screaming, “Play some Madonna!”
“If you do,” I told the DJ, “I will hurt you.” I must have looked serious, because not a single note of Madonna did he play. Wise man.
At about 8.00 in the morning, I answered the Call of Booty (god I hope that’s the name of a porn film) and departed, despite many semi-coherent admonitions and fumbling, sweaty hugs (oh, I do so love those Irish lads!). I stayed at my friend’s place until about 1.30 in the afternoon and then groggily began wending my way home to properly face the new year and my deep and fundamental self-loathing. As you do on New Year’s Day. En route, I ran into a couple of stragglers from the party, still wasted.
“Holy shit,” I said. “The party’s not still going on, is it?”
“Oh yeah! People are dancing and everything. It’s crazy.”
Wow! thought I. I was lucky to get out of there alive! There must have been enough cocaine in that place to film a sequel to Scarface.
I went about my business – ate, slept, went out with Frenchie and got unaccountably drunk over the course of two hours; slept again, woke up, showered, ran some errands. Yesterday afternoon I sent a text message to V, asking if I could drop by the lads’ and pick up some DVDs I’d left.
I got back a frantic message saying “Oh my god we’re still going come by what a craic”.
No fucking way, I thought. That simply is not possible.
And yet…it was. I went back to the flat, and it was like entering some dank underworld spawned in the subconscious of Hieronymus Bosch. A smelly underworld. An underworld with a very sticky floor. Everyone was still drinking pretty hard – I guess they’d taken brief shifts off to sleep, none more than a couple of hours, and had spent most of the previous day in the pub. There was even dancing going on, although it was mostly reduced to people sitting next to the dance floor and half-heartedly waving various appendages in the manner of dying cockroaches. Everyone had the manic, glassy-eyed look of those who have left the realm of food and sleep behind and are existing on a different plane of reality. The music was blaring. There was vomit on the carpet. Nobody seemed able to communicate in full sentences or below the level of a shout. To be honest, it was a bit frightening. It was a scene never meant to be beheld by sober, sleep-refreshed eyes. When I left, someone ran after me to ask if they could borrow money for more drugs.
And as far as I know, boys and girls, that party is still going. It is the Party That Wouldn’t Die. It is the Party That Ate Tokyo. It is the Revenge of the Zombie Death Party. FEAR THE PARTY.