Silent Music, Hidden Dragon
Why you should spend money on “stupid” things
Stupid party. I had been calling it “stupid party” for months. Long before it was a party. When it was only an embryonic idea and a five hundred pound deposit. In late February, when I still hadn’t drummed up the courage to actually invite anyone and the next down payment was due, I got cold feet and cancelled. Spent all night googling less insane alternative celebrations, feeling increasingly hollow. No, I did not want to hire two overpriced yurts for just me and immediate family on an anodyne field site with manicured paths and plastic jacuzzis for almost the same price as the (much better) thing I was cancelling. The next morning, I did a one-eighty. The “stupid party” was back on.
From January through August, it remained, like a pressure sore. Nudging me awake at 4am to remind me of something I should have done months ago. Cracking me to tears when I opened the ‘invites’ spreadsheet while my daughter (a calm and inveterate planner) helped me to complete simple tasks like wording emails. (Mum! You are a writer! You can do this!) Again and again, I was overwhelmed by the stress of organising it. I kept forgetting what it was for.
On the surface of things, it was for me and my daughter. I think that was a lot of the problem. Not the “daughter” bit. The “me” bit. I had a big zero birthday this year, and she is imminently (in the next few days) turning 21. I would turn myself inside out if it was just for her, but for me?
I find parties take the pain away from ageing. They give me something to focus on as I watch the tachometer tick up to the next milestone towards obsolescence and extinction. Despite my spiritual leanings, I still anguish a little about extinction. I have a lot of unwrittenbooks in the mental hopper, and no matter how eternal your soul might be, you can’t write books without hands, feet, and eyelids.
Or maybe you can, but you don’t get the credit for them, and as we all know, love and admiration are the only things (living) writers write for (although money really helps). Yep, that’s me, casually filling the hole where the love should have been and calling it art. Honestly, if all childhoods were happy, would great literature even exist?
What with birthing four humans and the necessity of earning a living, I have been slower at book completion than I planned when I was nine. So yep, some residual anxiety about clocks ticking. I’ve built an amazing life (especially out of the binfire that was my mid-thirties), but how much time do I have left to enjoy it? And why not make sure I truly enjoy it?
For my last zero birthday, I had a Hawaii 5-0 fancy dress theme. It was an icy January so we whacked the heat up to tropical. We decorated the house with lanterns, strings of hibiscus, and an 8-ft palm tree. Every guest was decorated on entry with a flower garland if they didn’t already have one. My chef son donned his whites and cooked up a Hawaiian menu on leaf-shaped plates, accompanied by a Hawaiian playlist. I hired the local lesbian ukelele band. We stopped short of turning the living room into a beach with 20 bags of white sand, but that this was seriously considered and costed tells you everything you need to know about how far I will go to distract myself from thinking about my coffin.
Obviously, as this year’s zero number was even scarier, the party had to be bigger than our winter lūʻau.
The problem was, I was testing myself to my limits. It was a huge undertaking. I was hiring a woodland yurt village in its entirety for the weekend, trying to fill it with people I care about, feeding them and entertaining them. The worst part of it was that I had to ask people for money, because even now, I am not the wealthy successful author that nine-year-old me imagined I’d be by the year 2000. See: the creation of four humans plus a wrong-turn first marriage, plus earning a living, plus writing literary fiction in the age of Amazon and Netflix. Wealthy people have it so much easier, in this regard, don’t they? I’m still hoping to become one of those who can casually gift good times to all of the people they care about. But as things stood, I had to ask my friends and family to fund their own accommodation. It felt like asking, “How much do you love me?” which is something too painful to ask.
A lot of my friends are creative people, and not well-off. I needed them to come (because I love them; they are central to my life), so I subsidised those that I could. I said bring your instruments, play music if you feel moved to. But still I was thinking,
“Why am I spending so much money on this stupid party? Just accept you are ageing, and take your daughter bowling, she’ll be fine.”
(She is an introvert). Asking people to cough up money (and time) so I could temporarily forget my mortality seemed a bit much.
As I said, I had forgotten what it was for.
Because the true inspiration had been my daughter’s wedding last year. This joyous confluence of family, friends, dancing and food made me think how rare the opportunities are for us to come together with all the people who bless our lives. These milestone birthdays were simply an excuse to pull together. once more. a group of people I love and celebrate being alive, while we all still are. Because people get snuffed out all the time. One of my brothers had a serious motorbike crash three months ago, and was lucky to be with us (on a crutch and strong painkillers). Another was delayed by a day by his close friend’s funeral. You never know when it’s your last dance.
So my aim was to create a weekend of joy, spending proper time together, immersed in nature. In luxurious yurts with proper beds and wood burners. Hammocks and barbecues. A wood-fired hot tub large enough for eight or ten people to laugh in. A communal yurt with leather Chesterfield sofas, a communal firepit and kitchen. A backgammon tournament for anyone who played or wanted to learn. Cider and perry from the National Cider and Perry collection on tap.
Two months before the party weekend, I found out I was losing my job and facing a lawsuit. But it was too late to cancel the party. Commitment fully made and mostly paid. But as you can imagine, given I still hadn’t even invited everyone, this added to my “stupid party” stress. And made it even easier, again, to forget what it was for.
But then it began. The weather was unusually summery. The kids ran free. The parents relaxed. There was a small crisis of a lost ‘Welsh ball’ that was searched high and low for, before we assumed it was lost in some nettles. A ‘missing’ child was found curled up asleep in hammock. The backgammon tournament was an expected hit, and the sudden death final on Sunday (someone had to catch a train) drew a big crowd exclaiming ooh and oh no! There was a lot of hilarity in the hot tub. And for the Saturday night, son-cooked pizzas from a wood-fired oven, a crzt of prosecco, and a silent disco.
The silent disco. If you’ve never tried one, wow. No, do it. Big, big hit.
You know how it is when the “disco” starts up and everyone just sits in their chairs wondering whether to dance or not, and the dancefloor stays empty until some tune comes on that a bunch of people agree they can respond to? Not with a silent disco. I went around the tables dishing out headphones: switching them on, and setting them to the red channel (my 60 years of dancing playlist)1 or the blue (my daughter’s 21st playlist). As I placed them on heads, or they placed them on their own, each person lit up, and very often, spontaneously, started dancing.
The headphones makes it personal, and somehow, in your own world, everyone is less inhibited than they might be. The dancing is wilder, more expressive. Plus we weren’t restricted to the dance floor; we danced beneath the trees and round the fire. No shouting necessary to have a conversation: if, those who wanted peace or conversation or the sounds of the woods just set them around their necks or switched to green.
A silent disco brings hilarity too, to observers; the reds and blues dancing to different tunes, with occasional burst of singing. Moments where excitement lights up a group, one or two switch over in curiosity, jump alive, and in seconds, the whole lot defects and just for three minutes or so, we share the same song. The silent music was hot.
Uptown Funk, too hot? Make a dragon want to retire man? Is that the hidden dragon of the title? No, my friend. Found hiding in the kitchen, at the end of our Monday clear-up: the Welsh Ball.
It wasn’t a stupid party. It was a great party. However long it lasts, how blessed we all are to have friends, food, music, and dancing. Just to be alive.
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This playlist was meant to be 61 tracks: one dance hit from every year from 1964 to 2024. However some years I just couldn’t get rid of either of the last two, so there are a few years doubled up. I was extremely pleased at how popular this playlist proved to be :-).
Just wait until you're approaching 90, like me, Ros. I think of parties as scary but everyone seems to expect this one so that's what we have to do. I'm hoping for lots of good memories. We're going to gather round in a huge circle - 90 of us! - and talk about old times, about cricket and teaching and conservation projects and family events and falling in love twice in one lifetime. Oh, and writing and literature and music and circle dance. Perhaps it won't be so bad after all!
You sure made your sixtieth birthday a doozy. Quite a wardrobe exhibition in that group photo. It's good to still have projects on your plate when your time here is over. That means you were never bored and never felt you were without a purpose. These posts are like receiving a newsy letter from a close friend.