Holding a drunken party while your parents were out was a rite of passage at my school. Some parents were wiser to this than others, and I note that my dad [also known as the Daft Old Biffer] still hasn’t learned that NO is really the only response that any sane adult ought make when asked by one’s teenage brat for permission to have a party.
I got lucky: post-parental-divorce there was a stage where I could wangle a YES to requests involving the acquisition of leather jackets, scientific calculators, trips to Venture Scout camp, or the possibility of holding a “Cast Party” on the last night of our O-Level production of Julius Caesar.
Perhaps it was the Shakespeare element that threw his spider senses off, but he did say that I could have a party, and he arranged to go out with his new lady friend [also known as The Witch or Stepmonster]. I think some general guidelines about alcohol [none] and trouble [call him in the event of any] were issued, and I signed up to them with my fingers crossed behind my back.
We lived at the time in a huge ramshackle house with smelly carpets and inefficient heating. Actually, I think the carpets only became smelly around the time of the party; there may be some connection. The house sprawled over three storeys, and in a vain attempt to keep hormone-injected teens out of the bedrooms, Calpurnia and I constructed a pile of coats on the stairs. You’ll note that neither of us went on to be engineers. The pile of coats turned out to be easily shifted, and the posters in my brother’s bedroom at the top of the house were mostly defaced.
As you probably know, all good parties wind up in the kitchen. In this case, the kitchen was the only room in the house with a source of heat. While the lads who had played Cassius and Trebonius pelted the windows with soggy cotton wool balls, Calpurnia and I were kept busy making strong black coffee for the guests who had taken a drop too much Thunderbird.
Dad returned to find us trying to pick peanuts and bombay mix out of the carpet with the help of a handful of girls who had suddenly become great friends with us under the influence of alcohol. I believe I was in a certain amount of trouble. Two years later, Nick managed to eclipse the memory of my party with an event of his own that seemed to focus on the reciprocal trashing of my bedroom.
Fifteen years later, Dad still hasn’t learned.