A right knees up

I was going to write something quite gloomy about Mark Zuckerberg and giving in to the devil on your shoulder. But halfway through, the words were faltering and my mind was elsewhere, daydreaming about two upcoming parties I’m throwing in February and March.

My love of hosting parties borders on the Gatsby-esque (as does my lack of interaction with guests when they’re actually happening). Recently I’ve been trying to trace the origins of such a trait. Teenage tent parties in the scrubby field attached to our house, aborted attempts to host a furtive bash in the cottage itself (scuppered because my aunt overheard two prospective attendees discussing their Friday night plans in the village shop earlier that day). At first, I got as much from attending parties as I did from facilitating them, probably because I was far more likely to be guest than master of ceremonies at that point.

Not to lean too heavily on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s opus but when, at 17, I read the party opinions he attaches to the character of Jordan Baker, I felt a great shock of agreement. “And I like large parties,” she tells Nick, early on in the novel, at one of Gatsby’s gatherings. “They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy”.