Learning How to Party Again

Shelter

First, we had to get the shelter up. Nobody can remember packing it away or where the pegs went.  So those had to be borrowed from somebody else’s properly packed up tent.

The owner of the other tent will curse himself for forgetting to pack his pegs when he is setting it up on the side of a cliff sometime soon.

Food

Nobody knows how immune we are or if it is OK to share food, so we organised hot pasties as a safe option. The sensible way to do this is to buy them, but I chose the stupid way. If you want to lose half a day, make pasties. There are 200 small bits of food in each pasty and each bit has to be hand-chopped to an exact size of small that is only known to the Cornish.

Being Cornish means you are cursed with this frenzy twice a year. Once the pasties are made, you swear never again. That wears off as fast as a vaccine and, after six months, you forget and do it all over again.

Conversation   

Talking is like playing a musical instrument.  If you drop it for a few months it gets harder to do and you are exhausted after 15 minutes.

Children find it easier because they just do stuff and talk about that. This place was once full of children easily killing time together.  What did they do? I cast back in time for inspiration. Several things came up.

Options to Awaken the Inner Child

Rabbit Trapping. Happy hours digging a hole and finding the right weak sticks and grass to cover the top, with endless discussions about when the unlucky rabbit would fall in.

Shooting. The summer when BB guns were in fashion.  These were handed out with solemn instructions to ‘stay behind the person with the gun’, and ‘only shoot at the target’.  The target was a plastic bottle on a box and the risk assessment in my head said this was safe. An hour later the children shot past the window with the last child wielding both guns and aiming as true as possible. They were furious when we confiscated the guns and one of them threatened to call childline.

Look for dead things. They made a collection and laid them out on the path. Worm, Vole, Starling, Slow Worm and more. It was a beautifully curated and absorbing activity.  I don’t remember any of them wondering what to say next.

Start a fire and hide. They smuggled fireworks back from a trip to France, sold them to grateful children that didn’t go to France and eventually set fire to a derelict barn. I know they did it because they were all sitting quietly in the house when the fire engine arrived and they never sat quietly anywhere.   

None of these activities suit grown-ups who have been locked in their own homes for a year. Start again.

Options for Adults

Games.  Do the poor traumatised adults want to be organised into them?

Kubb. A complicated game about throwing bits of wood around. 

A great game but everybody needs to understand what bits to throw, and why. So the owner of the game needs to be here and not in Sweden.

Croquet. 25 years ago somebody bought a toy croquet set. There was a mass row about the rules, but we worked it out. The set was gradually replaced with real gear from the car boot sale and we got addicted to knocking balls around the course whilst knocking opponent’s balls in the wrong direction. We’ve had tears and tournaments, blatant cheating and never-ending bad feeling. 

The children who collected dead animals are now better players than anybody else. Guests don’t like it because they know they will lose.

What happened in the end

Cherry blossom only lasts a few days. It is also a symbol of the fleeting nature of life and the fact that we cannot control everything. I realised I was overthinking everything, and if we couldn’t talk we could sing, so we did that.

Apart from when we ate the pasties. You can’t sing with your mouth full and there is plenty to say about how good the pasty was.

There were 10 of us. 6 humans, 2 cats watching from the distance in disgust and 2 chickens hanging around looking left out.

We made a lot of noise, but that was OK because the neighbours had their own cherry blossom party and stayed up later than us.  This is some of the noise. it is slightly good about halfway through. The rest is a shambles, but it was a good shambles and we all need plenty of those.