Today, Marie Rebelle’s wonderful Wicked Wednesday meme, which gives bloggers a place to be wickedly sexy or sexily wicked, is celebrating its first birthday! Hooray! Congratulations Marie! And what better topic to celebrate this milestone than ‘party’?

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I really enjoy letting my hair down; there’s nothing quite like chatting, laughing, dancing and generally having a good time with a load of like-minded sorts. In my salad days (God, I sound ancient, don’t I?), I partied a fair bit, but now that I have a family and live in a fairly rural part of England, I’m a little more sedate. Well, most of the time at least :-).

So I’ve been wracking my brain and trying to think if I’ve ever done anything outrageously sexy at a party (it is Wicked Wednesday, after all) but I honestly can’t recall an occasion that I was particularly wanton at a social event. What can I say? I have chintz curtains – and more than a few square edges! In any case, just to prove that I’m not a complete recluse, I thought I’d compile a little catalogue of some of the best and/or most unusual parties I’ve been to over the years …

 

Late ‘90s

Mystery Bus
First year at university, an event/party called Mystery Bus. It involved the Hall of Residence I was living in piling 300 of us into coaches within the first week of our arrival, driving us to a hill in the middle of nowhere, and leaving us with music, 30 kegs of beer, and buckets of condoms. Students away from home for the first time, hormones raging – I’ll let you work out what happened next. (Bloody freezing in that hillside grass, let me tell you.)

 

Steins & Brätwurst
University again. Yep, the same Hall social team that organised Mystery Bus decided to throw a Bavarian festival party that required all the ladies to dress as beer wenches and wear gingerbread cookies around their necks for the blokes to eat off of them. (Lots of crumbs down cleavages that needed to be, er, retrieved with tongues and fingers.)

 

Very late ‘90s

Captain Stubing & 077
Moving forwards to a slightly more responsible time (just go with it), I was living in a lovely old villa in New Zealand with three others (two girls and a guy) and every so often we’d throw a big themed party. One year it was The Love Boat, the next James Bond. We’d empty the entire house of furniture, make chilly bins full of (very strong) alcoholic punch, and decorate the house with anything we could get our hands on. For the Love Boat, we had palm trees, beach umbrellas, and even a Barbie doll with a pool who we put outside to create a ‘pool deck’. (She ended up stripped naked and violated in a pot plant within the first hour.) For Bond, we spray painted black rubbish sacks silver, used them to wallpaper the sitting room, and then stuck huge silhouettes of the various 007s on top so that it felt like you were in a gun barrel. Those bashes were always awesome. They’d go all night and would get more and more raucous in the early hours as the punch buckets got lower. One of the girls had a particularly entertaining friend, M, who never failed to turn up in an outrageous costume and try to convince all the women to partake in some sort of raunchy game.

 

Y2K

Beach bunnies
Yep, the millennium. Poured with rain but it didn’t matter. At my mum’s beach house in northern New Zealand, tealights on the lawn, dancing in the drizzle to Cream and Ministry of Sound. Everyone stripping at midnight and running into the waves, then sitting in the sand waiting for sunrise …

 

Present day

Jubilees & neighbours
Street parties. We live in a small hamlet and are lucky enough to have neighbours who are pretty damn awesome. Every so often there’ll be a BBQ or a celebration of some kind and most of the lane will pitch up with drinks, kids, dogs, and extra sausages. These gatherings are enormous fun, largely because they’re informal, irreverent, and filled with laughter – all things I love. We’ve had some great get-togethers over the years, including a gorgeous tea for Will and Kate’s wedding in 2011 and a fabulous bonfire party for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

 

School fundraisers
Have you ever seen parents on a night out? It’s like they’ve been let out of prison for the evening. To date, every event I’ve been to of this ilk has involved some sort of raucous behaviour: loss of clothing, parents shagging in the carpark, hilarious drunken dancing … and a few other things that shall remain nameless. All I’ll say is that mums and dads really know how to make the most of a three-hour window.

 

So there you have it. A party history. Not very wicked, I’m afraid, but (I hope) not completely boring, either!

Happy meme-versary, Marie. xxx

Title image: The Love Boat cast, 1977, ABC Television, via Wikimedia Commons

 

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