Party

I don't know what the official signs of a good house warming party are - having never thrown one before - but if they involve an unidentified cheesecake in your fridge, the next door neighbours' table in your living room and a mural featuring man eating fish, bits of genitalia that look like drag queens and depressed elephants stuck haphazardly on your wall, then I think I can safely say that last night's event was excellent. Even if I was already quite significantly drunk by the time everybody turned up (note: all of the Japanese guests turned up at exactly 8 o clock, which is what it said on the invitation. All of the non-Japanese guests turned up whenever they felt like it, ranging from 8.15 to 11.30, and showed some surprise that there was nothing hot left to eat. I'm still expecting some people to arrive at around about now and ask where the vodka shots are).

It was obviously a good party, because I wasn't even slightly prepared for it. Luckily I had the foresight to invite my lovely next door neighbours (the old couple who wake me up early in the morning but who I like very much regardless, which is saying something), and they not only turned up with six plates of hot, homemade Japanese food (which trumped my bowl of marshmallows, even if they did have bits of jam in the middle of them), they brought their table, their plates, their glasses and their cushions: without which it would have been less a party, and more twenty five people standing in a circle and telling each other they were hungry and wanted to sit down.

It was a roaring success, frankly. Three generations, six nationalities; beer, wine, spirits and food from all over the world. There wasn't a pause; not an argument, not a hiccup, not the slightest bit of tension. Friends turned up and immediately started cooking food for everyone; every single person turned up with a gift of some kind or another. Not one thing got broken; an hour of moving bottles and cans to the tip, and the house is as it was at 7.30 last night. Even more astonishingly, I woke up this morning and discovered that someone - and I suspect I know exactly who, because she promised me she would help make it less terrifying days and days ago - had washed up. Everything. Every single glass, pot, pan and plate. My house was probably less messy this morning than it was eighteen hours ago, because some of those glasses and pots had never been washed, and had been in storage for the past year and a half.

I've never really understood the concept of a 'house warming party' before - the temperature of a house doesn't even vaguely change just because lots of people have spilt beer all over its floors - but I think I do now. Friends oohed and aahed over my home decor (which made me like both friends and home decor more) and they laughed and shouted and chatted each other up and introduced a dangerous beer bong that made everybody ridiculously drunk and drew a big picture for me and brought gifts and loaded my house with food and drinks and cigarettes and generally welcoming good humour. They told me how glad they were that I was there, and how much fun they were having; they discussed plans for beach barbeques and camping trips and dinner parties and wheelchair races (more about that at another time), and they invited me to all of them. And - after a year (possibly longer) of incredible loneliness and isolation abroad, that felt..... good. Really, really good.

And - when they all held their glasses up and cheered me and my arrival in Nichinan - I can honestly say  I finally understood why people have parties. Because I felt thoroughly warm, and I think my house did too.