With the planet stumbling ever more feebly onwards toward a sweaty, messy denouement, it has never been so essential that people huddle together in groups to talk and laugh and drink and smile and do all the things that normal people do in order to distract themselves from the vast, cataclysmic indifference of the crumbling world in which they subsist.
The house party is the humble attempt by students to fill the void of fear and loneliness that festers away inside their hearts. It involves inviting many, many people who they barely know, round to their domicile and then drinking until they fall over. It is a fairly efficacious system.
The amount of house parties a student attends is directly proportional to the amount of time they have spent at their university. By the third year, even if you are a lazy, caustic, bitter, sociopathic misanthrope, who would rather shut himself up in a room all day eating Jaffa Cakes and binge-playing Final Fantasy XII while crying than talk to ‘real people’, you will still find you are required to grace at least one house party a fortnight with your pale snarling presence.
House parties are supposed to be fun, and thus, like most things that are supposed to be fun, are a harrowing trial that can usually only be survived by achieving inebriation through utilisation of the last legal drug.
Just as orgies, as Mark points out in Peep Show, basically just increase the number of people you can no longer look in the eye, attending a house party basically just increases (exponentially) the amount of people who you have to pretend to be interested in and lie to when asked how you are.
Readers take note: the answers “I’m fine” or “I’m good, thanks” are the only viable ones when your well-being is queried. You cannot, apparently, say, “Well, today I woke up at half past ten and felt so numb and dead inside that I forced myself to drift back into the inky nothingness of sleep until the morning had died. But that didn’t help because I dreamt of little purple demons that wanted to tear me to shreds and take all of my CDs away, apart from David Gray (who I don’t even like, because when he sings he sounds like a sheep). Then I got up and became incredibly angry because there were no Jaffa Cakes left and I couldn’t be bothered to go and buy any more. But then I felt good for about half an hour because I looked at a pretty woman on the television and concocted a fantasy in my head where I owned a stately home and she baked cookies, and I tried one of the cookies and said: ‘This cookie is terrible’. And then she went and baked some more cookies and they were much better.”
If you say that, if you tell the truth, if you open up your heart and let a separate entity have a glimpse inside, you get a reputation for being “weird and scary”. This is because people are afraid off the truth. They shy away from it like Hollyoaks fans from rationality.
Occasionally, when just the right level of drunkenness is achieved and a sprinkle of luck imbues the atmosphere, a house party occurs that is so mind-blowing in its joyous decadence that you forget that you hate everybody in the world and lose yourself in mirthful abandon. And this is why you keep going to house parties and hiding your corroded soul; because one can never tell when the night you will reminisce about in years to come will occur.
So far, others have informed me, these nights have mostly happened when I am not present. But sooner or later I’m bound to witness a fabled Great Night. Look out for me next time – I’ll be in the corner sneering. Do not ask me how I am.
