Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 January 2007 13:24:16
I was taken to a party.
It's more normal to be invited, but the circumstances were not exactly normal. I had arrived in a foreign country the night before, so as to work with someone who was there temporarily. Now that someone had, that morning, been in the bank. And he'd been having difficulty due to the language barrier and a limited comprehension of sign language. So a local student who had some English stepped in to translate. This student, it turned out, was living near me, so my co-worker asked him to look out for me. He took the task very seriously, although I have to say that this wasn't because he was by nature serious or particularly conscientious. It was because he was 1) incredibly friendly and 2) an absolute party animal. So it was that about 10 that night he turned up at my flat. Now, bear in mind that this was someone I'd never met or even heard of. So at 10 my doorbell goes and this strange person says "You are Lanark. You want come to party with me" (no punctuation because the intonation didn't permit me to detect if this was a question or an assertion). Well, what could I do? He seemed friendly (first impressions were absolutely spot-on there), so I followed him. The complex we were living in was just that, complex, labyrinthine even, so it felt like following the white rabbit as I chased after him along one corridor then up some stairs then through another, then round a bend etc. Eventually we came to another flat which turned out to be full of smiling faces. They all greeted me like some long-lost brother even though I'd never laid eyes on any of them before and they probably hadn't even known of my existence ten minutes before. How can people manage to be so welcoming? My student friend introduced everybody and I tried to smile as much as everybody else was even though most of the talking was in a language I still only knew about five words of. My student friend was very kind in translating a lot but that's no way to join in a conversation. In fact just smiling and drinking tends to be more effective. It turned out that my new friend had just returned from his home in Malaga with some typical sweet Malagueño wine. Strange stuff but nice, and probably a great way to get very drunk very quickly. Which may explain why I don't remember so much of the rest of that night. But it turned out that Tuesday night was party night every week. So just like that night, about 10, or maybe 11 or 12, we would go round to one of the flats and listen to music, drink, and for those into that sort of thing, smoke something. Usually around 3 or 4 the local police would come round and ask the music to be turned down. Sometimes that would happen, but sometimes the person answering the door would ask the policeman or woman where they were from. And usually it would turn out that there was somebody in the party form the same village. Whereupon the policeperson would come in, have a drink, start chatting about the village, gossipping. And the volume might go down a little but would slowly creep back up. And the party would carry on until, well, I'm not really sure - I guess we would crawl home sometime before dawn. But funnily enough I don't have any clear memories of the end of those parties. Strange.