GRANDAD'S SLIDES (PART 97) - LITTLE WHITE BOX 01

SLIDES 0627-0629

"Christmas 1974, etc"

"The horror...! The horror...!"

For several years my parents attempted to have what they called an "Open House" on Boxing Day in which they would invite everyone they knew (in their case, unlike my own, meaning one heck of a lot of people), to "drop in" any time during the afternoon and evening for drinks, chat, nibbles and general sociability.

Suddenly you are getting a vision of my own personal version of hell...

The peculiar thing was that, despite the fact that everywhere we went when I was growing up, there always seemed to be somebody who knew my Dad well enough to come over and say hello (God! That could be SO embarrassing...), these events pretty much always turned out to be the very definition of social failure.

Well that's how I remember them anyway.

You see, despite what my mother always seemed to hope and yearn for, there was never - as far as I recall - what could be described as a houseful.

Oh, people did turn up in dribs and drabs, usually the neighbours and one or two of their church friends, but they seldom overlapped or hung on in that way you always associate with the really successful parties, and mum always seemed to be looking out of the window in the hope that dozens of people would be in the driveway to join the happy throng of about half-a-dozen that she was currently dealing with.

There was always, always, mountains of food left over and the funny thing was that my mother really found it excruciatingly difficult to relax both before, during, and sometimes even after these events, so the bulk of the burden fell upon my Dad (drink duties) and my sister (food preparation) to get us through these long, long days.

Mind you, Dad always seemed happy enough to create one of his lethal alcoholic punches where he would add the various exotic bottles of liqueurs that he had picked up on their travels into the mix and declare the resulting lethal concoction to be really rather good.

My own contribution seemed to involve hiding away in the "other room" alongside whatever other kids had turned up whilst drinking fizzy pop and, possibly (it's hard to be certain that this was then because Mum usually had a strict "No TV when you've got guests" policy) watching the television set as it terrified another generation by means of the Child Catcher in "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang"

I always think that these occasions were actually something of a massive disappointment to my mother who always wanted to have parties and yet somehow never quite managed to achieve that magic alchemy where people can feel relaxed enough to actually have a good time. As I mentioned, she used to get really stressed about them beforehand, and then mildly bitter about it when so many of their friends chose not to come, especially if it turned out that they had "other places to be" or that there was another party going on at the same time in some other house of people we knew.

I may be doing them an injustice, of course, and these may have been the social events of the season to other people, but I doubt it. I seem to remember that they attempted to do them for several years, but it must really have only been two, or at most three. They certainly stopped after we moved house in 1978.

I think this is also one of the root causes of my own dislike of parties and might explain the fact that when I finally realised that I was actually able to choose to stop going to them, I did.