inspiring photo essay ii: party time

THIS INSPIRING PHOTO ESSAY NOW INCLUDES THE FAMOUS LOST PARAGRAPH DESCRIBING THE FOOD.

So, my mum wanted to have a party to celebrate my book being published. I was incredibly grateful and excited, since my mum is very beloved by all and sundry, and it would give me the chance to see lots of family friends, and to sell them my book, which is widely regarded as the best book I have ever had published.

One of the first things I noticed when I got home was that there were more gazebos than usual to the tune of one.



This gazebo had been bought by my mother in case of rain, and because it was much more sensible than to hire if she was ever going to need a gazebo again. It was erected by my uncle Alec, who is over from Johannesburg for a few months, along with his wife Elizabeth, who he met because she was my mother's best friend. It's heartwarming just thinking about it.

Because I am such a terrible photojournalist, and am only rescued by the excellence of my source material, none of my pictures of Alec and Elizabeth were good enough to feature here. My brother Alex is going to save my bacon by sending one. It will arrive shortly.

Alex had saved my bacon on Saturday also by helping me get the books from West End Lane Books, West Hampstead (who have been brilliant at organising books to sell at this and my party in Kilburn next week). Here is Alex and the car.



Here are the books. You can see how they got in this weird white plastic by going to see my previous inspiring photo essay.



The most noticeable thing about the house apart from the endless new gazebos was how much more food than you normally need in a house containing fewer than three thousand people. Here, for example is some trifle being made.



This is one of the two fridges.



Lots of food didn't fit into the two fridges, and was in boxes with ice. These two salmon, for instance.



It wasn't just food. There were also many hundreds of lists of things that needed to be done. Over the course of Saturday evening, my mother read and re-read these lists to the rest of us. Her problem, and it was a problem, was that she had succeeded in getting ahead of the game. She was, about this, in a state of disbelief. Are you in a state of disbelief about the lists? I cannot see why you would be. Anyway, here is pictorial evidence which I didn't fake. I am like Robert Capa.



To demonstrate that I am like Robert Capa in how good I am at spotting a pictorial moment, here is a picture of beads of water on the gazebo roof in the the Sunday morning sin.



I mean sun. If you saw the above picture in full definition, it would probably blow your mind, so you should thank your lucky stars. The sun is a star, fact fans. Here is the gazebo in the sun, including chairs.



(Parenthetical, for colour: did you know that if you throw an egg over a house onto grass, the egg almost certainly won't break? You think this is nonsense. I certainly did when my friend Chris told me during a previous event at my house. Everyone else did too. We all went and got an egg, and we all threw eggs over the house onto the grass. None of them broke. We have done this several times since. Very few eggs have broken. Here is a wider shot of the house to demonstrate what an exciting story I am telling. I am a very exciting storyteller. You should probably buy my book.



End of parenthesis.)

Anyway, the above picture of the empty gazebo is how my mother imagined the gazebo would be looking at one o'clock when no one had turned up. This is what the gazebo looked like at one o'clock.



And this is what things looked like inside.



But I am getting ahead of myself. At this stage, we were still running around collecting the wine and and change (big up Waitrose, Bishop's Stortford), and blowing up balloons, and erecting signs. These signs were painted on Friday by Hebe, who is a sort of de facto small cousin, when she and her sister Poppy and their mother Cherry were doing whatever my mother made them do. They were and remain excellent signs.



We were also assembling the enormous food-jigsaw. This is my cousin Fran getting stuck in.



(Parenthesis 2: Fran is an artist. She has designed her own wrought iron fences, which were in the garage. Here is a picture that in no way does them full justice.



I am aware that sometimes I say I am a brilliant photojournalist, and sometimes I say the opposite. I do it because I am changeable, like the sea. End of parenthesis.)

Here's the front of the house. Nice flowers.



These chairs came over to England from Zimbabwe when we moved. They are part of a small list of things I remember from being a small child in Africa. Either that or we bought them when we came over and this is a false memory. That happens too.



This is my mother, who is the inspiring heroine of this particular photoessay. The other guy bought a book.



You'd have thought, looking at it, that this guy had also bought a book, but no. He had wandered off with a book to think about matters. My top international photographer subordinate had taken over by this point of the photoessay and took the picture in case it was needed in a criminal trial.



The guy returned the book. Lucky for him.

I signed some books. You can get a crude understanding of what the process must have looked like to an outside observer by looking at this picture.



You can also get a crude picture of what some Crabbies alcoholic ginger beer looks like in a champagne glass. What it tastes like is: ginger beer. If you can't see where this might lead into dangerous territory, you have never had a dark and stormy. I can't find a picture to give you a crude sense of what it looked like when the champagne glass contained Saffron Brewery's Silent Night. The description (a beer with added port and chocolatey overtones) makes it sound disgusting. It is.

To get a crude understanding of how things looked when I was signing for my sister, this picture is better.



And for the history teacher who is the reason I became a historian instead of a chemical engineer (true fact: chemical engineer is the only job I coveted at any point in my youth).



You must be very impressed with my shirt. It was made for me by a Congolese shirtmaker in the literal Congo on the instructions of my friend Rachel who used to a diplomat there and is now based in Rwanda. This is 'colour' for those who are finding the relentless focus on my book a bit boring.

At this point, my mother gave a speech. It was lovely to the extent that my emotionally susceptible sub-photojournalist only managed a dim and distant view. Viz.



She recovered fine to take pictures of me thanking all the inspiring heroes and heroines of the photoessay much less and less eloquently than they deserved, but looking at everything, how eloquent would I have had to be? I am not that eloquent.



This was a typical reaction to my speech.



There was plenty of party after this. I just wanted to say, though, that in a previous blog post I mention that it included Somerset brie, and here is the proof via more Capa-esque journalism.



Incidentally, you might be thinking that the volume of food compromised the quality. More fool you, you fool. Let me take you back to the summer of 1994, when 50 different people came round for my twenty-first:

Everyone had a drink in the glorious sunshine, and then went inside to get food which they ate dotted around the house watching a purple thunderstorm all around. One of my friends who isn't one of the idiots stood in the kitchen for five minutes that seemed like an hour, huge plateful of Russian fish pie, lasagne, curry, coleslaw and whatever else tottering in his puny hand, telling my mother that 'this is the best meal I have ever eaten Mrs Hudson. I'm not drunk. A little maybe, but not properly. Not like I will be later. But not really now, and this food is AMAZING!'

(For this reason, this is my mother's favourite of my friends alongside all the other ones. She is really grateful whenever there is any evidence that I have friends.)

Another picture. I include it because it contains coleslaw. Several guests remarked that they thought they hated coleslaw, but it turned out that they had just never eaten it when it was done right, and that coleslaw turns out to be delicious.



It was sunny, and I had signed lots of books, so I took a tour around the garden with my cousins Monica and Dylan (keen readers of my book will note those names), and with Poppy and Hebe, whose family have always been virtually cousins also - they also moved over from Zim, we stayed with them when we came over, we still live in the same village as them.



I showed them the gravestone of Mary Something, which we dug up when we were re-doing the rockery.



There is another bit of gravestone nearby which I had forgotten about, but Dylan, who is a noticing kind of boy, noticed it. A better photojournalist would have a picture of it here. Last Christmas, I had a long debate with Dylan about the congestion charge. He was, broadly, opposed. The debate went on to include third world debt and international trade. It was a very good debate.

In this picture, I explain to M, D, P and H about the excellent fence my brother started building a couple of years ago and extends from time to time. It is one of those ones made by weaving long bits of supple branch through upright rods. 'Where is the picture of the fence?' you ask. Well might you.



You will notice that Dylan is more interested in an SS Jumbo cricket bat I bought off Ed Peachey at some point in the late eighties. He knows I am not really a foeman worthy of his steel. Hebe with the tennis ball is waiting for me to shut up so she can inveigle my unwise brother into a gymnastics contest. This will happen in less than a minute and will go better for Hebe than it does for my brother.

I notice there is no picture so far of my other brother, Mark. Here. I have rectified same.



He is talking to Jane, half my sub-photojournalists. This is Sally, who was the other half.



'I want to go to the loo! I want to go to the loo!' Don't worry, I can help you.

Here endeth the photoessay.