Party time!

As I've just posted in my work blog (cornwell_feed), we've just celebrated the tenth anniversary of our business being a business, with a party for our clients on Sunday afternoon. This is something we've been planning for - well, we've had it in mind for over a year, and gone through all the usual decisions and indecisions, some of them several times over. I haven't been posting about that because who wants to read that? And do I want to tell the world (and more to the point, my guests) about it? (If I'm invited to a party, I don't want to know that my host is in a panic about how nobody will come, and they won't have enough to eat, and all the wrong things to drink - not until it's all over, and I can say "There, there, I told you it would be fine!").

We considered various venues - we'd have liked to hold the party in Durham, since this is where we're based! - but once we'd visited Stephenson's Works, our minds were made up, and I still think it was a good decision. The space was large and open, light and bright and - once we'd opened a few windows - airy, with enough interesting things to look at, and interesting associations, but not so much that it felt cluttered or intruded on the main business of partying. A small boy could charge up and down the length of the room, and play with bits of machinery - we had to provide our own small boy, but luckily we had a Max, so that was fine. It felt smarter and more professional than holding the party at home (plus, it was someone else's job to tidy up beforehand), but not so much so that it didn't feel like us.

Organising the drink was easy enough: the local brewery were evidently used to being asked to supply "own label" beers for parties. They don't actually brew a special batch, but they do offer to overprint names of your choice onto the labels of their bottles. We had a happy session one weekend, sampling all their beers to decide which ones we wanted, and thinking of appropriate names, and came up with three: Webmaster, Uploader and Downloader. Our wine expert friend Helen Savage organised us a selection of wines, many of them from the south-west of France, including somew Basque wines (by a happy coincidence, she has a comission from SOPEXA to promote the south-west, and it's a region of which we are particularly fond). As usual, it's the soft drinks about which I am unconfident, and it's the soft drinks which came closest to running out. (Memo to self: next time, buy more apple juice. And some unfizzy water).

We dithered interminably over the catering. I would have liked to pay someone else to do it, and we looked at various possibilities, but couldn't bring ourselves to pay the price (I'm not saying that they overcharge: it's a labour-intensive business, and people are entitled to charge for their time. We just couldn't bring ourselves to do it, that's all). For an afternoon party, after all, where the guests have already had lunch, and will later be eating dinner, how much could we need. So in the end, with the help of one heroic volunteer, we catered it ourselves. I see myself turning into my mother, who invariably over-catered several-fold - I remember one party from which every guest went home with a spare quiche. I fought back the urge to make mushroom vol-au-vents (another Skip special: she'd bake all the little pastry cases the night before, and spread them on every flat surface she owned to cool overnight, and, inevitably, to be inspected by the cats. In the morning you had to remove the ginger fluff before adding the mushroom filling), but there was leftover hummus for lunch today, and there will be sandwiches for tea very soon, before we go out this evening.

The guests made up in quality what they lacked in quantity. We knew that not everyone would travel for the party (though we were delighted at some of those who made the effort to come quite a long way), and we knew that the summer is a time when people have their own plans - but what can you do, if your birthday is in the summer, that's when you party. Inevitably, we spent a certain amount of time explaining to people why desperance wasn't there - because he was somewhere else, that's all; but people always ask us where he is!

People seemed to talk to people they hadn't known before, and I got to talk to people about things we hadn't previous talked about - the sort of conversation where you realise you've known someone for quite a while, and worked together quite closely on some topics, yet never explored other areas (reflection brought on by being asked if Max was my grandchild - to which the answer is, "No, he's part of our holiday cover arrangements!"). Someone else asked me where were all the businesses and corporations we worked for, only partly joking, and I had to explain that no, these people were the people we work for, that his web site was not as atypical as he thought! Some people who had told us they would come along after other engagements that afternoon surprised and delighted us by doing just that (because I know how easy it is to be lured off for a drink, or just to feel that you're ready to go home now), and some people who couldn't be there sent us birthday cards, which we loved.

And when the hour struck, everyone went away very promptly, and it really didn't take long to clear up. And we returned the wine glasses to Helen and Olwen, who gave us supper and more delicious wine and the chat we hadn't had time for at the party. So, a good day all round, and in ten years time I may even be ready to do it again.