Party of the Year

I have no business being a journalist when it takes me whole week to update my blog. I do apologise but I did actually write a fantastic post on how great the party was, a blow-by-blow account of who did what, when and where, and promptly shut the damn thing down without publishing it. Doh! After which I lost the will to live and had to just get as far away from a computer as possible.

But just to recap. The party was off the da heezy (I know young people are not saying that anymore). It reminded me of the parties of my youth, when the older generation (now me) and the young would get together and somehow manage to speak the same language. I think in general it's easier because black people are raised on music, so when families get together, music is always involved and the old people (us now) force the young uns' to get up and show them whatever new dance is going on. And that's exactly what happened last weekend. Suzy Wong and I got to learn the Chicken Noodle Soup dance, which is better than it sounds, and we led the young uns in the Electric Slide to Candy's Cameo (with my daughter shaming me up by misstepping).

People know how much I love to Electric Slide, I even taught it to some women on my friends Hen Night in Spain a few years back. All the people in the club stopped dancing to watch. One woman was soooo happy because she said she had NEVER been able to learn any dance step and had no rhythm. She was black too. Okay I'm lying.

But the party was really good fun. We had the best dance competition 'Dance Idol' which was won by Suzy Wong's niece who we shall call Lil Wong because she stay bad just like her aunty. Wong used to have a hot dance group back in the hip-hop days, taking on allcomers boys and girls, and they took no prisoners.

Considering I was being the meanest mum ever and hadn't wanted to have the party, you would never have guessed from the way I was dancing up myself to every tune the DJ played. Wong and I had to work to get the youts on their feet. Then they harassed my dj friend Peter Platinum Phillips (Bassline FM) to play the tunes they wanted, and if he didn't have them, they 'bluetoothed' the songs off their phones straight to his infrared enabled laptop. Deep. Clarke was cussing our Macbook a few months back because it doesn't have infrared. The damn thing costs twice as much as a bogstandard PC laptop and does half the job.

We fed them MFC (mum's fried chicken), cocktail size jamaican patties, hardough bread and coleslaw. Plus the usual fizzy drinks and sweets. I don't believe in all this organic food nonsense at kids parties. Give them what they want, get them high on the e-numbers and by 10 o' clock they crash and burn into the deepest sleep ever. Result.

My daughter looked amazing (of course I'm biased). Sweet thirteen, all long-limbed and shiny-faced. She resisted my attempts to put a little make-up on her (NO MUM! - not even lipgloss!). Those baby years went so quickly, and now I have this demanding teen (Advice: always have more than one child) who talks too much in class, and could do better according to her teachers (and she bloody well will according to me). But as I wrote in her card - she is everything I ever imagined having in a daughter. And I feel privileged to have her in my life.

Happy birthday Clarkie x