How to party like you are actually 99

Forget the guestlist, who cares about the catering. I need to know how I'm getting home

At my age, this is what a good time looks like

I was at a party this weekend. An actual house party, in someone’s home.

This is no longer a regular occurrence. At Christmas and New Year maybe, a little. After January, those invites melt away until the November diary logjam commences in Q4.

It was absolutely tremendous - a delicious mix of old pals, newer pals and people of whom I was vaguely familiar but had never actually met. There was a cheeseboard, a Ferrero Rocher style pyramid of pakora and a butler’s pantry full of booze.

Yes, there was a butler’s pantry. No butler, that would just have been showing off.

Fairy lights twinkled. Bella Freud candles scented the air. No one, as far as I saw, poured Olaplex into the bath or made punch in the hostess’s prized green glass bowls.

In the kitchen, chatting to someone introduced to me as a landscape gardener, I discovered a sieve full of spicy Perello pickles that had been drained and then abandoned.

Seems I had not caught the first part of the introduction and I was talking to a one of Glasgow’s seminal 1980s bands. He declined a fancy Spanish gherkin. I hope I - as the younger guests might have put it - styled it out.

The dress code - “go for it” - was widely interpreted. I made the right decision in rejecting the green sequin column that did me proud at a recent big birthday. There’s going for it and then Going For It.

I have no recollection of this photograph being taken

The lower case option, also green and shimmery but with decolletage instead of all over microplastics, was at the showier end of the outfits on display. At one point the hostess, fearing for my modesty, offered me a safety pin. I declined. Fortune favours the bold.

Plus I was the only guest in her favourite colour. I feel that balanced out the odd over-share as I moved in the wrong direction.

Other guests wore, in no particular order, a silver cape, a tremendous structured polka dot number that could have been Damson Madder, a slinky column dress and fedora, gold platform sandals, vintage Clark’s shoes with electric blue pop socks and a Blondie t-shirt.

There was dancing and gossiping. Kir Royales were consumed.

And if all this was not delightful enough in and of itself, the logistics were as slick as the catering.

In my bus pass era, this is crucial to the enjoyment of any social engagement. This was the dream - Kendall Roy levels of comfort on a Royle family budget.

I drove to the venue, picking up two Scousers, my daughter and the pop sock wearer en route. My daughter then took the car back across the river, to be returned to mother the next day.

When the party had delighted me long enough, an angel sent from heaven offered a lift back to the west end in his Uber. Sir, at this moment nothing would make me happier.

The driver was three minutes away. Truly the universe loved Anna.

Homewards we went, on deserted roads, with further spicy theatrical gossip to help the journey zip along.

I was in my pyjamas, sandblasting off my lipstick, before you could say Pull Up To The Bumper.

Now that’s what I call music

This is how you party as an old person. Get the logistics wrong and all the fun of the Waitrose crisps and pink Freixenet turns to dust during a 40 minute wait for the bus that never comes.

One of my formative social experiences was a party in east London. I was maybe 18. We trekked across the capital from Brixton on various forms of creaky public transport. Once there, all anyone talked about was how they were getting home. And sure enough, it was monstrous. At one point we had a little doze in a bus shelter. Crossing the Atlantic is more straightforward.

That night in Dalston put me right off London and made me promise myself never to attend a party and talk about how I was getting home. I have kept to this, mostly, but these days the struggle is real.

Who does not want to be Kendall in his Loro Piana baseball cap, gliding penthouseward, blissfully unaware of the little people praying that Adil and his Skoda do not press cancel at the last minute?

Kendall Roy, a man who has never known the pain of the cancelled Uber

But sometimes it all works: the party was tremendous and the logistics went so smoothly that my abiding memory is of dancing to Grace Jones, not of walking through the industrial wasteland towards the O2 in search of a black cab.

I had enough fizzy wine-based beverages to have a grand time but not so many that I canny remember a minute of it.

Just occasionally, when a plan comes together, it’s great to be old.