This article is a preview from the Autumn 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
What I always most enjoyed about parties were the stories we told about them in the days and weeks that followed. Janet, for example, couldn’t wait to tell us all about how, after last year’s Bonfire party, her husband Gordon had been so many sheets to the wind that he’d climbed into the Soho cab and then, immediately, climbed out of the other side. “Aren’t we home yet?” he’d burbled as Janet raced round and endeavoured to stuff him back into his seat. That was enough to get us all laughing but there was more to come. Halfway across Clapham Common, the driver had pulled into the kerb and threatened to go no further unless Gordon stopped singing “The Red Flag”.
“Any more of that stuff about the martyred dead and you’re out of here,” he’d bellowed through the intercom.
Of course, most of us knew that our party anecdotes had gained in the telling. In common with all good stories, they’d been subject to a little editing, elaboration for the sake of comic effect. They owed a lot to imagination. And we might well have gone on with these happy fabrications if it hadn’t been for the arrival of the mobile phone.
Suddenly nearly everybody at the party had a small handheld camera in their possession. And they used it. So that instead of waking up the morning after, anticipating the phone call from Katie that would tell the full elaborate story of what happened when Brian stepped out onto the balcony for a cigarette and fell into Brenda’s carefully nurtured tomato plants, there would be a still picture of a relatively stable looking Brian standing next to rather than amongst the ripening tomatoes.
All of a sudden, imaginatively amplified stories of comic disaster and near-disaster gave way to bland shots of people’s faces. And for the most part these weren’t natural faces. No one, it seems, could allow themselves to be photographed at a party unless they screwed their face up into what they conceived to be a display of extreme enjoyment. “Just look at me! Aren’t I having a wonderful time?”
My own personal party pleasure was deeply affected by this shift from narrative to image. Instead of being reminded by Jill or Natalie about how well I’d jived the night before, or what fun it had been to watch me and my friend Jim re-enact the pass from Graeme Souness to Kenny Dalglish which had won the European Cup for Liverpool in 1978, I had to make do with half a dozen static iPhone pictures in which I’m doing nothing more mobile than gurning inanely.
But it was only after my most recent party – to celebrate what the doomsayers chose to call “my big birthday” – that I was subject to an even more serious development. Instead of being sent thank-you emails with pictures, I was requested by one partygoer to download what turned out to be a short video. Moving pictures with sound.
This was too much reality altogether. For a start the video revealed my dancing incompetence. I’ve never gone so far as to boast about my ability to jive but I’ve always privately entertained the idea that I’m still up to the bronze-medal standard I achieved during my teenage years. But the video that arrived from Jeremy not only showed that my dancing lacked any sense of grace or hint of rhythmic competence but also revealed that my escort, Jayne, had spent a good part of the dance glancing desperately around the room in search of an alternative partner.
That was bad enough but then the picture changed to what at first seemed a pretty innocuous shot of me walking across the party room. Now, I’ve always prided myself on being able to hold my drink. But as the video unrolled there could be no mistaking the fact that I was walking from one side of the room to the other as though endeavouring to master a tightrope. I was lurching from one point of stability to another, clutching friends and pieces of furniture as I tottered forwards.
I re-ran the video in search of reassurance. Could that tottering be no more than a camera effect? A minor optical illusion? I checked the accompanying text. Jeremy had hardly exercised an ounce of imagination. Next to a leering emoticon he had added just two words: “Pissed again”.
