My 30th Birthday Party
Wine, women and webcams
Saturday 14th August 2004

August 2004 has been a very busy month. I moved out of my flat, my flatmate got married, I left the UK for the southern hemisphere (again), another friend got married, and I turned 30. Due to the second last of these events, the wedding of Andrew Henderson and his fiance Leona, the weekend of my actual birthday (the 22nd) was going to be rather busy for a number of people, not least Andrew and Leona, so I decided to host a party for my birthday on the weekend of the 14th to allow a number of my friends who would be away at the wedding the following weekend to attend.

Thankfully the digital camera that I'd bought myself to take travelling (and as a 30th present to myself) turned up a few days before, which meant it got its first real test on that weekend.

Without wishing to degenerate into a fawning plug for Canon, it's a really nice camera. It's 5 megapixel (which means images up to a whopping 2592x1944 pixels) has a 3x optical zoom, video mode, photo-stitch mode (which means you can take several pictures of things in a row and when transferred to the computer they'll be "stitched" together to form one long [or high] composite picture) and a whole host of configurable thingies that I'm mostly ignoring as I haven't the faintest clue what they're for. Although I have been playing with the manually-set long-exposure times which are fantastic for getting night shots in really low light. Well, as long as you remember to hold the camera really steady otherwise you're going to get a lot of blur. In fact you're best off using the auto-timer (to prevent wobble when you press the shutter) and a tripod of some sort otherwise you're fairly stuffed.

Anyway, after deleting most of the "test" shots from the camera, these were the first shots of things, or rather people, that I wanted to keep. Given my busyness and the stress of trying to get things sorted for leaving the country, I hadn't really organised anything for the party, so unlike previous years, there was no fancy-dress or theme for the evening. Just turn up and bring some booze was the idea.

Speaking of booze, that was one thing I wound up avoiding for the majority of the evening, only finally having a glass of wine or two well after midnight. I'd been out with work colleagues for my leaving drinks the night before and had intended to stay for a drink or two, just long enough to be polite, and then leave. Instead we'd headed straight over from work at 5pm and, skipping dinner (an oversight I'd come to regret) I'd had more rum and cokes than I could count. Every time I'd get three-quarters done I'd find someone else had plonked another drink down in front of me. I'd smile, slightly glassily, and then start on the next drink, intending to leave once it was finished.

I finally got out of place at about 10:30pm, at which point I headed to another pub to meet Simon and had, somewhat unwisely, yet more drinks. After that I cycled home (which probably wasn't a cunning plan but didn't result in death and dismemberment so that's okay) and went to bed, still without drinking some water, or eating something.

Hence Saturday dawned with a pounding hangover of the type I haven't experienced in quite a number of years. My mum had arranged to turn up to get me a Sgian Dubh (that's a “dirk” or dagger for non-Scots in the audience) for my birthday from a place that was thankfully just over the road from my flat. Given spinning nausea and an inability to think I wasn't really in a state for this activity, but I succeeded in picking out one I liked, being fed McDonalds (as it's easily digestible and practically mush to start with) and holding a conversation for a handful of minutes before collapsing back into bed to recuperate for most of the afternoon.

I was feeling much more human by the time people started arriving at the flat, but I just couldn't face alcohol, so stuck with soft drinks. I still had a really good time, and the party lasted until after 4am, although it was fairly subdued by that stage. As Jo couldn't attend I arranged to have my old laptop running in the corner with MSN Messenger and it's webcam capability active so that Jo could at least join in the fun virtually. Given it was silly o'clock in the morning for her though (due to the time difference from Edinburgh to Mackay) she was fairly sleepy, but I really appreciated her making the effort.

As mentioned, this years party was a non-dress-up affair, at least on paper, but after a couple of drinks the urge to put silly things on heads seemed to rear itself out of the group subconscious, and the winged warrior hat of the preceding two years appeared from somewhere, along with some kind of Norse warrior hat to accompany it. Both did the rounds, and appear on heads further up this page.

© Barny Russell 2004