Carol’s Column

It’s hard to live a little if you can’t let go a little

In case you didn’t know, there is one day to New Year and 358 days to Christmas and the next party season. However, in view of general fragility, we shall spend New Year’s Eve attending a small select party of 25 instead of a glorious bash with 768.

The body can stand only so much.

Times have changed.

Take the Plimpton-Throgbore’s party, one of those frightfully upmarket affairs where the hostess got lost among the Chris Levin frills, the champers and the warthog pâté with truffles.

I’d just attacked the skewered oysters when something hee-hawed at my left shoulder pad. A short, bald and ugly stranger in a chartreuse Pierre Cardin jacket was making movements with his lower facial orifice.

“Hello, darling.”

Darling?

“So where did you go for the hols. Plett, Comores, Austria or the Galapagos?”

I plumped out my padded cleavage and eyed him haughtily: “Sweetie, we didn’t go away, we stayed home.”

“Home?” His eyebrows rose upwards making him momentarily hirsute.

“Home,” he repeated, his voice like a braying ass in a Malmesbury farmyard. “Who stays home for the holidays? How frightfully droll.”

He leant forward.

“Do you think you could possibly remove your hand from my décolleté,” I said.

“So sorry, I thought they were olives, haw haw.”

I could have told him our private jet had dirty ashtrays, that some tiles had blown off the roof of our ski lodge in Bariloche or that we couldn’t summon up the energy to go sailing around the Pacific because we were exhausted from jogging along the Great Wall of China. But what the hell.

“We decided it would be such fun spending the hols in Joey’s, seeing the sights, strolling through Hillbrow, sunbathing at the Monument, picnicking at Boksburg lake with the AWB, the DP and the UDF.

“It’s so boring going away. I mean, last time we were at Plett the whole of Johannesburg was there. In Kitzbuehel, the only language we heard was Afrikaans, while in Mauritius they all spoke Zulu. You just can’t escape.”

He shook his head. “Fascinating,” he said and took a bite of caviar blini which stuck to his lower teeth, making them look as if they had blackheads.

I recounted the story to my husband.

“The trouble with you,” he said, “is you’re a stick-in-the-clay. That’s why you don’t enjoy yourself at parties and fall asleep standing up. You should try to live a little.”

“The last time I lived a little you had to bail me out of the Parkview police station.”

“Carol, living it up doesn’t mean rushing starkers through in the street at midnight yelling ‘Tutu for President’.”

“So, I was feeling especially lively that night.”

Life is short and my great-grandmother, the Turkish belly-dancer from Stellenbosch, always told me to enjoy every moment. Which is difficult.

I have tried to become a social asset but it hasn’t been a great success and only yesterday my husband commented on my lack of social prowess.

“Was it necessary to rush up to me the other night and say ‘Let’s leave this terrible party immediately, it’s deadly. I want to go home and read a book’?”

I shrugged. “Did I know it was the host and hostess you were talking to?”

“Tonight,” said my husband, “keep your clothes on, don’t tell dirty jokes, don’t dance on the table and don’t crawl under the table and tie people’s shoelaces together.”

I can’t wait.

A Happy New Year to you, too.

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