Yesterday we held a party to celebrate my sister's 50th birthday, so today we're all completely exhausted. I managed to put of starting any work today until it was almost dark outside.
The party was hosted by her good friends, Lindsey and Tony, who have a beautiful contemporary house on Marine Parade in Herne Bay. At any given point during the party, it seemed as though half the guests were there simply to nose around the house, with various tour groups traipsing around from room-to-room. I was trying to get trays of food out of the oven while two guys examined the stove, splashback, drawers, cupboard finishing, etc. I had to burn them with trays to get them out of my way.
The party managed to combine two typical New Zealand pastimes: nosing around open homes, and eating. As expected, everyone stuffed their faces as though they'd been fasting all week - even though the party was in the afternoon, after lunch and before dinner. We served up platter after platter of sushi; blinis with hot smoked salmon; risotto cakes; meatballs with barbecue sauce; rosti with various dips and toppings; and the red pepper tarts I've been making, to an increasingly approximate remembered recipe, for years. All were scoffed by our apparently near-starving guests. I had four young helpers, all of whom did an excellent job passing around food; my niece and her friend, Kate, were flopped on the sofas like rag dolls by the end of the party. My nephew tended bar, and was last seen heading off into the night to watch the rugby with his friends, a box of Coronas under his arm.
Lindsey has an amazing piano, so my brother-in-law was charged with hiring a pianist. He didn't just get any pianist: he got Billy Joel. Deryn was really good, especially when he played "Comfortably Numb," one of my favourite songs. (He didn't sing at all until the end, when he did "Piano Man," after which we managed to herd everyone but the serious overstayers out into the rain.)
I wish I had some photos, especially of the flowers by Leaf and Honey, which were SO beautiful, or the giant yummy chocolate-and-whiskey cake from Rocket Kitchen, on which my sister's complicated name was, fortunately, correctly spelled. But my camera was hidden away upstairs, and I was too busy feeding the starving millions. It reminded me of the endless weddings my parents used to attend, and their verdicts afterwards, which were always based on food, quality and quantity: "not much to eat" meant an unenjoyable wedding. Hopefully everyone enjoyed themselves. Some people enjoyed themselves so much they trampled chocolate cake all over the floor, which I enjoyed scraping off later.
My brother-in-law put together a slide show we played on my computer - pictures of my sister through the years. There were some of the two of us, and, in the absence of anything more recent, I include them here. The first two were taken in my grandparents' front garden, at the old house, now gone, on Ponsonby Road. The third is of us with my brother at Auckland Airport, I think, in the days when my mother forced us to dress nicely, in the manner of visitors from the Austrian Tirol. And the last is of the two of us at Fox Glacier in 1981, when I was 15 and she was 22, and I looked like a boy giant with a Lady Diana hair-do.
I would just like to say that we were wearing peasant dresses at the airport, in the manner of visitors from a gypsy camp - and it was the HEIGHT of fashion.
Posted by: L-E | August 19, 2008 at 10:11 AM