A week or so ago, while on the way to the launch party for new nightclub, The Boat, I had the following back-of-a-taxi conversation with my pal, Dishy Debs:
DD: "There aren't enough parties this month."
Me: "Are you kidding? There's nothing but parties. Look - we're on our way to a party right now."
DD: "No, we need more parties. We haven't thrown a party for ages. What excuse can we find for a party this month?"
Me: "Errr...... St George's Day??"
DD: "Brilliant! When is it?"
Me: "April 23rd, I think. That's, um, a week next Wednesday."
DD: "Did you know that it's also Shakespeare's birthday?"
Me: "No. No, I didn't know that."
DD: "That's an even better excuse for a party, isn't it? The only people who celebrate St George's Day back home are right-wing nutters. We don't want to have anyone thinking it's that kind of thing, to put people off."
Me: "Oh, I don't think that will matter out here. No-one will think that of us. And any excuse for a party will do."
DD: "Right. Well, where's an English venue we could use?"
Me: "How about Fish Nation?"
DD: "Of course! Which one?"
Me: "The Nanluoguxiang one. Much nicer. And close to where we live."
DD: "Yes! Do you think they'd let us take it over for free?"
Me: "I don't see why not. It's always dead mid-week."
DD: "Do you think they'd lay on any food for us?"
Me: "We can but ask. They might do us some chips. After all, 30 people drinking wine and beer all night like it's going out of fashion is going to be a very nice revenue spike for them."
DD: "LET'S DO IT!!"
Such is the deceptive ease with which party plans are conceived in this hedonistic city!
Not that I can claim any credit for actually bringing this idea to fruition - aside from a little input as a catalyst or encourager, mostly outlined above. No, this is really DD's baby. But I'm looking forward to it - I think a significant number of good people will be joining us for an evening of "beer & The Beatles" (and just possibly one or two recitations from the 'birthday boy' himself).
"Oi, Shakespeare, NO! I've told you - you're Bard!!"
6 comments:
Sounds like you're going to have FUN!
Actually our esteemed prime minister, Gordon Brown has gathered support for celebrating St. Georges day akin to St. Patricks minus the right wing racists & with ethnic minorities included.. to celebrate Britishness.
I've always found it rather odd how celebratory St. Patricks day is.. when various brands of christians have been at each others throats .. I know a simplification of a very complex situation & hopefully over now.
don't you ever post photos of these party nights? or even have them hidden away on the net somewhere?
My digital happy snapper camera suffered an unfortunate fall a few months ago, so I don't currently have any convenient means of taking party photographs. (Actually, it still works - but the LCD display is broken, so I can't frame shots or navigate the menus, change the settings. Frustrating!)
Managing photos is also a problem. My old laptop is terribly, terribly slow, and is pretty much out of usable disk space. Its replacement isn't a lot better, and doesn't have much (working!!) software on it: no Media Player, no PhotoShop. (I shouldn't complain: it was a freebie from a former employer.) I really need to get myself an offboard hard drive, but I keep failing to get around to it.
I had dozens of photo albums of China on the old Yahoo Photos - but they abruptly wound that up last year and transferred all the pics over to Flickr. Flickr is heavily blocked in China. I can't really be bothered to work out how it works - too fiddly, too different to the Yahoo Photos set-up I had become familiar with. Most annoying of all, the pics from the old site were automatically transferred, but all the sorting and labelling was deleted..... so, what I have waiting for me in my Flickr account is a morass of about 1,000 photographs hopelessly mixed up.
There are some photos on here of last year's Christmas Party at Salud (another Dishy Debs production), and also of the 2 Kolegas music bar's 2nd Anniversary party last summer.
Please tell me there is no intention to have St George's Day celebrate "Britishness." Apart from the fact there is no such bloody thing as Britishness, it's just bloody wrong.
Well, of course, Gordon has that whole Scottish-inferiority-complex thing going on - "We hate you, but we want to be you."
And also, let's be honest, St. George is pants.
Yes, a bit unreal. And no connection to England at all. He didn't even die in an interesting way, did he? How did we end up with such a shit saint?
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