NYESP007

So we threw a party called Spanish.

It began in the early evening in the back yard with tapas (patatas bravas, garlic clay pot prawns, chilli olives, boquerones) and sangria. Then the progression to wigs, frocks and Crotch.

Crotch is our house speciality: a sublime NZ honey vodka mixed with Tasmanian sparkling apple. Serving Crotch enables the host to say “would you care for some Crotch?”. It also allows guests to say things like, “now where’d I put my Crotch?” And “ooooh excellent I just found my old Crotch!” And everybody’s favourite, “is that my Crotch or your Crotch?”. And so on.

At that point Q put something in my Crotch, just as the Latino beats (Ozomatli, Barrio Nuevo, Los de Abajos, Rio Black Samba) started to quicken. Someone said ‘pole tennis’ and the Fiesta moved into the front yard to have a bash and a squeal, while from the porch onlookers were rewarded by repeat wardrobe malfunction framed by the sun setting on 06 in the great beyond.

Then Q scraped up a round of dirty martinis, which I found very moving. Hours later I found an untouched & abandoned martini near the dancefloor. Here I discovered that by simply making a dirty martini at the beginning of a party and leaving it out to collect the grime and guffaw going on around it, well that’s a special kind of dirty. All I needed was to throw in an anchovy and it was good to go.

By night, the west-facing porch was declared to be ‘Porchugal’, and the house itself was ‘Spain’ (the dancefloor Madrid, the kitchen Sevilla). The back yard was ‘Barcelona’ but by morning it was more like flotsam washed up on the coast Ibiza.

So now I’m back at work and, as I suspected, there’s no Crotch in sight.