h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My daughter Izzy had her 18th birthday at the weekend. It was a hectic time for us, but well worth the effort.

We decided to have two parties in our house, one on Friday night for the relatives and friends of the family, and one on Saturday night for Izzy's friends of her own age.

Friday

I had been hoping to bring my father to the party from his nursing home for a short while, but he is very unsteady on his feet and had fallen during the week. The doctor decided that it would not be a good idea, so Izzy and I went to visit him on Friday afternoon - we had some small "Gü" cheesecakes to celebrate the event.

The main event was to take place in our kitchen. We bought some helium balloons arranged in clumps of 5, and some streamers, and did up the kitchen to look suitably festive.

Food was sausages (both normal and gluten-free), garlic bread, crisps and nibbles, meringue roulade and "rainbow cake". This was a special request from Izzy, and has lots of different colours inside in a chequerboard pattern. Mrs G spent days experimenting and cooking prototypes. The end result was amazing!

We managed to get through quite a bit of wine and beer: we had prosecco, Asti, a nice French sauvignon blanc, some Nero d'Avola and Carlsberg. There were of course lots of soft drinks as well.

The adults were very well behaved and didn't smash up any furniture or anything.

Saturday

Some of the people coming on the Saturday night were smokers, so I laid down big sheets of plywood on the lawn, and screwed them to strips underneath in places so that there would be no tripping hazards. We then erected a "pop-up" gazebo which we had borrowed off some friends. This was 3m x 3m so the smokers could go outside and smoke in peace without feeling guilty about it, and the boards protected the grass (which is very soft after the summer deluge) from being turned into a mud bath. With a few party lights around it, it looked very inviting and the night wasn't too chilly.

Food was the same as on the Friday night but without the gluten-free options, and Mrs G had cooked an even bigger rainbow cake (as we had 35 guests coming).

We had decided that rather than policing the 18-year-olds (who can legally drink) from the under-18-year-olds (who can't), we'd just have a blanket ban on alcohol. We wouldn't provide any, and no one was allowed bring any. As it happened, some bottles of beer were smuggled in and consumed (some of these children have been drinking since they were 14), but we turned a blind eye and nobody got drunk. If we had allowed beer, many of them would have drunk to excess. So it worked out well. The children / young adults were very well behaved and even tidied up. I only found one cigarette butt in the garden.

At about 11:30, many of the local kids went home, but 12 guests had arrived from further afield (some from as far as Cork, Galway and Leitrim), so they were staying the night. At about midnight, it started to get very windy and I was worried about the gazebo. I decided to take it down, and in doing so, the wind caught it and twisted it round, breaking two of the struts and bending the legs. I got it bundled into the shed to be looked at in the morning.

At about 1, the remaining guests decided to watch Doctor Who. When that was over we had to get them all off to bed. By the time we sorted out beds, mattresses, air-beds, and couches, and persuaded them all to go to bed it was 3am (which is not as late as it sounds - I'm Irish and we stay up late most nights). I went to sleep at that point, but apparently most of them were still talking at 6am, and talking between bedrooms via facebook too.

Sunday

Sunday's main task was trying to get the remaining guests to leave. They had to inhale all the helium from the balloons and talk in silly voices, and all the other after-party things. Eventually I ferried them all in groups of 3 down to the local tram station, from where they could make their own way home.

Then I looked at the gazebo. I reckon the legs can be fixed by sawing about 3cm off the ends of them, and no one will be any the wiser. The broken struts at the top will need to be replaced, and I found a gazebospareparts.co.uk that will provide the parts I need, although shipping a 1.3m pole from the UK to Ireland is ferociously expensive.

It was a great weekend, although I left Izzy studying in the afternoon, and came back 10 minutes later to find her asleep on her books. It'll take us all a few days to recover.

Two parties on consecutive nights is very wearing, but simplifies things a lot, too. Good organisation.

With mine being boys, their 18th birthday parties were rather more boisterous, but they all got themselves home so we didn't have to bother with that. Considerably more cigarette ends in and around the dustbin area, though.

It's worth putting effort into birthday parties and making them special - they can so easily degenerate into "just another night drinking, talking, listening to music and doing silly things". When they are younger, (at least in Germany it is like this) so many parents just bundle them into a room together and let them play, so a birthday party is no different from an afternoon playing with friends.

Izzy and her friends will have lots of happy memories of this special weekend.

No denying that an 18th birthday marks the cutting of the very last apron string, though.

I wish her a successful and fulfilling future life.

By now those molecules of helium have reached the upper edges of our atmosphere and been blown into space by the solar winds never to return to Earth.

Anyways, sounds like a very fun and memorable weekend. And if that gazebo is like the ones I'm familiar with, they're notorious for collapsing in the wind. I've got one that has outlasted almost all others and now the fabric part is deteriorating leaving blue tint on anyone who touches it. It will probably rip to shreds in a good wind. Now when I go camping I'm on the lookout for others of the same size hoping they'll collapse in the wind and I can pick up a free replacement tarp.

I borrowed the gazebo off my brother-in-law, knowing he had borrowed it off someone else. But he tells me that it didn't actually belong to that person at all - they'd borrowed it too. So it would be nice to have something workable to pass back up the chain.

If there are any camping facilities in your area, you might keep an eye on their bin areas for the spare parts you need. I'm sure after each weekend you can find salvageable parts.

>So it would be nice to have something workable to pass back up the chain.

How far back up do you expect it to rise?

I remember doing something similar for my 18th - a nice and well-behaved dinner out at our local Italian restaurant with family and my parents' friends on one night, and a complete and utter lash-up down the pub (with stripper, vomiting, the full works) the following night with the locals.

It would have been a more successful plan if a large number of people hadn't attended both events.

B

Where do you hire a vomiting stripper?

Spewmint Rhino?

...the bulimirexics convention... ...the revels of one of the less famous, but more dissolute Roman Emperors?...