Starbucks on Pembridge Road to relieve the problem. To clarify: I use the Starbucks loo. It’s not an anti-capitalist demonstration.
Those poor pirates! I have awkward and mixed feelings about fancy dress. I’m very happy to dress in whatever stupid costume I’m given when appearing on TV. I won’t be nude but any sort of ridiculous outfit, in a context where it’s supposed to look funny, I’m fine with. That’s probably because I can say I didn’t choose to wear it, it’s just my job (although that’s a pretty flimsy excuse when it’s a costume for a sketch I’ve written). But when a party invitation says ‘fancy dress’, it’s different. I don’t think it’s right to turn up dressed normally, although people do and God knows that avoids hassle and embarrassment. I just think it’s a bit rude and churlish. It’s both failing to observe a clearly stated dress code and refusing to join in with the fun of a social event. Rather than that, I think one should probably just not go.
At the same time, though, a perfect, gleaming, hired costume would feel a bit OTT – a bit ‘Look at me!’ A friend of mine regularly has a Hallowe’en party for which some form of horror-inspiring outfit is required. Perhaps, to reflect what inspires horror in me, I should go as a party invitation requiring fancy dress. Instead, I make a lame nod towards compliance. The first year, I went to a ‘party shop’ and quickly bought a plastic vampire cloak and a wizard’s hat and went wearing both. I felt this would do the job. It would be saying: ‘Look, I’m joining in – clearly this is not how I’m normally attired.’ The problem was that the first question everyone asks you at a do like that is, ‘What have you come as?’ and those two items don’t really provide an answer. A vampiric wizard? A magic vampire? A wizard going to the opera?
The next year, I eschewed the hat but slicked my hair and said I was a vampire. A vampire with normal teeth. The year after that I thought I’d have to do better and so I cut up a furry hot water bottle and sewed bits of it to the backs of fingerless gloves and other bits to a T-shirt. No one got that I was a werewolf, even though I’d put fake blood round my mouth.
‘You just look like a normal bloke who’s trailing fluff everywhere,’ someone said.
Why are the British so comfortable with this extroverted form of social event? What happens to our trademark repression when an accountant and his wife cheerfully get into a cab dressed as Sylvester and Tweetie Pie? What is it that makes an otherwise inoffensive man happy to go to a social event wearing round glasses, a false beard and sporting a stethoscope so that he can spend all night saying ‘Yes, Shipman’ in answer to appalled gazes?
And when did it start? To my eyes, before about 1950 most people were wearing fancy dress anyway. What on earth was a Restoration-era costume party like? Could a gentleman be persuaded to remove his ridiculous three-foot wig before donning the comparatively conservative horned Viking helmet? (I know, before you balk, that the Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets, but I can’t help feeling that’s their mistake, not ours.)
What does the Queen go as, when she’s asked to a fancy dress party? That must happen all the time – aristocrats love masked balls and other eccentric events that show breeding and conceal inbreeding. But she’s got a problem. She’s basically in fancy dress her whole life. She has to go to everything as the Queen. On a normal day, she’ll be head to toe in canary yellow, salmon pink or frog green and, if she’s opening Parliament, she’ll be wearing a sparkly dress and a crown. Like me, she seems perfectly comfortable wearing weird outfits for work. But, if the footage of her from Millennium night, awkwardly holding hands with Tony Blair while singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, is anything to go by, she finds it difficult to let her hair down at parties, which is also like me.
Where we differ, and where our Millennium nights differ, is that I didn’t light a beacon, then cruise down the Thames to the sound of a 21-gun salute en route to a party at the Dome. I didn’t watch 400 carnival performers do whatever carnival performers do (which is whinge about hamstring