By four o'clock on Saturday there were nineteen people in a room that holds about eight, and someone had put a full bowl of crisps on the stairs. It was Easter Saturday, bright and breezy, and after eleven weeks in the house we had decided it was time to show people what we'd done to it. Kev and Pauline arrived at twenty to two, which is early even by Kev's standards. Kev brought a tool bag in case anything needed tightening.
The £74 menu
Thirty-one people came and went between two o'clock and twenty to eleven. The food budget was £74, which works out at £2.39 a head, and it went on a very large pot of chilli (£29), bread rolls and butter (£12), crisps, dips and cheese (£19), and fruit, salad and milk for the tea and coffee (£14). Most of it came from Aldi on Friday evening. I cooked the chilli that night in the biggest pot we own, which is also the only big pot we own, and the kitchen smelled of cumin until Tuesday.
Pauline brought a tray of flapjack that was gone in twenty minutes. Henderson's relish went on the table next to the chilli, and the Chesterfield contingent eyed the bottle like a dare. My sister Ellie, home from Leeds for Easter, took charge of the playlist and then, without being asked, of the crisps. Drinks were bring-a-bottle, which everyone did, so we now own eleven bottles of wine and no wine rack.
Chairs, coats and one loo
Maureen lent us four folding chairs and then sat in the best one for an hour and a half with a plate under foil on her knee. Jas brought over six more, along with Hannah and Ruby, and Ruby ate a bread roll in the garden and nothing else. The garden steps turned out to be a seating plan: stone is cold, but a coat folded under you fixes that. The back room became the coat pile, and by seven the sofa bed had vanished under a dune of jackets from which Dan had to excavate his own.
We have one loo, in a bathroom that is still peach. The queue started on the landing by half past four and ran down the stairs, past the creaky board. Dan, coming out, said it was like visiting a museum of 1992. Meanwhile Kev had found the new consumer unit under the stairs and was inspecting it with the quiet reverence of a man at a cheese counter, so the queue also had to dodge him. A few of Matt's colleagues went up the garden to look at his workbench in the shed. They said "very tidy" in the tone people use for a baby they are not sure about.
Maureen looked round the front room, where we stripped the woodchip in February and March, and said, "Ron always said magnolia never offended anybody." The walls are not magnolia. I decided to take it as a compliment.
What we'd change
Paper plates, for a start, and a plan for the bins. We have six plates of our own, borrowed ten from Jas, and by six o'clock were serving flapjack on kitchen roll. The black bin was full by seven. The brown bin took forty-odd bottles and cans and then sulked. There is no dishwasher, so Pauline, my mum and I washed up until about eleven, which felt less like a party and more like a shift. Next time I would ask whoever brings wine to take the empty bottle home with them, and I would decide who is doing the washing-up before anyone arrives.
At about half past ten, with the last six people on the garden steps in their coats, Matt said, "We should do this every year." I said we would see after the washing-up. On Sunday morning Maureen knocked to say she had left her plate behind, and that it was the best party on the hill since the street party for the Jubilee in 1977. I told her that was a high bar. She said she knew.
