It’s been a while since I had such a straight-up, unabashed, pure-and-simple really good night in with friends. Last night I had one and it was one of the most simplistically wonderful things that I’ve experienced for a while.
Having decided rather last minute that the best way to combat our household’s fear and loathing of fireworks, K and I set about recruiting the usual gang of easily-entertained appendages to join in our frivolities. We also took the opportunity to finally go out and splash a bit of cash on the Scene It board game I’ve wanted for a while.
The whole evening was really terribly refined, in a loud and rambunctious kind of way – no alcohol, no TV, just a group of friends laughing, chatting and playing games, sometimes all at once, sometimes in a strange mish-mash of the three.
Whatever we were doing, though, it was just lovely to have the guys round and to be enjoying myself without feeling totally exhausted. I’d had quite a quiet day, keeping myself in check and not getting too over-excited about things so that I had the strength to make the most of the evening and it really paid off. The all eventually left around 1am and I was still feeling really good – a bit of a rarity for me.
We got through games of Scene It, Scattegories and Simpson’s Monopoly, the last of which having the bizarre novelty of now being a cash-less game. Each player gets a credit-card, which is inserted into a little electronic calculator to add or remove money from the account. It’s a great idea, but sadly doesn’t really work in practice. The novelty wears off after about 5 minutes, by which point you’ve realised that every transaction takes 5 times as long as it did with cash and that it’s now impossible to a) know how much you’ve got in the bank without having to ask for the machine to check and b) know how much everyone else is stock-piling to help make those cash-rich deals to the hard-up players.
It was just such a great night and we all had a great time. I honestly don’t think any of us noticed the lack of alcohol, which goes a long way to proving my long-held belief about having more fun without it than with it. I won’t lose myself in an anti-alcohol diatribe here (because you don’t want to hear it anyway), but suffice it to say that it wasn’t until K pointed out the party’s dryness the next day that it even crossed my mind.