The best party ever?
Eight years ago I went to the best - and the worst - party I think I'll ever go to. Hard to imagine something so beautiful could, in fact, be one of the most painful evenings of my life. It was a small gathering, just my parents and me, together in a small space, holding hands, laughing, crying, reminiscing, deliberating. So much discussion with, in fact, so few words. We remembered family holidays - those camping trips in the 70's which were our own version of Emma Kennedy's The Tent, The Bucket and Me . My Dad would pack EVERYTHING into Mum's Mini, the tent taking up the whole boot, the car filled to the rafters with everything else. He would build me a seat on top of a few boxes and then pack the car around me! And we'd be off, 'up north' with several other families to a campsite (I use that term VERY loosely - my memory is that it was simply a field with one downpipe on the edge of a forest and near a VERY cold stream that we washed in - if w