I recently read in Vogue that the best parties in London are no longer thrown by artists or pop stars, but by the new American ambassador and his wife in their official residence. At which I thought, bloody hell, the very idea of making champagne small talk with gurning Guantánamo apologists while men with machine guns hide in their bushes – no thanks. My second thought, coming in a smooth nanosecond after the first, was that I needed to get invited, immediately.
This is because I have suffered my whole life from a chronic case of Fomo, or fear of missing out. Even though I worked in Los Angeles for two years, interviewing celebrities, and was thus lucky enough to attend many such American parties, where the champagne is free and the opportunities for feelings of profound isolation, humiliation and unattractiveness are almost interminable. And where I once had a strange experience while at a very plush do, overlooking the skyline of Beverly Hills. A woman entered the ladies loos as I was leaving them, and seemed to be delighted by my face. She said a very excited “Hi!” and I said an excited “Hi!” back. The door swung behind us, she rushed to embrace me, and I felt instantly terrified.
Why? Because a) I had wet hands and didn’t know where to put them, having just washed them, and while I have never actually been into a toilet and peed directly on to them, there is always the fear that someone might think that this is why they are wet. And b) she was Jennifer Aniston. Who clearly thought I was someone else.
“Aaargh, oh God, I’m sorry!” she said, when she realised, and rushed past me to her actual friends. I stood there in the dark, rubbing my damp hands on my thighs like a pervert, racking my brains to think who in the A-list world could possibly look like me. Courteney Cox? Maggie Gyllenhaal? The dog out of Marley & Me?
Then there was the party at a private mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where the actor Jonah Hill seemed to like my English friend and chatted her up a bit, something we both found so exciting we were rendered mute. Understandably, he wandered off. Later on, she summoned up the courage to offer him her number, thinking maybe she’d find it easier to talk to him at another time. He replied that he didn’t have a phone. Which might have been OK, had their previous attempted chat not been all about a text message he was in the process of sending.
I once spent the whole night trying to stand eight feet in front of Robert Pattinson, so I could take a selfie with him in the background. By the time I had taken a mere 12 shots, trying to get my phone properly aligned, he had rumbled me and moved. Then the police arrived, and I nearly died of fright. It turned out to be a noise issue, but the fear of a restraining order is always with me.
Anyway. As luck would have it, I did wangle an invitation to the ambassador’s party, just last week. And it has ruined me. Because their house was not just full of old portraits but also contemporary art – big homoerotic tattooed nudes, bunches of enormous grapes, a wheel of leaves. And piles of ironic Ferrero Rochers on silver platters. The ambassador made a funny speech about how he used to make Belle And Sebastian mixtapes for his wife – yes, that sweetest and indiest of Scottish bands – in the hope that she would fall in love with him. And then Belle And Sebastian played! And the ambassador’s kids snuck downstairs and watched from their parents’ laps. Robert Peston, the BBC economics editor, got on stage and knew all the words, too. The actor Stanley Tucci leaned against a pillar and sighed.
We all danced in their sitting room until the early hours, even when the DJ unironically played Common People, twice. And at no point did it turn into Homeland – nobody came and bombed anything. So it turns out my stupid sodding Fomo is entirely justified. I can never enjoy a party as much as that again.
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