After two months of this, my constant attention whoring paid off and I was afforded a ticket to “THE SNOW BALL”. Whatever urbandictionary.com might say, the snowball is not a disgusting sexual act. In fact it is quite the opposite. As the official website puts it – it is “the final date of the year in the London Debutantes Season diary” the most glamorous and festive ball of the year, organised by the crème de la crème of the London social scene to raise money for charity, filled with celebrities like Des Lynam (I think he’s a footballer or something) and royalty like the Queen of Oman (?). Thinks about that. Picture it in your head. Now imagine someone like little old me there. Just imagine it. CRAZY EH. What an insane mismatch of social classes there would be! It’d be like something out of the OC. And in this case, I’d be Ryan and not Seth for once, a crazy kid from the wrong side of the tracks, ready to bloody some noses and upset the social order with my wild and rebellious ways! Just imagine that. AND NOW STOP IMAGINING BECAUSE IT WAS A REALITY.
I went up to London deciding that I would act like a gentleman and fit in with the Aristocracy that I was soon to be joining. The essential plan was to be effortlessly charming for the entire night, woo some kind of beautiful heiress and live as a Kept Man for the rest of my life, lounging voluptuously from a velveteen pouf and eating grapes peeled on the thighs of virgins or something. Therefore I got into character by acting as chivalrously as I could. I stopped to let a woman get on the train before me (and she wasn’t really even that hot so it was an entirely selfless act on my part). When I was listening to my iPod, a song by Eminem featuring extremely anti-female lyrics came on and I skipped song without even a thought. And when I was sitting on the train, this heavily pregnant Chinese woman hobbled on. Everybody else stared at her blankly and didn’t get off their seats, so I, after a few seconds of meditation, jumped up and gave her my seat. I settled back on my haunches with a very satisfied ‘Fuck the rest of you, I am going to motherfucking heaven’ expression on my face. I didn’t have to say anything but they knew that I was the moral victor. The Chinese woman’s husband then came on with a massive pram that crushed everyone else on the train and caused three other people to stand up. Then the Chinese woman proceeded to do scratch cards for the entire journey. Seriously she must have done seven or eight scratch cards. Frankly I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing and so I gave up being chivalric. I mean there was a big muddy puddle on the ground outside the station and there was a woman about to cross it I didn’t even take off my jacket and cover the puddle with it to stop her spoiling her shoes. In fact I pushed her into the puddle and then threw my sandwich at her before running away.
Anyway I met up with Matt and Max and changed into my tux. I’m not going to lie, I looked the sharpest of all three of us – Max had just come out of mouth surgery and so half of his face was yellow, and Matt had brought the wrong suit, which was just half a size too big, something that he complained about for the entire journey to the hotel. THE HOTEL oh yeah. We were worrying that we wouldn’t be able to find it, but such hopes were entirely unfounded when we got off the train. It was lit with so many lights that I’m fairly sure that I could have seen it from space (had I happened to be in space and looking for a hotel). It was also massive – the size of an entire city block, and when you looked at it from the bottom you couldn’t see the top. I would say that it was roughly the same size as my ego although in all fairness my ego is probably a bit bigger.
We went in and as soon as we were inside, I knew that I would never have to put any effort into anything I ever did again. I had Made It. The place was a palace. Plush velvet carpet for as far as the eye could see leading to beautiful walls covered with gilded mirrors, magnificent flower arrangements, gorgeous portraits and a fire extinguisher. Our eyes as wide as saucers, we wandered into the main hall area to see a bravura crush of men in suits and women in sparkly dresses who toasted and serenaded each other with the songs of sirens. Waiters darted about giving out glasses of pomegranate champagne (I had a glass) and miniature sausages and delicious little toasted cheese things that had ham in them (jewish Max had two of these before I pointed out the pork content). Minocher, who was wearing a pair of dashing tartan trousers, suddenly rolled up and leapt onto me. I peeled away and sauntered through this glen of beautiful people, feeling like a hobbit in the land of the elves, and I suddenly realised how many gorgeous girls there were. Seriously there was TALENT there. One of them caught my stare and I swear to god there was a quarter of a second when our eyes locked and the chemistry between us was enough to set fire to Belgium. Unfortunately I went off her almost immediately when I noticed that her nose was well ugly and bumpy and flat, like someone has hit her in the face with a shovel and then I was distracted by an old man who was WEARING A MONOCLE NON-IRONICALLY and that promising love affair was vanquished. As I walked through, I realised that I, with my firestarting political opinions and my working class ethic, had nothing in common with many of these people. What knew I of diamond mines and polo? Nothing! I knew of simple fare, like coal mining and digging trenches in the hot hot sun, all day long. I started to feel smaller and smaller and more out of place and when I reached the end of the hall I was all hunched up like a little Gollum type freak. I looked left and right. Where were my friends? They were gone, replaced by a girl with a giant shaggy head of hair, clad in diamonds and a figure wearing tartan trousers who was not Mino but a man with wrinkly ears. I had a headache.
I took another glass of champagne. Then a man started to play the bagpipes and the Head Matriarch (this TERRIFYING woman who looked a bit like The Wise Owl from Winnie The Pooh) told us all to go into the dining hall. Dazed and confused, I followed the crowd and bumped into some other Balliolites.
We went into the dining hall, through a passageway filled with fake snow (I won’t lie, I stole a handful later on the evening and was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t even snow, just cocaine). I say dining hall, I mean DINING PALACE. The tables were all set up fancy with these giant feathers and sparkly cutlery. The sense of isolation and confusion that had been engendered by the champagne reception was increased when I found that I had been assigned a seat far away from the rest of the gang. A tear ran down my cheek as Matt and Max floated off, balloonlike, to the other side of the hall as I was trapped in one corner, surrounded by people that I didn’t know.
We all know me, I’m a touchy and confrontational person and I dislike meeting new people in person. I find the effort actually maintaining a conversation in real life both painful and boring and I would much rather either talk in a series of internet-MEME style clichés such repeating ‘no your mum’ to whatever the previous person has said, or just making up shit about how I played Optimus Prime’s stunt double in Transformers, or sit in stony content silence [this is probably why I’m not very good at speed dating]. Therefore, the idea of having to actually talk to people I didn’t know for long periods of time was nerve racking and so I downed my champagne and kind of slumped in the chair.
My two neighbours were these girls. They were actually alright looking and for a few seconds I perked up, fiddled with my bow tie, played with my cufflinks and sat up straight. They proceeded to ignore me for three solid minutes, until one of them swung round violently. “Hi I’m Sizzy,” she said enthusiastically. She had one of those voices like Peaches Geldof probably has. I stared blankly at her and then blindly gesticulated at my name card. I was so impressed by my smoothness that I made a mental note to take up self-harming when I got home. And I had some wine. “… Thomas?” she asked.
“Um… yes.”
We got chatting. It was evident that about thirty seconds into the conversation, she had come to the conclusion that I was a: A complete social retard, and b: A little small-time Englander who was unused to the Big City Lights. To be fair, I did start coughing halfway through an anecdote about working in a wine shop and I nearly choked on my own tongue. Then she said that she had a boyfriend who was an elite rower and I was like ‘forget you, clown’, and turned to talk to the other girl. I forget what her name was, I think it was Catherine or something, but for the purposes of this blog I will call her ‘blonde girl’.
She really wasn’t that much better than Sizzy, although she did have slightly more comic potential as she said ‘Top Form’ a lot. The first time she said it I started laughing and then I realised that she was being serious so I put on a straight face. And had some wine. It was like:
Me: I’m going to Oxford
Her: Oh, Top Form Top Form, what are you studying.
Me: English.
Her: Top Form.
Me: *Has some wine*
It was amazing, especially as she seemed to think that I was some kind of Wild Boy, a bit of rough from the country who spent his days shooting policemen and sniffing glue with Elizabeth Barret Browning. She actually said ‘It’s not often that we see someone outside of our social sphere’ and then looked at me as though I was probably about to start a brawl. I shrunk beneath their gaze and drank some wine. I had a nagging feeling like both of them were mildly condescending me, entertaining me like some kind of exotic zoo pet. Then Blonde One said that she had a boyfriend so I was like ‘forget you, clown’ and turned back to Sizzy, before remembering that she had a boyfriend too, so I just had some wine instead in the brief interlude while both girls were being chatted up by boys from Eton. The waiter game round and topped up my glass, so I had some more wine.
The problem was that there were these little serving imps that kept going round the table in circles filling up the glasses of wine as soon as they were drunk. I was unaware that there wasn’t some kind of implicit challenge and frankly I don’t drink wine that often. This I would class as ‘the beginning of the end’.
I had some more wine when the first course arrived. It was a long square plate that had the following things on it:
I stared blankly at it, and then gingerly stabbed the spinach with my fork. I raised it to my mouth and it fell off the fork and left a greasy stain on the tablecloth. I raised my eyes to see both Sizzy and Blonde One staring at me with what can only be described as pity in their eyes. I thought about it, realised there was no way to recover, then slowly stabbed the spinach again, placed it back on the plate, put my fork down, crossed my hands in my lap, and stared into the middle distance. Then I had some wine. I got hungry again and ate the rest of the food which was ok. However the ‘eating of the rest of the food’ was tempered with ‘drinking almost constantly from the magical wine glass’. I felt a bit like Odin in that legend when he’s drinking from what he thinks is a beer horn but it’s actually the sea and he can never empty it, except instead of partially draining the ocean and thus inadvertantly causing the tides, and learning an important life lesson, I simply failed to get to the bottom of the wine glass and instead got utterly smashed.
I honestly can’t remember the last two and a half hours of the ball and when I came to, I wasn’t lounging voluptuously from a velveteen pouf and eating grapes peeled on the thighs of virgins. I was sprawled sideways across Max’s bedroom floor in, my tongue swollen up to four times its usual size, in an agony of remorse that took an entire week to fade away. I was also topless. Apparently during those two mysterious hours hours, amongst other things, I pushed a woman off of an auctioned motorcycle and nearly got Matt beaten up by a South African rugby player before falling down the stairs. Several of my friends refused to speak to me for several days after the event. ☹
That was my entry into civilised society. How do you think I did?
I don’t think that I’ll be invited back.
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