As the festive season gets into full swing, Michael Croninremembers his party-going heyday
An address half-shouted in a pub: a friend of a friend of a friend is having a party. The chain letter of invitation, then the doubtful wandering through empty streets, wondering whether, if you rang the bell of number 86, out would tumble a flushed party-goer or a senior citizen in paisley pyjamas and tartan dressing gown. Wrong bell and you were back on the asphalt. Right bell and you smiled winningly at the unknown face at the door and moved into the stream of post-pub revellers pushing their way from one room to the next.
Pockets were patted desultorily for the holy grail of the party-goer: the bottle opener. A volunteer would be sent off to extract one from someone, somewhere. Open bottles were a mystery to all who drank from them. No one could tell how they had been opened. Where there were no openers, there were also no corkscrews. But there was always, mysteriously, a screwdriver.
A rough guide to parties. The front room was reserved for dancers. The stairs were generally monopolised by courting couples. Down in the basement kitchen the serious business of opinion was conducted in a thin mist of cigarette smoke. Around midnight the national question came stalking into the kitchen. In the back sittingroom the complex manoeuvres of longing were acted out in the slowly pulled cigarette, the steady gaze and the fumbled request for a light or a glass. Sometimes, such was the velocity of yearning that you risked all and coached your awkwardness into an imitation of studied cool. At other times, expectations floundered and the party became a sullen drinkfest, a series of melancholy swigs as your take on humanity darkened and you saw yourself as alone, bereaved, misunderstood, vowing that you would abandon the shallow vanities of the party life for a life of unexampled austerity. You would look with scorn on those who walked in the valley of merriment.
Upstairs, bedrooms were variously occupied - but not at a rate that would have interested the scandal sheets - the close, personal politics of friendships making indecent exposure the least-preferred option in the cautious card play of early adulthood.
In the dark days before wine columns, Blue Nun and Black Tower delivered nights of lukewarm sweetness and days of corrugated hangovers. For the larger purse, dogged by romantic ambition, there was Mateus Rosé. The soundtrack was appropriately classical as your mind projected an adman's images of lovers in boaters and willowy fabrics tumbling in poppy fields, the straw treasure trove of the picnic basket there to stave off the hunger pangs of post-coital exhaustion.
But Elvira Madigan had a hard time of it in a Ranelagh bedsit. A red plastic mug and a pilfered pint glass were not quite the goblets of the gods, and the wine, rather than being an elixir, turned you into a speechless pumpkin who could only drain the glass of gathering melancholy as you realised that the lovely Alice was already seeing someone from History.
As the years steal by, the invitations to parties are fewer, and you can no longer risk turning up at houses of people you don't know unless you want to find yourself keeping a garda company in the back of a squad car.
There are fewer people you do not know, and there is an ease in the routine of familiar conversation, as if new friendships were too exhausting even to contemplate. The foreign guests are asked "Where do you come from?" and "How long have you been in Ireland?" and "Do you like it here?" In the open-plan kitchen the property question has replaced the national question, and at midnight it is the phantom of the babysitter whose shadow lengthens over anxious parents. You worry now about where you put the car keys, not the bottle opener.
When the dancing starts, hesitantly, after the cans have been slowly sipped and the glasses carefully drained, it is more re-enactment than performance, a self-conscious acting out of a script you can only half-remember. Everybody laughs a lot, as if moving about on the lovingly sanded floor were a fancy-dress parade, each wearing the moves of another age in a carnival of recollection. Hope, or the memory of it, brings you back to the moment in youth when the party begins. To the desire for fortune to throw open her fingers and release the future from quarantine. Heading out of the house, around the corner and across the field to the excitement of the unknowable.
As night comes down, and the kitchens glow in the orderly minding of settled lives, a slight wind tugs at your heart, and you feel your fingers crinkle with the fizz of happiness. The rolling concrete is buoyant under your feet, a trampoline of expectation, each step to the party a step out of the dark wood of the everyday, out of the thickets of lessons, homework, exams, study, work. As you pace across the roads and through the playing fields the air seems a long caress from a life to come, the thinning traffic a quiet prelude to the boisterous promise of the night ahead. In that moment you are the darling of the streetlight, a message hurtling out into the spaces of all your tomorrows.
• Michael Cronin is director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University