When I was a teenager I waitressed at fancy house parties. I had to wear a white shirt and a black pencil skirt and sometimes I’d add a swipe of frosted pink lipstick as a nod to the occasion. It was the only time in my whole life I wore a pencil skirt and sometimes the white shirt was actually my school shirt. Us party waitresses wore sensible black shoes and 10 denier tights. It was my first experience of any kind of denier. These days I’m strictly a 100 denier woman.
It was the 1980s and people in big houses in Dalkey and Killiney regularly threw extravagant shindigs where 16-year-old girls like me wandered around serving tiny vol au vents and exotic dishes involving avocado. Us waitresses were the invisible girls. People mostly ignored you, kept on talking over your head, as they swiped the canapes – I felt five years older just by learning how to pronounce that word – off the silver trays. The women were all mesmerising in clouds of oppressive perfume and painful looking shoes, the men were all wearing, or so it seemed to me, the exact same suit and having the same conversation. Golf featured an awful lot.
I loved those gigs. Didn’t mind being an invisible girl. It was the beginning of my fascination with posh houses and the way rich people live. I sometimes go to parties like this now as a guest and I am always over-the-top nice to the people serving the mini-vol au vents. Because it’s a strange kind of gig really from the other side of the silver tray. You are at a party but you are not really invited. You are mingling with the throng, but you are not supposed to properly mingle. You can speak, but only to say “would you like some skewers of Wicklow lamb?”. You are an outsider on the inside of a party. You are only there to serve. But serving can be its own kind of fun.
I don’t think I was particularly good at it, mind you. In the kitchen, the backstage of the party, where the food was loaded onto the trays, I got caught a few times “tasting” the canapes. Sometimes I’d be serving wine and I’d accidentally slosh it over the guests. Some of the grown-ups were kind about it and some of them complained loudly to my boss. But the thing I loved most about those parties was checking out the downstairs toilet. The people at the parties called it the downstairs loo. I couldn’t bring myself to use that word. Still can’t.
A second toilet. Talk about luxury. When you grow up, as most of us did, in a house where it’s a constant battle to get inside the bathroom the idea that you’d have a choice of toilets was very cheering. It was miles better than the sparkling chandeliers in the hall and the tennis courts you could glimpse at the far end of the massive back gardens. And the thing about these toilets was that they had stuff in them. Stuff apart from Domestos, I mean, or a rapidly dwindling bar of cheap soap which was all you’d find in the toilet at home. They had books in the toilet, as though this were a place to stretch out and contemplate life instead of just a transient room, a place to get in and out of at top-speed due to the irate banging on the door that started before you’d even sat down.
They had photographs on the walls in these “downstairs loos”. One party host had pictures of himself with all sorts of famous people. Chris de Burgh featured prominently. This was where the hosts put their awards and framed certificates. Boasting gets diluted when it’s done in the confines of the “downstairs loo”. It says you don’t take this achievement stuff too seriously, but, at the same time you’d like your guests to know all about it.
I have a downstairs toilet myself now I'm deeply proud to say. But there's nothing in it except mosaic tiles, liquid soap and toilet paper there. I am jealous of the style of the downstairs facilities of some of my friends. One of them has a copy of the Good Friday Agreement signed by all the participants on the wall. Another friend has a Time magazine cover featuring Columbo and some original art from Viz. This same friend has books in there too but only of a certain genre. One of his unassailable life mantras is: "There should only be frivolous books in the jacks". I've since developed an urgent need to decorate my downstairs toilet. It seems to me it's the next step up from actually owning a downstairs toilet.
Now, where did I put that award?
roisin@irishtimes.com