The other night, my friends Gerry and Elish threw a party. It was a proper old-fashioned hooley over the St Brigid’s bank holiday weekend with our teenage children pressed into service making negronis and gin and tonics. They earned a hefty wedge from the tip jar and learned vital life skills at the same time. There were also quality party pieces from the youngs. Gerry and Elish, proficient in their respective fields of saxophone-playing and belly-dancing, have standards. Nobody was being let loose with a tin whistle. The teenagers, on a break from being drink-servers, performed The Schuyler Sisters from the musical Hamilton, complete with rapping and buckets of sass. We hold these truths to be self-evident: the kids are all right.
Naturally, the food at the party was also top notch. Writer and chef Gerry goes by the business moniker Breadman Walking, so you know you’ll always get a decent nosebag when he’s in charge of the vittles. At this party he outdid himself with three types of home-made focaccia, a trough of coleslaw and a giant porchetta which took two days to prepare. The pork belly and loin had been trussed up “tighter than a Bridgerton bodice” and treated to a garlicky massage with rosemary, parsley and thyme, fennel seed, Maldon salt and peppercorns. He also made an industrial-sized trifle, and there were plastic takeaway tubs for next-day Bank Holiday Breakfast Trifle. You never go hungry or bored with a friend like Gerry.
My friends thought that, it being a holiday, half the people they asked would be away – but they made the mistake of mentioning porchetta and trifle in the invite. At the peak of the party there were 50 or 60 people mingling around their lovely terraced home.
I knew there would be serious mingling because that’s what parties are, minglefests, but on arrival I also noticed the hosts had rented some of those stand-up mingling yokes from a catering company – the kind of things that strike fear in me. The idea is you congregate around the stand-up circular mingling yokes, with your negroni or in my case a Blood Orange San Pellegrino, talking to people, before moving on to the adjacent mingling yoke to chat to more people.
‘The stand-up mingle is a social minefield, so I play it safe, these days’
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I’ve no problem with mingling. I love a good mingle. But what I like most these days is a prolonged sit-down mingle.
The stand-up mingle is too overwhelming to sustain. In a stand-up mingle, surrounded by other stand-up minglers, there’s always the worry you’re not mingling enough. When do you move on to the next mingle? How to extricate yourself from a mingle that has gone on too long? The stand-up mingle is a social minefield, I’ve realised with age, so I play it safe, these days, when it comes to mingling.
The sit-down mingle serves two purposes. You get to eat your porchetta, focaccia, coleslaw and trifle sitting down, which is a joy. And you never know who you might end up mingling with, the sit-down mingle being more of a lottery than the stand-up version
I did indulge in a bit of stand-up mingling at the beginning of the night. You have to, for appearance’s sake. You can’t go straight to sit-down mingling at a party unless you have actual mobility issues, is the unspoken rule. So at first I mingled standing up, and chatted with lovely people I hadn’t seen for a while. If I hadn’t seen them since I was diagnosed with cancer, the first bit of mingle content was inevitably about that.
I was grateful to one fellow mingler whom I’d met at another party previously where we’d already had the cancer conversation. When he brought the subject up, he quickly remembered “ah sure we did all that last time”, and we moved on to another much more interesting subject.
Soon though, I found myself a comfy spot on a sofa and began my extended sit-down mingle session. The sit-down mingle serves two purposes. You get to eat your porchetta, focaccia, coleslaw and trifle sitting down, which is a joy. And you never know who you might end up mingling with, the sit-down mingle being more of a lottery than the stand-up version.
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Some people might say that sit-down mingling is, by its sedentary nature, not mingling at all, but there were plenty of comings and goings and belly laughs around the seating area. On the downside, you do miss the chats with certain people. The committed stand-up minglers and the sneaky fag merchants mingling outside never go near the comfy chairs, so it’s unlikely your paths will cross at a party. This is the sacrifice the sit-down mingler makes.
More than three decades ago I worked in the now long-defunct Sunday Tribune, my first proper journalism job. I went in for one week of work experience, but then just kept turning up. These were the days before swipe cards. You could just walk into the first-floor newspaper office on Dublin’s Lower Baggot Street, which famously used to be the nightclub Zhivago – “where love stories begin”. So I kept going in and writing articles, until eventually they started paying me. This was a bonus because I’d have done it for nothing, so thrilled was I to be sharing the same air as writers Nell McCafferty, Ann Marie Hourihane and Susan McKay.
Back then, my friend Paul had rhyming nicknames for certain colleagues. I’d be risking legal letters if I told you some of them, but I can share mine. It was Róisín Ingle, likes to mingle. It still works, only with a tweak: Róisín Ingle, likes to mingle, sitting down on a really comfy chair.
