Parents! It’s New Year’s Eve! Let’s party | Eva Wiseman

There’s only one way for parents to have a proper old-fashioned celebration on New Year’s Eve – and that’s to send the kids away. Here’s the plan…

Here’s an idea: a New Year’s Eve camp for the children of parents who still love a party. Not just drinks, a dinner, but a party party, you know, a thing that starts gently with a plastic glass and chatter about school catchments and then joyfully descends.

A New Year’s Eve camp that starts today, lunchtime, where children collect by the campfire in full excitement and coats, and their parents, vibrating with guilt, cover them with weighted kisses before dashing off to shave their legs and put a record on. The camp could be in Elstree. Somewhere like Elstree. Somewhere suitably green and anonymous, but accessible by motorway. The children would have structured play for the first two hours, while parents made their ways home, relaxing a little more at every petrol station. And they’d get home, rushing now, steaming up the bathroom, a spritz of something citric maybe, the door to the kids’ room slightly ajar, its contents of Stickle Bricks and puddled tights like a conquered landscape. The music is important, the kitchen Sonos pumping out songs that remind them how to be the people they were when they met, with ambition and mopeds and all their hair. At some point they close the kids’ room door.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2BYYfuQ