Last year, to celebrate my unemployment, Lauren and I had a New Year’s Day afternoon social, and it was a lot of fun, so we did it again this year, and I think we’ll go on doing it. The refreshments are those listed above, plus hot lentil soup and cheeses and dips, and we didn’t offer desserts but a few of the guests turned up with ’em and they got snaffled, so I guess we should in future. As for champagne, we find that the Mumm Cordon Rouge hits a good price-performance point. The gazpacho (improvised by Lauren) was just stupendous, got raves all around. The kids get sent upstairs where there are lots of toys and intermittent supervision. We had one injury—somehow they managed to pull down a curtain and the rod hit little Joe on the head, nothing serious but it was kind of scary when he came downstairs with bright red blood running down the side of his neck. Oh, and someone broke the antenna off the toy-racecar remote, and Phil Mansfield disassembled it on the spot and jacked in a new antenna made out of the wire off a champagne cork, it worked fine, is that stylish or what? The crowd included VCs, geeks, businesspeople, neighbours, parents of the kid’s playmates, and miscellaneous old friends. The thirty or forty people who dropped by included only one other blogger, as far as I know, and very few people who read ongoing; an indication, were any needed, that this public-voice thing is in its early days. Plus, Adam dropped off a mix disk labeled “CTI/Kudu (& Others)” which was just ultrasuede, luscious Boogie Nights Seventies organ funk. Same time next year.
