the new party bores

THE HOT DIVORCEE
Francesca is a “moveable feast”, depending on where she is in the world — her house in Mayfair, her condo on Mulholland Drive, her villa in Le Lavandou. But she loves parties! Day people are simply not as amusing as night people. The doorbell rings and a pale young man staggers in clutching a can of Red Stripe. “Artists,” she sighs. “So dangerous. So alive!”

Francesca worries that she might have overdone the skull trend in the Mayfair mansion: it’s stuffed with skull scarves, paintings and sculptures. Luckily, her signature style stands out even more: huge sunglasses, a sparkly coat, platform shoes and a massive vagina dentata ring in fossilised walrus teeth by Lenny Kravitz’s jeweller. And a BlackBerry stuck to her face. She has three — one for each country.

Who can it be this time? Her good friend Christian Louboutin? Her best friend, the interior decorator on her payroll? Or maybe her best, best friend, Slash from — Arrowsmith, is it? She hopes it’s that kid she met in Topshop who is an absolute genius. Sort of prophetic, actually.

The call is interrupted by the arrival of a girl who shares the same architect. (Her female friends are all “girls”, even though, like Francesca, many of them will never see 40 again.)

As the house fills up, Francesca talks about her recent trip to Bali, her tarot lessons and how she hopes the recession will make people be more creative and do things like mend a kimono they love, design their own evening wear.

When everybody has left, she resolves for the second time that month to change her will. Those bloody yobbos think she won’t notice when they steal Veuve Clicquot from her fridge. Maybe she should marry an art collector so they can collect together, although it suddenly strikes her that she should never have divorced her third husband. She really liked him. She starts to cry when she sees what time it is: 2am and she has to get up in two hours’ time to fly to Miami.


THE LATE-START DRUGGIE
Alex spent his youth racking up a huge property portfolio. He never touched drugs — said they were for losers. But then, one night, when he was 36, a beautiful girl whispered “Om shanti” as she offered him a bong at a party.

Soon, Alex was talking nonsense to cab drivers at six in the morning all over London. “It’s like, we’ve got a connection, me and you... yeah?” The cab drivers were fascinated by what he said. He learnt many new things in the space of a few weeks: to tie his hair back when leaning over a mirror, to hold the joint away from his fine-gauge knits when he was smoking.

His new clubbing buddy — a former squaddie, homophobe fascist transformed overnight into a nice person by smoking spliff — turned him on to orchid feed (a new form of liquid ecstasy you could get over the internet because it claimed to be plant food). Alex said it was fantastic, that it made you feel like you wanted to do it with a donkey.

His wife started to nag him about how he was never around for the kids any more, but Alex had others to turn to. One night, he was having another in-depth conversation with one of his cabbie friends about his conspiracy theory that traffic lights stay red longer at night than they do in the day, when the cabbie looked in the rear-view mirror and said: “You’re talking shit, mate.” Fortunately, Alex didn’t remember any of this the next day.


THE ECO-BORE
Maisy’s iPhone screen is smeared with threads of sustainable Alaskan salmon. “You see?” she says, showing the handsome man a photograph of the lettuce she’s growing in her window box. “It’s not exactly going to save the world. But, you know, it sort of cuts down on consumption.”

Maisy doesn’t look like a tree-hugger. When she gets her clothes from those Swap-a-Rama events, she always picks up the tight-cut jersey dresses, as opposed to the matted lamb’s-wool jumpers. At parties, she tries to be mellow about the whole eco thing. She mentions a couple of Freegans she knows, that she was once macrobiotic for a year, that she thinks Alex James’s project to make cheese out of Prince Charles’s milk is really cool.

And she likes to keep a sense of humour about her. “I drive a Prius — or a Pious, as I like to call it.” Only then does she go in with her line about how, as a PR for a green fashion label, she is trying to “turn corporate social responsibility sexy”.

When the handsome man is distracted by a nearby conversation about Rumer Willis’s 90210 lesbian kiss, Maisy sighs. Most men she meets think that being green means that you don’t binge drink, smoke, eat junk food, have multiple sexual partners, waste money on designer clothes, get fat or read celeb magazines. And that’s just not true. Sometimes she glances guiltily at the OK! cover in the supermarket-checkout queue.

She has a dream of living in the countryside with her boyfriend and having kids. But he lives abroad and neither of them will fly, so things are looking a bit grim, actually. She can feel her face burning. She’s glad they don’t have those eco-light bulbs at this party. They make your skin look crap.

THE LOVELORN GAY BOY
James is 25 and looking for love. The only trouble is, every weekend down at Vauxhall, there are clubs with 2,000 Spanish men dancing with their tops off next to clubs with 3,000 Italian men dancing with their tops off, not to mention the dungeon venues and the saunas and that place where you’re only allowed in if you’re wearing a jockstrap and boots.

By Monday morning, James will be back at the office, regaling the girls with how he spent the weekend: “Bollocko on some balcony, drinking my weight in cheap vodka.”

By Monday afternoon, there’s a turn for the worse. “You lesbians are so lucky,” he’ll say to his best friend on the phone. “You can have relationships, but us gay boys can’t.”

The lesbians always set him up with U-G-L-Y. What a surprise. I mean, come on, his boyfriend has to have some hair and go to the gym at least a couple of times a week. He doesn’t mind old people per se, it’s just that they use the past tense all the time: “I used to go to Kinky Gerlinky,” and “I used to have some fab evenings with Derek Jarman.” So it’s back down the Old Bull & Bush. He spends the first half of the night slagging everyone off to his friend. At 4am, he panics and goes home with the ugliest man in the room.

MIDLIFE-CRISIS MUM
Help! Jackie has three children and a husband who is not treating her very well. Forty is a tricky age for a woman, because you could still jump ship and get a new man, whereas if you wait until you’re 45, it might be too late. Things are sort of going all right. Her husband says it’s cool if they have their own interests, and her parents don’t mind having the kids. She’s been to four festivals already this year.

You rarely see her out of skinny leather jackets and dagger heels now, and her post-promiscuity high — a mixture of panic, sexual satiety and “Ha! How about that then?” — looks better than any Botox (although, of course, she’s had a bit of that, too).

Her favourite thing is the way her friends look at her when her mobile starts ringing at 11pm, just as they are about to get a taxi home. “God, how glamorous — one hour’s sleep!” they cry when she tells them about last night’s adventure. She doesn’t describe the reality: a threesome with another woman and a South African banker whose body grossed her out but, well, he had some money. Her mind wasn’t really on the job. She kept thinking how she must remember to sew those name tags onto Tommy’s gym kit tomorrow. Then she wondered if she shouldn’t come off the antidepressants, because you only ever got 70% of an orgasm anyway.

The next morning, her husband decided she was having too much fun and told her he wanted a divorce, although her biggest concern was dropping the kids off at school without making eye contact with the mum she had found herself in bed with the previous night.

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