THIS weekend I'm gonna party like it's 2009. I'd party like it was 1999, as Prince and the Revolution suggested, but it was so long ago that I can hardly remember what it was like.
The partying I'll be doing this weekend doesn't involve any boozing, late nights, loose women or rock 'n' roll – sadly. No, my partying these days amounts to planning, organising and funding soirees to mark the occasions of our daughters' birthdays.
Unbelievably, and this really does take some getting used to, our youngest daughter, the baby of the family, the one who will always be the little one no matter how old we all get or how tall she grows – is seven this weekend. Seven? Seven!
It's true that kids keep you young, but as they shoot up millimetre by millimetre, minute by minute, day by day, they also make you feel that
little bit older – because while you might not think 2002 was that long ago (Beckham's penalty against Argentina and Ronaldinho lobbing Seaman from 35 yards in the World Cup feels like yesterday) it is as long as our youngest daughter has been alive.
As far as she's concerned 2002 is Year Zero. When I was a kid 2002 was three years AFTER Space 1999 – it was beyond the future. We'd all be flying around in spacecars, eating roast dinners in a pill, have machines doing all our work for us, enjoy so much leisure time that we wouldn't know what to do with it and energy would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth putting on a meter.
Of course, none of the above is true. The future isn't gleaming chrome with robots on hand to wipe your bum to the sound of a soaring string quartet. The future is exactly like it is now, apart from the fact you're that bit older and nothing works in quite the way it should.
Well our baby is that bit older – and because her first choice of camping was a bit of a no-no because of the chill spring winds – she decided she'd like to go bowling with just 11 of her closest friends.
Now it's become a bit of a tradition in our house that party invites are designed and printed by me – with our kids' heads Photoshopped on to whichever cartoon character, musician or film star is popular at the time.
This year (same as last year as it turns out) our little princess said she wanted to be Lola (off Charlie and Lola). And so there she was, jumping about on a space hopper with her smiling face where Lola's once was.
Once that was all done, the only thing left to do was to whittle the entire roll call of the register of our youngest's class down to a more manageable dozen.
Honestly, it was harder work and more stressful than planning the seating arrangements at a wedding. 'Ooh, if she comes I'll have to invite her, and I'm not inviting her because she didn't invite me to hers last time, and if I invite her I'll have to invite her brother, and she said she can't come because she's on holiday with her nana...'
Some people (women, mainly) maintain the most enjoyable part of going on a night out is the hours and hours and hours it takes to get tarted up, put on their glad rags, guzzle a bottle of wine, shout their heads off to the 'Mamma Mia!' soundtrack and make a night of it before they really make a night of it.
It's much the same process for kids and their parties – and we should know because between us we've run a grand total of 16 between us over the years. If our youngest has as much fun at her bowling party as she's had ordering me about then, quite frankly, I'll be amazed.
Some people might think it a tad extravagant in these austere, recession-hit times to hold a kid's birthday party in a neutral venue that will cost upwards of £100.
Why not host it at your house?
My response is this: are you on drugs? It works out a lot cheaper (not to mention quieter) to not have the party in your house. There's no clean-up involved and 12 seven-year-old girls have the capacity to create as much ear-splitting chaos as a G20 protest.
They can make as much noise and mess and create as much havoc as they feel like when they're bowling.
In fact, if they're a bit too quiet (fat chance), I'll tell them to make some more.
But, suffice to say, she is very, very, very, very excited about her birthday.
She's even got a little chart on her bedroom wall and ticks off the days until the big day itself.
The first thing we hear as her little eyes pop open in the morning is a little squeaky voice trilling across the landing 'five days til my birthday!'
Not surprisingly, she's made a list – and checked it twice – of presents she'd like.
The trusty Argos catalogue has been well thumbed, corners of pages turned over and potential targets marked. One of which is a cup cake maker – amazingly she didn't fancy a football.
