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SUMMER PARTIES

WE ARE officially into summer party season. Don’t worry, I don’t really know what that means either.

If you’re Grayson Perry and Paloma Faith, probably a lively chat about colour clashing at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition soirée. For the rest of us, maybe tepid rosé in a friend’s garden? Perhaps with a barbecue, served three hours later than billed.

I sometimes wonder if I enjoy having given a party more than the event itself. Certainly, I find the immediate run-up a nightmare. I’m in the thick of it at the moment: the book festival I co-founded happens this Friday and Saturday.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway ‘is always giving parties to cover the silence’. Her story takes place on a single summer’s day, June 13, 1923, and begins with socialite Clarissa Dalloway having resolved ‘she would buy the flowers herself’ (because a servant could do it instead, obviously). She dashes around London preparing for her party, her mind abuzz with memories, regrets and niggling worries.

Does Jay Gatsby entertain so lavishly to cover the silence or is it just to catch his first love Daisy’s attention? ‘There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the champagne and the stars,’ is how the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, introduces his wealthy neighbour.

One of the most memorable moments of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line Of Beauty, is when its young protagonist, Nick Guest, dances with Mrs Thatcher. He is high on drugs at the time.

The scene takes place in 1986 at the 25th wedding anniversary party of the super-rich Feddens, who Nick lodges with in Notting Hill — at the heart of their family, though never part of it. You get better at knowing when to leave a party as you get older — at even avoiding a hangover to savour the morning after.

Greenwich Book Festival runs from June 15-16 greenwichbookfest.com