Ms Baroque does it again

Last night I went to a party. Hurrah! It was the first proper party I've been invited to since July, and thrillingly it was only in Finsbury Park, so I could even rely on getting a cab back. IIt was also the first christmas party of the season... who could resist.

I've been very, overwhelmingly, baroquely, weirdly tired all week.* No; for weeks and months now. I thought I might be too tired to go to the party, but it was being given by some work colleagues, and it was on a theme of "Hollywood" - a badly-needed chance to glam it up, in other words - and it is my "weekend off", so what luck! And I do believe in the rule that if you're tired you need to just get out and get the juices flowing. It's not as if I hadn't just spent a solid week lying on the couch with my eyes closed.

On Friday while I was still at work Little Mlle Baroque rings and says, "Are you going to be in tonight?" Um, ye-es... life's not that thrilling just yet... "Good," she says. "Can I come round and get nit-combed?" So she arrived at Baroque Mansions, instead of going to her dad's, which meant I was once again in Morrisons thinking about dinner, and then she had a bath while the spuds cooked and then we had the nit-fest, and by then it was so late she just stayed. Saturday was the usual exotic round of cleaner, errands, shopping in the Narrow Way with my best friend (we do such fun things together!) and laundry-sorting. Mlle B was here with her friend Kitty till so late that I ended up taking them all the way to Kitty's on the bus rather than let them go alone.

By the time I got back home I had something like an hour to have a bath and get ready for this party, so I threw on some sparkly earrings, red lippy and my lovely black heels from Office, straightened the crucial front bit of my hair, and went in turned-up jeans & a purple lace shirt. I had to do my make up in the cab, in the pitch black, trying to see by the streetlights as they whizzed past. The cabby was laughing himself sick (& the maquillage was impeccable).

Hollywood! People do make such an effort, they do dress up and it was fabulous. I'm serious: there were girls there who'd spent the afternoon in the hairdressers, including one in a beautiful spotty dress with a veiled hat and a Marcel wave! Marilyn was there, Jay Gatsby, Sky Masterson, Columbo, a porn star from the seventies, a few starlets in LBD's and big sunglasses, someone in gold sequins and someone (more futuristic) in eighties silver sequins. I passed myself off as Courtney Love with dyed dark hair.

All was well until 2am, when my cab arrived. I was fine at the top of the stairs; it was only about six steps from the bottom that the trouble started. The staircase in my colleague's flat goes straight down, steeply, but with an odd hiatus in the proceedings. I can't call it a typical landing (as indeed I did not have a typical landing at the bottom of it), because it doesn't have a turn; it just stops being stairs for three feet, and then suddenly starts being stairs again just when - if it's 2am and you've been drinking all night and you're in 4in heels - you least expect it. Honestly, I don't think it was the heels. I think I just didn't see the six bottom steps. I'd have fallen even in trainers.

So there I am, lying at the bottom of these stripped-pine stairs with blood dripping onto my jeans and the stripped-pine floor, and people suddenly appear all over me, taking my shoes off, helping me back up, cosseting me with ice & feeling the top of my head for bumps... The cab is sent away, I'm told to stay a while to make sure I don't start raving insensibly, and Nicola in the gold sequins makes so many jokes that I keep laughing which just makes my mouth bleed even more. Dear me. I eventually manage to get another cab, get home at 4am, and wake up at noon with a fat, split lip and bruises coming up all over me. Even my shoulder. Who ever has a bruise on their shoulder??

At least this time I can say I was pretending to be Courtney Love. At least this time I wasn't in Somerfield's! But I shall now endeavour not to fall over any more.

And after a quiet day today, I can go to work tomorrow and get quietly back to just being tired all the time.

* note from the future: this turns out to have been the gall stones! Who knew.