New Year's Eve

Finally surfacing after New Years.

The WOHFTF crowd were having a New Years Eve fancy dress party and the theme was 'Song Title'. That sounds like a fantastic theme as there are thousands of options. Then the restrictions start kicking in - Fiona wanted to be more glamorous than last year so no 'Killer Queen' or 'Psycho Killer'. Neither of us wanted to be carrying around cardboard all night so most objects were out so no 'American Pie' or 'Left of Centre'. Fiona wouldn't dress in a school girls uniform for 'Presentation Boarder' because no one has heard of the Saw Doctors. Fiona decided she as going as an angel so I had to find her a song. She wasn't willing to black up for 'Angel of Harlem' and settled on Robbie's 'Angels' with the angel off the tree to go with her wings and halo. Then she noticed 'Blue Angel' by Marillion and thought that would mean she could wear her new jewellery and blue top. She wasn't listening when I explained what the song was about but we didn't expect to be singing it or even hearing it...

I had been swithering with a few ideas. But, primarily because I am lazy and didn't want to go to too much effort, decided on the 'Sweetest Thing' by U2, though it was a close thing with 'N17' by the Saw Doctors. My logic was I could simply list sugars or the distances off the road sign at that left turn in Claregalway.

Of course, it was a lot of effort. All I needed was to get a tee shirt and draw on it. But printing would be better, so all I needed was to get iron on transfers. I actually got them with little effort but they don't work on laser printers, which naturally is what I have. But Fiona has an inkjet. But wasn't that not working? Yup. So can I fix it? No, it looks like it needs a new ink cartridge but the error says the cartridge is not there at all, and if it does think its there, its not the correct one. Back to PC World where we find out that you can only gets the required ink online. Long story short, Fiona now has a new printer and I ironed the transfer onto my tee shirt later that night.

Ciaran was the wild card. Since he was supposed to organising his own costume, we only arranged a backup one. The simplest costume we could come up with, irrespective of what he was wearing, was 'Sunglasses at Night' by Corey Hart. Needless to say Ciaran went as 'Sunglasses at Night'.

James, organising the party, needed the music. 'Sunglasses' was reasonable easy to get but 'Blue Angel' was more complicated. Marillion of course are famed for their concept albums and 'Blue Angel' is more correctly known as 'Bitter Suite III - Blue Angel' and sits 4 minutes into that 8 minute track.

The party was fantastic. The costumes were amazing - some brilliant ideas. Sadly I never got pictures of everyone. We spent ages trying to figure out everyone.

Games had been organised so we were split into teams and sent off to different rooms. A logo quiz, some pretty specific general knowledge "Which 1976 UK number one single had the title of the song which knocked it off the top spot included in its lyrics?" and a music quiz which coincidentally had 19 songs, the same number of unique songs as there were guests.

Later Fiona and I were narrowly beaten in the "Couples Quiz". The couples were made answer questions on either side of an open door using a table tennis bat to indicate him or her. David and MaryAnne also got 5/5 so a series of increasingly difficult tie breakers were carried out. After 4 tie breakers I got Fiona's favourite colour wrong but I did know her eye colour. I think the wrong answers were more fun and the debate about 'who is better in the morning' is sure to run and run. Anyway I felt better when Fiona's mum got it wrong the next day too.

Over the evening the room did polarise into the drivers and the drinkers but that made the games after the Bells more interesting.

All in all a great night and a fantastic way to start the New Year.