At the front of the room, sure enough, were the ball gowns and tuxedos. In the middle, best suits and party dresses. At the back, where we plebs were located, it was just smart casual. Which was our good fortune, actually, because the catering was a hog roast. Yep, a hog roast. Greasy-finger food in a bun, and don't ask for the cutlery because there isn't any. Mind that ball gown, lady.
Now, there was a time when a hog roast was a sort of village-green knees-up affair. You turned up to the site of the pagan conflagration, where some poor smoke-ridden individual would have been turning a spit for the last five hours, and where you were supposed to prove your tribal loyalty by taking your chances with the salmonella, by eating greasy chunks of whatever the man with the carving knife handed you. It was a proof of your vigour that you'd survived enough of these shindigs to have accumulated all the viral antibodies that you were ever likely to need.
But this hog roast was a different kind of affair. There outside in the gleaming courtyard was a shiny new white van with fancy sign-writing on the side, and the all-electric oven/grill thing alongside it had been switched off several hours earlier while the fat was being stripped off the (alleged) hog, and then the poor thing had been dismembered with a sort of culinary chainsaw and taken indoors. And then you queued up for a strangely weightless bun the size of a football, and let the chef lard it with whatever was at the top of the pile, and then you stuffed it all into your mouth with your raw hands while the band played Strangers in the Night. Vegetarians were offered a giant bun and a bit of lettuce, and maybe some apple sauce. There didn't seem to be many takers for that, though, so maybe the caterers knew their job after all?
But a hog roast it wasn't. Which was a good thing in some ways, because more of the participants would have survived the night than they would have done with the usual bug-laden open-air shindig. As to whether you can really mix slowly-burned pig with a full-on tuxedo event is another question entirely. For some reason I found myself hoping that somebody would light up a huge wicker man out on the terrace somewhere, but sadly it was not to be. Pity, I'm sure there's a commercial market for pagan revivals.
BJ
