Barbecue Season Starts Here

You know how some evenings are just... well, not perfect, but more right? Well tonight was one such evening.

The specifics aren't too important. It was a barbecue hosted by one of the ICSS lot, we were each asked to bring a dish (or raw meat, whatever) and a bottle, and most bizarrely we were given the metatheme of "the decade in which you were born". This meant we had to either dress up as, or alternatively (for the chickens) bring in some stuff from the 60s, 70s or 80s (as was relevant). I won't describe my outfit in too much detail, except to say it involved white socks, black shoes and some Ray-Ban-esque sunglasses. Quite.

Numbers were good; although the crowd was very three schools orientated, there were some out of the fold, and so it was nice to meet new people. The hosts owned and lived in the venue, and so there was no uncles or aunties to be considerate of. The cooking was taken care of by the usual suspects (that is, not me) and so was fantastic (barring the minor ham episode, but the less said about that the better). We even had some home-made desserts to top it all off.

But it was the vibe that stood out; that rare aligning of stars where everyone gets on, the conversation flows without any effort and the logistics just fall into place. In fact, the vibe was almost too good; as much as I myself tried to flit around there just didn't seem like enough time or space to mingle with everyone with the same kind of attention or quality.

Quite amazingly I was there for around seven hours in total; others were there for even longer. I have no idea where such a time scale went. As the night tailed off, the conversation became even more rowdy, silly and, in some places, rude (cough), but in all honesty I reckon we could have carried on for another few hours. No one wanted to leave (well, apart from the fuddy-duddy types) and it took a bit of an effort to finally drag our sorry butts out of there.

If this is a taste to come of this summer's barbecue season then I can't wait.