This was a great party. Wonderfully well organised by Janie, with themeing help of course from Kim.
The theme was tropical, as Janie and I had been to Cuba and Jamaica earlier that year.
It was the early days of iPod use for me, but I made up a well cool iPod playlist, which I have maintained (as best I can) and printed in pdf form here – 2007 Caribbean Party In Full.
The food was catered by Jo Buckingham of TRUFFLEhound. Olivier the butler and his team were hired to look after the guests. We also put a lot of effort into designing an amazing rum cocktail to be a centrepiece for the drinks.
So what could possibly go wrong? Well, unfortunately I went down with the raging sh*ts overnight the night before, which left me not much use to anybody all day. I tried to sleep it off for most of the day, hoping to be fit by late afternoon onwards. But I didn’t get far when I tried getting up and helping out around 16:30, so I went back to bed again until just before the guests arrived.
As it turned out, I managed to get through the party more or less, but only by keeping away from the wonderful food and drink we had put so much effort into specifying. It really was only a 24 hour bug-type thing, so I was able to try leftovers on the Sunday, but that’s hardly the same thing.
Kim quasi-secretly hired a “butler in the buff” for the party. Naturally he arrived and needed to change soon after I had sloped off to the bedroom to lie down for a short while – as it turned out an even shorter while than I had intended. Here is a discreet picture of the gentleman:
There are lots of photos from this event – some of them leaving very little to the imagination in the “buff butler”department. The full monty (as it were) of the photo album can be found here.