Ashleigh Young on surviving the party season

Having a ball? Spare a thought for those with a fear of festivities.

Come on callers join the party

I am sorry to say that party season is upon us. How many parties will you go to? Two? Seventy-two? Will you never stop partying? Do you like these parties or do you go because you are afraid of what might happen if you don't go? I am usually afraid before, during and after a party.

Somehow, I never learned how to party. There were a couple of times, dancing furiously in my 20s, that I felt I finally understood what it was to party but back then partying was about so much more than dancing. It was about having a loud voice, hugging strangers and embracing unpredictability. The most memorable party moments couldn't be engineered. At my 21st birthday party, a man lost his balance while dancing and fell backwards into my zucchini cake. At another party my friend cocooned herself in a sheet on the kitchen floor and bit anyone who came near. The parties I go to now are grown-up parties where everyone has a nice time. But that's even harder.

When I was in Toronto, I went to a writers' party. The party was on the top floor of a massive hotel. You could see all the way across the harbour, where ships were tracking across the water, fleeing the party. People say that the hardest part of going to a party is walking through the door but that's the easiest part; the work has not even begun.

I looked at the table of snacks, panicked, picked up an apple and bit into it. Never eat an apple at a party. This was a bad apple, floury and watery but it was also hopeless as party food, drawing too much attention to the act of eating and preventing me from gesturing freely. I managed to enter a conversation with a Canadian film-maker called Alex, who told me he had once worked in a shearing shed in Hāwera but his eyes kept roving around the room and I sensed he wanted to get away from the apple. Finally I wedged the fruit in the top of a beer bottle and hid it behind some other bottles. I tried to re-enter the conversation with Alex but he had been swept up by two novelists. I found an older woman who was wearing track pants and a bum bag. To my relief she had a high, whispery voice and opinions about James K. Baxter, so I stayed at her side for the rest of the night.

What it is about the grown-up party that is so difficult for some of us? One is that to have a successful party experience you need to change gears as you move from conversation to conversation. But for parties I really only have one working gear, which is the gear of nodding thoughtfully. I'm a single-speed bicycle in a world of electric bikes. In other words, I am boring. Another party hurdle is one of simple logistics: how to navigate the room, how to break into a conversational circle, how to extricate yourself if someone starts bellowing about their house extension or how they have an absolute glut of tomatoes and they don't know what to do with them all or how important it is for a man to own one really nice suit.

The rule of all parties is that the most exciting things will happen after you have gone home. One year, I left a party and heard that later that night a university lecturer fell off the balcony. Another time, a former prime minister turned up at 2 in the morning. Another time, everyone just had a really amazing heart-to-heart and cleared the air of old grievances and committed to being more loving and supportive friends to one another, all while I was fast asleep with my cat's bottom in my face.

All of these things pale in comparison to the biggest party difficulty of all: the feeling of being desperately uncool. The party acts as a kind of social paint-stripper, dissolving any illusions you held about your coolness and exposing the insecurities and inadequacies beneath for all to see. At least, that's what it feels like.

Clearly, I am not qualified to give anyone tips for surviving party season. But this is what I've got. If you do not have to go to the party, do not go. If you do have to go, then you must find a series of small stations to revolve around as you ride it out: the food (except apples), the host's cat, a hedge in the garden where all the introverts have gone. My way of surviving a party is to find one or two poets, who can bear lulls in conversation better than other kinds of writers, and then we stay together, clinging to the party like Jack and Rose clinging to the door in Titanic until one of us loses our grip and drifts silently into the icy depths, by which I mean they just go home to their nice cosy bed.