Spin the bottle and bootleg booze — how my daughter’s 14th birthday party descended into mayhem

When my daughter asked for a party for her 14th birthday, I thought: “How bad can it be?” Thirty guests, she suggested, restricted to the kitchen, “and anyway, we’ll mostly be in the garden” — although the ground is January-hard and the chairs lichened and damp. So we strung up Happy Birthday in helium balloons and coiled Christmas tree lights around the shed and brought out camping mats and connected her speaker to our Spotify. She declared an alcohol ban and, on her advice, I cleared out the fridge and cupboards. Her plan: I would watch a film upstairs, dipping into the party occasionally.

Mid-afternoon, three girlfriends in tracksuits chorusing hellos bought crisps and Coke and disappeared into her room “to get ready”.

By evening the front door was under siege. Girls in hoop earrings and eyeliner flicks came bearing Celebration chocolates and birthday cards. They were led to the kitchen, now dark but for rotating coloured dots.

And then the boys arrived: a sea of nodding hoods, North Face puffas and rucksacks that stayed on all night. The mood deepened, the music darkened and there was an air of anomie. Sexist lyrics matched the brute testosterone of their chat. “I’m gonna get wiv her later,” I heard one haltingly tell another. The other replied that his “girl” was on her way.

Two boys rapped to drill. Are they really 14? I asked my daughter. They could fit my 12-year-old in their pocket. “Where do they come from?”

“Go back upstairs, Mum.”

Later I find a boy in the corridor, cross-legged, head rotating like a Gnawa lute player. “Is he drunk?” I panicked.

“No, Mum”.

“Is he high?”

“Ohmygod, no Mum.”

The boy floated outside. He was not drunk. But one who zig-zagged towards me, enveloping me in a bear hug, appeared to be. Three girls burst out of the downstairs loo where they’d only gone to take selfies in the mirror. Zig-zag went in. There was a crack, like wood splintering, and an expletive. Zig-zag emerged apologising. The shower door had been torn off the wall.

Now my daughter was stressed. Someone was audibly asking for booze. She asked him to leave. Others were shouting — no, bellowing — as they played spin the bottle.

In the garden, girls — eyes shining in the freezing night — had shed their jackets to reveal boob tubes and goose bumps. They breathed soupy clouds of Juul vapour.

Floating boy, I saw, was traversing the neighbour’s wall as if on a swaying tightrope. He tried to scale a high fence. “That’s it,” I declared. “He leaves before he breaks his neck.” His “fam” gathered in the street, waiting for cars, faces lit by phones.

Then someone said Zig-zag had vomited. “What part of ‘no alcohol’ did you not understand?” my daughter was screaming. Three girls escorted him home. Lights went back on, the kitchen was filthy. Crushed bottles and streamers were stamped into the lawn.

A helium balloon was escaping into the sky. “That was a nightmare,” my daughter breathed. “I’m so sorry, Mum. Never again.”

#MeToo doesn’t need this Brand of support

Oh, look, Russell Brand has given his blessing to #MeToo. The — what is he, a writer? A comedian? Let’s call him public egotist — has written a book, Mentors, about the help he has to wrestle his ego, I mean demons. While publicising it he pronounced #MeToo “a really positive change”. If nothing else, surely #MeToo means never having to hear a predator like Brand pontificate on women again? Brand crowed about his 1,000 conquests — “different women, three, four, five times a day”. His record includes spitting in a woman’s face after sex.

His newfound benevolence reminds me of the hypocrisy he showed in 2015, overseeing social projects from his £150,000 Range Rover while running up costs of £1 million-plus. Or in the solace he offered refugees, if flown to Syria first-class.

But who is worse, Brand or Morrissey? The former Smiths frontman believes women who went to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel knew “exactly what was going on” and were happy to “play along”. Phoney support or brute “honesty”? Both are vile.

*After two long years, Theresa May’s domestic abuse bill will surface today. When the Prime Minister took office, there was much trumpeting about how she would help women trapped in coercive relationships — of whom approximately two a week are killed. Little was done about it. It is an issue that is screaming to be better understood.

Recently it was the birthday of my late aunt. Her husband, after seeing a play with a “slutty” character who shared her first name, made her change it.

That was the most surreal act during years of controlling behaviour. Let’s hope May has something other than a soiled Brexit as her legacy.