Caroline O'Donoghue: The real fear about parties is that nobody will come

When I get right down to it, my fear is an immigrant fear - and the crux of this particular immigrant fear is the fear of not mattering to people

The 10-year anniversary of my living in London recently came and went without much incident. 

The 10-year anniversary of my living in London recently came and went without much incident. This was a surprise for most of my friends, because for years, I’ve been putting off birthday celebrations because I want to “have a really big one for my anniversary”. 

Then, when it came down to it, I flaked. I’m 31 and it’s time to stop kidding myself: I am not a party haver. I am a party goer.

My reluctance to have parties is down to a lot of things: I hate organising, I hate cooking for lots of people, I hate cleaning up the day after. Mostly because I never manage to properly clean, and I end up finding fag butts in the couch for weeks afterwards. But the real fear is, of course, that nobody will come.

At this point, my best friend Ella, who loves throwing parties, would say: “Don’t be mad — I’ll come, and Tash will come, and Richard will come, and Gavin’s already there — that’s a party, even if no one else turns up!” 

She has a very protestant attitude to hostessing — if you traybake it, they will come — and can’t quite understand my anxiety. But when I get right down to it, my fear is exactly as old as my time in this country. Because it’s an immigrant fear. And the crux of this particular immigrant fear is the fear of not mattering to people.

Immigrants not ‘mattering’ to people is obviously a large and deep concern. If it is a giant pie chart, less than 0.1% of it should be dedicated to “white Irish woman in the media fears her friends won’t come to her party”. 

‘Not mattering’ is a fear that begins when workers and young girls start vanishing over borders. ‘Not mattering’ is when some of the most highly educated people in the world are forced to clean toilets because of prejudices around background, accents and skin colour. But these worries do scale down, too.

Back in the early days, the loneliest days, when I feared Fridays because there was no one to hang around with and no money to spend, I used to take the Tube to Camden and wander around for hours. I would stare at groups of friends like I used to stare at dresses in windows. When the friends started trickling in, I held fast, like Janet in Tamlin. 

They were all English, of course. I was young for an immigrant — I had just turned 21 — and most Irish people don’t leave the country until their mid 20s. When you’re that broke and stupid you can only really be friends with other 21-year-olds, and the only other 21-year-olds I would meet were English people. 

They had all moved to London with gangs of friends, in cheery, scummy house shares in north London. They had jobs with their fathers, or friends of their fathers. No judgement here — if I had been in Cork or Dublin, I would have leaned on my dad’s connections, too. 

I loved them. I still love them. But there was no getting away from the uncomfortable fact that they were now my closest friends in the country, and to them, I was just a new, fruity, Irish addition.

I remember saying this to my friend Tom, back then. “You’re my best friend,” I said. “But I’m just your new friend.” It does strange things to you, this feeling: you start to imagine your own death, wonder how long it would take your parents to hear of your demise, and who, if anyone, would help in sending your body back home.

There is something else that starts happening when you are a woman without significant connections in a new country. You give off a scent that only a certain kind of man picks up on. 

You’re the weakest gazelle in the herd: someone who can be messed with. I had several employers corner me in situations that would be both depressing and legally problematic to recount here, and years of blaming myself for it. What vibe was I giving off? What hints was I dropping, that I was unaware of dropping?

I was reminded of this again recently, when I went for a pint with a new, much younger friend. We met at the pub she worked at. She was new to the city herself, after years spent in Hong Kong. Halfway through the drink, one of her co-workers came over to us. “That guy is back,” she said. “He’s looking for you.” My new friend went crimson and quickly explained the situation to me. 

He was a much older man that she had mistaken for “sweet” — he responded to this by physically harassing her. She concluded the story the same way I would have at her age. ‘I keep thinking, did I lead him on by being too nice?’ ‘No’ I said. ‘Because if you were his friend’s daughter, his daughter’s friend, or indeed anyone connected to his network, it would never have crossed his mind.’ 

My new friend is simply suffering from the immigrant’s curse of not quite having enough connections or status to matter.

We left the pub through a back door, and then climbed over a wall to get to the street. She was embarrassed: if she is my new young friend, then I am her new old one, and she just made me climb over a rain-soaked pub wall. I suddenly felt a deep gratitude for the time I have spent in this country, the connections I’ve made, the sensation of no longer being alone. 

“Hey,” I said. “Would you like to come to a party?”