It’s my party and I’ll philosophise if I want to

Some time that December I read that one should never host a party in a large, open space. Instead, you should select a venue of small, interlocking rooms, not only creating the impression the space is more crowded than it is but, crucially, allowing your guests to suggest to themselves that if only they left this small space for another they might find the guests they had been hoping to find: the old friends, or attractive strangers, or mildly famous person that would allow them to tell the story of this night to someone else.

That month I seized upon every item like this in the conviction that the party I had just held – in a large, open pub on a damp and warm spring evening – had been a failure. All the things I had not done to make it better! It was my 40th. I enjoyed myself, as much as is possible at one’s own party, and felt great affection for every single person there. But at some point that night I also had a strange thought, a hint of the finite time ahead and the ways it would be quickly spent.

Credit: Michael Howard

So what now, I wondered: was I to spend the next 40 years maintaining all these friendships? Was that even possible? Or was this a disguised farewell to both the times that had been and the people who had experienced them with me? And, perhaps, to the particular ways we had experienced them together.

In my early twenties a friend had told me of being out to dinner with his father when they ran into a man. Who was that, my friend had asked. His father had responded by saying the man was his best friend. My friend found this shocking. How had he never met this man before? They saw each other once a year, perhaps, his father said. Was this what adult friendship was? We found the prospect horrifying.

In the year that followed that party, my partner and I experienced a series of events that upended our lives. We left our home in London because of the pandemic; learned we were expecting a child; and I began writing a book that, I had believed not long before, I had no interest in writing.

Sean Kelly at his 40th birthday party, listening to friends give speeches in his honour.Credit:

Now we are older still and everyone’s lives have changed, mostly in ways that have left them preoccupied: with children or parents or career or health. I may not see everyone at that party again, but I see, too, that you do not stop being friends because you have not seen someone. And that, in turn, is a small component of the larger realisation, which is that lives change – really change – and that our assumptions at one time about what matters in a life are hardly relevant at another.

As midnight approached and the pub began to shut, a few of us left for the next venue. We danced there, though I had wanted dancing at the pub, and for some time after I treated this as the sole metric by which the success of the night could be judged. This was why, to myself, I called the night a failure. But failure depends on the terms, and those terms are up to you.

Some time later I complimented a friend on her own 40th, how much I had enjoyed myself, and she told me she had not been sure how to celebrate her birthday, but found the experience of being at my party so lovely she decided she should have one, too. Last year I saw her three times, but the last was only brief.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.