From being dragged out to dinner to flirting: Nine moments that make life a little bit more fun
Fun, like ice cream and (unfortunately) condoms, has many flavours. Many textures. Differing degrees of stickiness and risk. Fun: not so simple. Not in the end…
You-are-going-to-pay-for-this-later fun
There you are, one, two, nearly five cocktails down, and possibly you’ve had your first fag of the evening although you haven’t smoked in years (yes you have). And there’s still dinner (and wine) to come and it’s already 10pm and you don’t care, YOU LOVE THIS SONG. You start paying for it at 4am when you wake up in your clothes and your make-up (although most of it is on the antique pillowcase) with a mouth like a pet cemetery. By 2pm the next day you are a husk, desperately trying to find a happy corner inside your broken soul.
Grown-up fun
Also known as ‘improving fun’. You accept an invitation from someone you are slightly scared of, to the theatre or an exhibition in a real museum. You wear your best ‘I am a lady architect’ outfit of serious clothes, and you nod and chat about Syria and Sylvia Plath. You arrive home lit from within by the art muses – ‘I am going to do that more often,’ you say. (You do not do it more often.)
Unexpected fun
You are dragged out to a dinner as a chore – it’s Love Island season for goodness sake, what is wrong with people? And yet halfway through the evening you realise that you are having a GOOD TIME: delicious food that’s coming quickly, funny fellow guests who you don’t know that well… And then it’s 9.30pm and the herbal tea is being poured: the universal signifier for ‘we are wrapping this up in 45 minutes’. You are almost sad to leave. And that never happens.
Worthy fun
It’s Saturday morning. You may be dressed as Scooby-Doo because you are helping out at a children’s party, or you are wearing gym kit because you have volunteered to do a 10k run for charity. Despite the fact that you nearly die of embarrassment when you see someone you fancy, you enjoy yourself. You haven’t thought about the leaking roof/ the possibility of having early-onset Alzheimer’s for at least three hours.
Bonding fun
You gaze at each other across the table, there’s a gang of you and you haven’t seen each other in ages, and there you are high on being together, totally, screamingly absorbed in the delightfulness of being with people you truly love. Everyone is jealous of the bonding fun you are having. Like that St Elmo’s Fire lot. Before it all went wrong.
Organised fun
This is rarely actually fun. Rounders in the park (all you can think about is tracking down the nearest loo and are there crisps and when can you eat the crisps?). Or maybe someone suggests a few games of tennis – so seasonal – and the whole thing is utterly humiliating as you serve endlessly into the net. Or it could be a quiz night to raise money for a local thing, which begins with buckets of bonhomie and ends in viciousness when someone on the other team asks for a recount and no one talks to each other for weeks. And you think that, if you lived in Midsomer, at least four people might have ended up dead.
Heavily documented fun
Judging from the Insta stories/tweets/Snapchats (kidding)/Facebook updates, you are having the MOST fun with the FUNNEST crowd in Funtown. It’s so fun being you. You are right smack in the heart of the party of the century. Later you cannot remember if you talked to anyone.
Flirty fun
You know you could. You know it’s possible. It’s right there for the taking, right now, you could, you know – but could you? You don’t. But you could have.
Stolen fun
‘I am just going to a meeting about that thing,’ you say. But really you are sneaking off for a mani/pedi or a massage or a rummage in & Other Stories or some Netflix. No one knows where you are at this moment, you think shiftily. Bliss.