Once when I was a kid my parents held a party, which was notable because it was just the rarest thing I could imagine either one of them doing, in fact thinking back, a couple of major birthdays aside, it literally did not happen again, and I suppose in that there reveals some bleakness of true, bonafide adulthood – as a human on the cusp of his thirties now, I live in fear that the parties of my twenties were an anomaly, doomed to fade forever away, to be taken up instead by other humans, younger humans, in their twenties; that I have crossed forever a divide, like a window I can only look through but never pass, where I can now only watch the young people, with their parties, having fun; that I am doomed to never have it again – the fear being that actual, legitimate adulthood is just a long slow fade away from the parties of your youth, and the party frequency demonstrated by my parents during my own personal childhood kind of goes some way to means testing that.

Anyway the point is they had a party.

So it was a Hallowe’en one, the party, which I know because I remember so vividly my dad’s costume: he had painted his entire head and skull (he was bald, my father, in that very inarguable way, an all-body baldness, his head and skull arrangement resembling a sort of large emotive walnut) with a sort of cheap green face paint that absolutely did not cover his skin tone at all, making him look, instead of like a warlock or ogre as was I assume the intended effect, but actually just as though he was about to be sick on an aeroplane or was feeling quite queasy but would get over it on a coach or bus; and, to complete the picture, he arranged on his head with stage glue a series of (unbranded) Rice Krispies, painstakingly applied, as sort of boils or warts. The overall effect was someone had very half-heartedly cursed a toad to live a human life. He paired his green head with blue jeans, a faded grey polo, a greasy-necked sky-blue body warmer and tan leather work boots, i.e. the exact same outfit he wore every single day of his entire fucking life.

My mother dressed more traditionally as a witch.

I knew this party was important to my parents because I had been very firmly condemned away from it. This was telegraphed to me repeatedly as we went about the pre-party chores that seem necessary ahead of such a gathering: the three of us formed as a team to move the Big Table, the yard was swept, my mother made some sort of cake-in-green-jelly arrangement that went largely untouched at the party proper and so was eaten by me for breakfast for days. My instructions were clear: at 7 p.m., when the party started to kick off, I would retire to my room and play imagination games, and from there after a while I was trusted to put myself to bed. I painted a sign for our broken bathroom door that read ‘NO LOCK, PLEASE KNOCK’, affixed it with Blu Tack, brushed my teeth and combed my hair, then retired to bed.

Only I could not fucking sleep because of the sound of partying below me. Like: obviously. We lived in a six-room terrace house that was suddenly heaving with 45 to 50 adults, most of whom I had never seen before and never saw again since and am still, some 21 years later, utterly baffled as to who they were and why they were in my house dressed as ghosts and such, but they were all drunk and yelling and not eating the jelly. Whenever I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep my mind defaulted to assuming that I was in trouble: that, if discovered I was in bed and awake past, say, the frankly illegal time of 9 p.m., I would be yelled at so thoroughly I would die. With the hubbub of the party below me, I laid perfectly still in bed (turning over in any way or fidgeting was not an option because the slight small noise of child on sheet would alert my parents to the fact that I was awake: they would hear it, somehow, over the conversation and through the ceiling, and they would pause the music and roar ‘EXCUSE ME?’ and they would immediately march upstairs and take me to child prison), arms pinned to my side, eyes rigidly open.

I assumed I could just spend an entire evening like this – my plan was to just not sleep for 12 to 16 hours, then, in the morning, walk downstairs with a big show of yawning, stretching of the arms, asking my parents mildly how the party was, Did You Have Fun, Oh Was It Loud I Didn’t Notice, that I could spend the next eight or nine nights slowly catching up on sleep an hour at a time, that eventually I would compensate for this overall loss. But then I heard sneaking on the landing outside my door, the sound of drunk women shushing, and my mother’s voice was there, detached, always, a voice delivered ever through great outward plumes of cigarette smoke, and one asked cutely, ‘Oh, can we see him?’ and ‘Oh, can we go see him sleep?’ and my mother, a witch remember, said ‘[sound of cigarette smoke exhaling] Sure. [sound of more cigarette smoke exhaling] Go wild.’

Which is how we find ourselves with two women full-on screaming in surprise to find a rictusly awake child awaiting them when only they wanted to see cute dozing. My mother, upon this discovery: ‘Why are you awake?’

At which point I was dragged downstairs in my pyjamas to be shown to the attendant party. I was a nervous boy and this did not suit me: dozens of large, tree-sized adults, in black and with monstrous faces, peering down on me, cackling and laughing at the absurdity of a child up this late, handing me party snacks to eat with my hands in front of them, as though you might watch a squirrel consume a nut. And then I became incredibly weary, the kind of tired only a child in his pyjamas in a forest of monsters can become, and fell asleep on a sofa, and my toad-father carried my limp body, sweetly murmuring, up to bed, where I slept solidly through the night and the subsequent clean-up the next day. And that was the first time I fell asleep at a party.

SUMMER ’09

When I was 22 a nightclub opened up back home that offered what – looking back on it now – is the most absurd and ludicrous deal known to man: an All-You-Can-Drink night, with a £10 entry fee and a free cloakroom. I don’t know why the ‘free cloakroom’ aspect of it seemed so important to me at the time (I had a coat stolen from a corner sofa in a nightclub about a year previously, and I suppose at the time that was … the most important and insulting thing … that had ever happened to me? And completely changed my worldview on everything, based on whether they did or did not have cloakrooms attached to them? I don’t know), but I remember that being the real clincher: not that I could get catatonically drunk in exchange for one crisp ten-pound note, but that my H&M jacket (I got it in the sale! It only cost £8 anyway!) wouldn’t go missing while I was doing it. Galvanised by this, the plan was set: we would go to the All-You-Can-Drink night, and drink all that we could.

Well, we went multiple times. Economically, it did not make sense to get drunk any other way: even pooling your resources and getting supermarket beer crates and bottles of vodka to have at home didn’t work out at a drink-per-pound rate that could beat Elements, so we essentially spent a whole summer drinking the whole place dry. Did we care that the vodka was thinned down with water? We did not. Did it matter that the only lager available on tap was a sort of cheap fizzy unbranded thing that might well have been the recycled dregs of other, more acceptable lagers? We did not. Did we care that the atmosphere in there cycled through three moods (from 9 p.m. until 10.30 p.m., sober and vibeless; 10.30–11, pure and dreadful chaos; 11–1 a.m., some of the worst DJs in Chesterfield attacked us all with house music and a smoke machine)? Also no. To reiterate: one of the great selling points of this place to me was that I had somewhere to put my coat. This is as close to nihilism as I’ve ever got in my life. I didn’t care about anything.

I don’t know if you’ve been to an All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but the theory when transposed over to drinking is much the same. Every year for her birthday my aunt insists on going to this weird family-friendly world buffet place on an industrial park in Wolverhampton, where for £8 all-in you are issued a small white plate and the offer to go tonto on various hot plates of food. There is a pizza station, and a section that makes vindaloo. There is a whole grill where meats and fish are pumped out in piles. Trays of Chinese food, but also chicken nuggets. English cuisine is represented by deep trays of chips and every possible English breakfast meat, fried and left to sweat beneath a heat lamp. Go there with good intentions and leave with salt bloating: to enter the domain of the world buffet is to be immediately overwhelmed by decision fatigue, and you end up trailing back to your table with a plate high with chow mein, and somehow also roast potatoes, and then weirdly a wedge of pizza stuffed on top there like a cherry on a sundae, also for some reason broccoli. It is impossible not to have a bipolar plate of food when given the opportunity to serve yourself from a buffet. Which is a roundabout way of saying: yes, I was frequently very very sick at Elements.

I was 22, so I rarely stuck to one alcohol. Firstly we would have these neon green little shots, which were terrible. Then maybe an awful fizzy pint or two, which were also very terrible. A terrible off-brand Jägerbomb would follow. Maybe a couple of (terrible) vodka-cokes. There was an hour in the night, every night, where the DJ seemed to play Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’ five or six times in a row, so I would lean against a sweat-dripped wall and sort of sway to it, eyes half open, before going and getting another terrible beer. The toilets were attended, so had an odd array of aftershaves and perfumes plus a tray of lollipops, and you would always leave there heaving off the fumes of it, the heady mix of beer piss and Paco Rabanne. Then you’d go and get another terrible fizzy beer or something, try and stay upright long enough until the lights went up. We were frequently, frequently kicked out. One time my mate got kicked out so hard on a Friday that, when he went back there on the Saturday, he immediately got kicked out again, because the bouncer who kicked him out the night before recognised him as getting so catatonically pissed that she pre-empted him doing it again. ‘Miss!’ I said, already three pints down in ten minutes, ‘Miss, please! His coat! It’s still in the cloakroom!’

As a show of support we all (reluctantly) left, wobbling home in solidarity. Summer had caught up with me: my face was burnt a permanent pinky-red, I’d been out to about ten consecutive £10 nights in a row, all I seemed to eat was 2 a.m. chip plates, my body was dying from the inside-out, every moment alive was agony. It was, obviously, the greatest summer of my life. You’re bulletproof, when you’re 22, mostly: you bounce off walls and shake off hangovers, you only care about your coat and where your next £10 is coming from, the most important thing in the world to you is sitting four-to-a-sofa with your mates and sinking a crate of beer. Which is what we went home to do, before I fell unconscious on a sofa, and everyone wrote the names of their favourite wrestlers on my face with marker pen. I came to abruptly at 4 a.m. – ‘Where am I?’ I insisted, ‘Where’s my coat?’ – and everyone laughed because I had ‘KENNEDY’ written across my forehead. ‘I don’t have “KENNEDY” written across my forehead,’ I insisted, then staggered home.

Elements closed soon after – because, I’m assuming, £10 All-You-Can-Drink offers aren’t financially viable even for one second – meaning there was only one summer like that for us before the dream ended. It was probably for the best, in a way, in terms of me still being alive today, but you’re allowed to miss times that were fun even if they were also extremely medically bad for you. The next morning my mum woke me up with a bacon sandwich and told me I had to get a job. ‘It’s time, kid,’ she said, soothingly. ‘Also you have “KENNEDY” written on your forehead.’ And that was the second time I ever fell asleep at a party.

MAY ’15

The Pacquiao–Mayweather fight was highly anticipated by boxing acolytes but not by me because I very truly did not enjoy any boxing match that wasn’t between Rocky Balboa and another man, but for whatever reason the fight fell on a kind of hectic party weekend – two people were having birthday parties and I’d promised to go to both, and ended up also agreeing to go to a friend-of-a-friend’s 4 a.m. screening of the fight – so I kind of read up enough to know what a jab was and went out into the night to get on it. You can probably see where this one goes: I ‘jabbed’ myself with five pints of beer at one birthday, ‘haymakered’ myself with three more at the next, and ended up on the wrong side of an incredibly busy A-road, clenching onto a can and looking across four lanes of traffic at my stranded Uber, trying to get to the third. ‘Mate,’ I said on the phone to the man who the app said was parked right in front of me, ‘can you not just … drive over here?’ And he said: no.

I got to the party in the end, but was swaying (much like a boxer! After 15 rounds! Of being punched directly in the head!) so I went to the bathroom to freshen up. This didn’t go well: I splashed my face enough to focus my vision in the mirror, but seeing how truly pissed I was sort of served to recoil myself down into a second, deeper level of pissed – self-fulfilling drunkenness – and exited the bathroom stumbling now, impossibly, more than I was before. I was introduced to a number of very calm American PhD students who were quietly watching the boxing match with me, and then smoothly offered a small white heap of cocaine.

This, I suppose, was the moment I became, truly, a Big Boy. I’d not been offered coke before, but the way it was laid out for me – so elegantly! Such a casual offer! Piled on an intricately embossed, expensive-looking book! – made me realise that now I was at an adult party, for adults. Baby Joel was last seen terrified and crossing an A-road trying to get in an Uber he couldn’t afford to have cancel on him. Adult Joel was here, now, drunk and swaying and about to snort a line of drugs with his nose. When I was a kid, in the knots-and-camping youth club Beavers, I watched in half-tears as my friend Charlie, six months older than me at school, crossed over a figurative bridge (a folded parachute laid on the tiled floor of a church hall) to join the Scouts, the next-age-group-up club he was now a part of. I was just a boy, down here with the Beavers, learning to tie my shoelaces on a cardboard shoe shape with holes cut out of it. Charlie was a man, with a different woggle on his scarf and new friends to make. This book with cocaine on it was very much like that, in a way.

Anyway, no. When I was given my first joint to smoke, on a weekend trip to Amsterdam, I had to be very literally taught how to inhale it, so alien was the idea to me, and this small line of cocaine was similar: I very literally couldn’t figure out how to close one nostril and snort. ‘Mate, you just—’ my friend-of-a-friend said, but I shushed him away. ‘I got it, I got it,’ I said. Then I tried two more times – running a rolled-up £20 note over it, ineffectively, like a hoover blocked with a child’s toy – then gave the untouched book back to him. ‘You know what, mate,’ I said. ‘I’m actually alright.’ Pretty immediately I fell upright and asleep in a kitchen chair and missed the fight entirely, and had to be kicked awake to leave again, and I suppose the great moral is this: whatever party you invite me to, wholesome, Hallowe’en, drunk, adult, child, jellied, coked out, cloakroomed: I will ruin it. I will ruin it, always, by falling asleep.