We've all been there haven't we? Virtually anyone who has ever been a teenager has done one, or all, of the following: been to a party where the carpets have ended up covered in beer/vomit/cigarette burns/all three (delete as appropriate); thrown a party which has spiralled into something rather different and much harder to tidy up than the beer-and-pizza evening begrudgingly allowed by the parents; fallen around at the age of sixteenish in a room where other 'guests' happen to be having sex; stained the parquet floors with bong water and singed the sofa after attempting to give some vaguely known, semi-conscious 'new best friend' a joint.
Admittedly Rachael Bell, 17, who had to do some pretty hefty apologising on Friday after a party she threw resulted in £20,000 of criminal damage to her mother's home, has probably had a more heightened experience of this than most of us. The true story of how 200-300 people came to be in her family home in Durham (some apparently from as far away as London), will probably never be known. They certainly found out about the party from Rachael's MySpace page, which advertised a 'trash the average family-sized house party'. She claims the site was hacked into and 'details' added encouraging people to come. She only wanted "a few" people to pop over, even though her mother had told her that there would be no parties while the rest of the family - three further siblings in tow - were away caravanning.
That said, Rachael admits to inviting 60 people herself, which was always going to engender some fairly Herculean efforts on the washing-up front. Bell, who has been in hiding all week, has said sorry, saying gatecrashers were climbing though the windows and that she then had a panic attack. However, a MySpace posting which may or may not be by her, suggests that she might not be entirely sorry - 'i hope u liked the party..was fuckin wild like!!!hmmm another???'.
However it happened, Bell's version of the 'trash the house party', the idea came from the E4 drama, Skins, starring Nicholas Hoult. It is a phrase that has now been adopted all over the web. Mostly it seems to have been taken up by fairly posh kids who go to each other's houses and really don't actually, erm, trash the house, but in Rachael's case the guests took the invite seriously, wrecking clothes and toys and urinating on beds and carpets. Rachael's mother's dress became a toilet and any buckets dotted around were full to brim with vomit.
To be fair to Skins, if you watch the 'trash the house' party footage on the programme's MySpace page, it does look like a lot of fun - there's dancing, snogging, drinking, jumping on beds, shagging, drawing on mirrors in lipstick and everyone's young, pretty and fashionably dressed. At the end all the guests pass out in a dishevelled yet immaculately accessorised heap, attractively pulsating with teen angst and the knowledge that they don't have to be up in the morning for work. A not particularly bright teen might conclude that a similar party could actually occur in the real world, so if Bell is responsible for the MySpace invite, it's likely that it's this kind of thing she was looking for, rather than criminal damage and heartbreak for her mum. She does dress exactly like a character in Skins too - a bit Gothic with big sunglasses.
It's tempting to blame the internet here of course. Without sites like MySpace and Facebook, and texting, you could claim parties like Rachael's would never happen. But you would be very wrong: a straw poll of my friends revealed that they'd all been to shockingly riotous (and often very enjoyable) house-parties, and all this in the age well before text messaging. After all, the odd 'Yobs cause £10,000 damage at house party' story appears in the papers at least once a year.
'I went to a party where people stole everything. And I mean everything - they even took the white goods,' says Matthew, 29, a friend. Was the kid who threw it particularly hated? 'No, it was just for the hell of it basically,' he said wistfully, Other people tell of gatecrashers beating up the people acting as bouncers and then starting fights once inside, of being told by police not to throw a party on their farmland for fear that it would be similarly crashed and of excrement being smeared on walls.
One girl, who will remain understandably anonymous, got so drunk at a house party that she tried to pee in the washing machine in a utility room, only to pass out and get stuck between the washing machine and the wall. Her boyfriend found her an hour later, still unconscious. How sweet. A Christmas party in Surrey was relatively tame until the father's bow and arrow was discovered and the front door destroyed by being used for target practice.
My own party stories are tame by comparison. There was the night the combination of being 16, drunk and newly stoned, created a level of paranoia that meant that when I found my friend Paul passed out under a bush I apparently ran down the garden screaming 'he's dead, he's dead!' I still maintain that he was lying with his head at a very funny angle, resting on a plant pot. Whatever, Paul was sick all the way down the garden and for the following four hours.
When I was a student the six-bedroom house we lived in was perfect for huge parties. We got round the risk of people being sick by doing batches of baked potatoes on the hour from midnight onwards. However, we did have mice, and somehow arranged for the pest-control man to come round the morning after one of the nights before. My housemate answered the door only to pass out at his feet, and after putting her in the recovery position, he picked his way into the kitchen only to see houmous dripping down a table leg and literally hundreds of empty bottles festooning the place. He turned to us and said, 'So, you've got mice... No shit.'
The point of all this is that these parties mostly happened 10 years ago, before people decided that posting every detail of their life on the internet was a good idea, and yet still things went terribly wrong. House-trashing and gatecrashers have been a mainstay of American teen comedy movies for at least two decades - remember Ten things I hate about you, where Bogey Lowenstein's wine and cheese evening turns into a tequila-fuelled disco? In this case the invites were distributed via lo-tech leaflets.
Whatever the reality of Rachael's party, house-parties are always going to be risky, and therein lies their attraction, of course. The problem with the internet and mobile phones is that when you put them in the hands of people who are notorious for not really thinking things through, or who might be terrified that if they don't invite everyone they've ever met, they might be revealed as a Billy-no-mates, then you get uncontrollable mass invites.
Chances are though, that Rachael will reconcile with her understandably furious mother, they'll paint over the graffiti, and in 10 years time, she'll still be dining out on this particular party.
