To avoid just being completely wrapped up in coupliness all weekend, I decided to have a little teaparty Saturday evening. I wanted to be sociable, and also to introduce the Beau to some of my Swedish friends. The party was a bit of a disappointment in some ways; I'm used to the idea that you invite a bunch of people and only some of them can make it, but in this case six people specifically said they would be there and only one, Joanna, turned up. The missing five turned out to have more or less decent excuses (one was ill, one was trapped in Uppsala, one couldn't get to the internet to get my contact details or the invitation, one decided she needed to get ready for travelling the next day, and the fifth is just flaky), but it was a bad coincidence that all of them were prevented at the last minute. Still, the three of us had a very convivial evening, and consumed vast quantities of teeeeeeeea and mulled wine. Having mountains of leftover cake is not exactly the greatest hardship I've ever suffered, either.
But once upon a time it was still considered only polite to at least phone and tender your apologies for not being able to be where you said you'd be.
They sort of did; at least, one person texted me to say he couldn't make it, one tried to text my landline, leading to much hilarity but little comprehension since the computer tried to read out the text message as if it were Swedish, the one who was sick called me the day before and warned me, and on the day of the party to apologize. The one I'm a little peeved with is the one who didn't come because his router died so he couldn't look up my email; ok, that also meant he couldn't look up my phone number to apologize until the following day, but really, use some initiative here, that's a pretty pathetic excuse for not showing up to a party after you've accepted the invitation. I had said it was an informal, drop in when you feel like it kind of do, so it's somewhat forgiveable that people didn't keep formal etiquette, but even so.