Party politics

All was going swimmingly until a mother tapped me on the shoulder to enquire why her son had not been invited. “You can’t invite nine of your son’s friends and leave out the other 21 children in the class,” she declared.

You see, despite following etiquette guru Emily Post’s party advice with the age-plus-one rule (if your child is turning eight, invite nine kids) for more than a decade, I had broken the first rule in Britain’s unwritten birthday party manifesto… a rule that is actually being enforced in some schools.

As if rewriting British children’s classics (Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree) and therefore airbrushing history isn’t enough for this sanitised society, where shielding our offspring from normal life has reached ridiculous heights, such political correctness is now rewriting the rules of birthday parties.

It’s not just crazy, it’s complicated. In Dubai, all I had to worry about was delivering the wow factor while competing with the parents. Here, in Middle England, it’s all about delivering the ethical factor, while trying not to offend the parents or damage the kids.

Take gift-giving… an easy, enjoyable experience, right? Not so with the Barbie-dolls-teach-self-hatred and video-games-teach-violence parental Brit brigade on board.

If you do manage to find a present at the right price – not too expensive (this fuels the fires of consumerism) and not too cheap (it is both environmentally and ethically repugnant) then you need to ensure the gift delivers enrichment, education and ethical consciousness in equal measure. Cue Oxfam-funded goat for a starving developing-world family times 30 for the party bags.

And so while my organic kale crisps, soy ice cream and homemade gluten-free cake – made using xylitol, fair-trade flour, coconut butter and non-GM soy birthday candles – passed the picky parent inspection, my organic fruit kebabs (“Those sticks could poke someone’s eye out”) and homemade organic beef burgers (“My son only consumes grass-fed Wagyu”) did not.

But it’s the “every child’s a winner” expectation, ensuring that our offspring are shielded from disappointment, that really gets my (non-organic) goat.

It makes musical chairs (where the child who gets the last remaining chair wins) obsolete; and pass the parcel (where a parcel of prizes is passed around and layers unwrapped by a child when the music stops) complicated. Not only do you have to provide a prize for every child, all of equal value, you have to ensure the music stops on every child an equal number of times.

It was quite easily the most stressful and expensive day of my life. Having handed out Hello Kitty party hats to the girls and Star Wars masks to the boys, I was pulled up by a prissy parent for deliberately creating gender stereotypes.

I was also chastised for allowing my son to open his presents during the party, (this incites unbridled greed in other children); providing party bags made of unrecyclable plastic instead of hand-crocheting them like another mother had; and decorating with non-biodegradeable balloons, rather than hand-painted paper bunting.

The party was sugar and tantrum-free – but it was also fun-free. “That was the most boring party ever, Mum,” my son said after his one fun game, hide ‘n’ seek, was stopped by a parent concerned a child could get lost.

So, before you bemoan the unashamed excess of Dubai’s status-obsessed birthday bashes, ponder the pain of the politically correct party in Britain. A birthday is once a year, so I say, have your sugar-laden, calorie-busting cake and eat it.