The Potter Party

How Naltrexone works in the wild

Mr and Mrs Potter work very hard and have three children and don’t see their friends as much as they would like. So they decided to have a party at their house. They drafted in a marquee - a marquee! - and a caterer and cocktails.

“We are serving margaritas,” said Mrs P on the WhatsApp chat, two days before the party. I clutched at the front of my T-Shirt in panic. Margaritas are my nemesis. They are my nightmare. White wine is bad enough, but once I have had one margarita I will not stop until I have drunk all the margaritas. I am in danger of ending up a snarling, drooling animal, pouring tequila and cointreau directly into my mouth, snorting lines of salt, biting chunks out of limes as if they are apples and so on.

I was really looking forward to this party. There is a good deal of overlap between my friends and the Potter’s friends. What I didn’t want to do was drink 14 margaritas and then go red and talk shit and dribble and then feel like death for a week afterwards.

So at 6pm I took 1/4 of a Naltrexone. I find that not only does Naltrexone stop you getting a buzz from alcohol, it stops you wanting a drink at all, even before the first one. This might be psychosomatic, but a feeling’s a feeling, right?

I arrived at the party to find that the margaritas were indeed spicy. Red Alert! Awooga! But I was able to calmly bypass them and drank a glass of fizzy water instead. I said hello to Edwina. Edwina always introduces herself as “Edwina, like Currie”, and I always introduce myself as “Esther, like Rantzen” and we’re sort of bonded together by having these weird old-lady names.

Edwina was not dressed like an old lady. She was wearing a hot pink needlecord jumpsuit and looked so dazzling that Giles kept mixing up his words like we were in a Carry On film. Then Camilla Long arrived and Giles and I barged shoulders as we simultaneously beetled over to her.

She was looking a tiny bit hunted. “I’m actually a very shy person,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “you are shy.”

“But my mother always used to say, ‘You’ve got to talk, Camilla, you’ve got to chat’. And so I’d drink 14 vodkas and then I was talking. ‘See, mother! I’m chatty now!”

Camilla had brought her soi-disant “boyfriend” Ben, who is a photographer. He is very calm. He has a resting heart rate of about 45 and gazes at Camilla as if she is a Speedlite that might need the batteries changed.

Camilla has a sister, Zoe - not present.

“Do you look alike?” I said, fantasising about there being two Camillas in the room. Camilla looked at Ben.

“No,” said Ben.

“No,” confirmed Camilla.

Then Camilla and I launched into a duet diss track about an incompetent interview in that day’s paper - rich coming from me, the world’s worst interviewer. Camilla once did me a massive favour by giving me permission never to do an interview ever again. I rang her in a ginormous tizz two years ago when I was in the middle of writing up this nightmare interview and my back was spasming and both eyes were twitching and for the first time in about twenty years I had no idea what I was doing. It was just awful.

“You can’t be an interviewer if you are neurotic,” she said, pointedly. And that was that.

Mr Potter made a speech.

“Everyone keeps asking me what this party’s for,” he said. “And so I looked up today’s birthdays and Brigitte Bardot is 90, so cheers!” RAY, went everyone.

It was now about 10pm, and someone put a spicy margarita in my hand. I gasped. Finally we meet, señor picante. The drink sat cold in my hand, a goodly amount of sea salt on the rim, a disc of actual chilli resting on an ice cube. Naltrexone helps me not reach for a drink, and it helps me to say, “No, thanks,” if someone offers to fetch one for me. But when one is placed in my hand?

I drank it in four gulps.

“We’ve got to leave,” I said to Giles, fearful that I would suddenly turn into the snarling margarita lime-eating werewolf. But then I saw Freddie W, who I had not seen for twenty years. When I was 16 she was the most beautiful girl I had ever met and remains a staggeringly gorgeous dainty elfin porcelain-skinned honey. I had heard that, on top of all this, she had become a spy.

“I’m not a spy,” she said. “I am a tired mum of two boys.”

“Oh, I wonder why I thought you were a spy? Someone told me you were doing something and it was like you were a spy.”

“I lived in Kenya for a bit?”

“That’ll be it,” I said. But, as I write this, I still think she might have been a spy. Spies don’t just confess, “I’m a spy.” But they do, like, randomly go and live in Kenya and then deny it’s because they’re a spy. So there you go: Freddie W - spy.

Then I saw Catherine Taylor, oh my god. Catherine turned up at Westminster in the year below me, in 1997, and it was like an ice pick to the heart. The caramel tan, the huge blue eyes, the Kate Middleton legs, the glossy tumbling brunette mane. I think when I first saw her I let out a cry of pure horror.

Catherine had broken her leg the summer before she arrived at Westminster and was on crutches and so we call her “Catherine Crutches” to this day, I think hoping that this would somehow diminish her massively unfair physical advantage. Reader: it did not.

I said to her, “You look exactly the same as you did when you were 16.” Except she didn’t. She looked better AUGH. I excused myself to the bathroom and stared at my face for a bit in the mirror and thought about facelifts. Then I went to find Charlotte Pyke, who is a very serious stage actress (Chekov and similar), and I said, “I think I need a facelift.” She said, “Tell me about it. I had to go into an edit the other day and see my own face on a UHD screen and I was just, like…” here she opened her mouth and blinked dramatically once or twice.

Mr Potter, who by now was extremely drunk, put another spicy margarita in my hand and, even though I was trying to leave the party and was additionally really quite panicked about the werewolf thing, I drank it, tugging at Giles’s sleeve even as I went glug, glug, glug. “Let’s go, let’s go,” I said.

Okay, so I did have those two drinks. But it was only two. I didn’t go red and dribble. And when I went to bed, I was at least still fully human.

How about you? What is the drink that will surely turn you into a crazed booze werewolf? Are you considering a facelift? Please leave a comment in the handy box below.