You only really know you've had a successful party when this has happened

(and ooh la la, how embarrassing it is)

To be honest, I often wake up with a head like a bowling ball after an average party.

But it can always be worse.

Besides the fact that there was a dead rat living in my throat, I was already dizzy just moving my pinky, and I could still taste the 82 Flügels from the night before just fine in retrospect, I was struggling more with something else, on January 1, 2018. And that has everything to do with a, uh, rather naked photo. And family. A deadly cocktail.

What happened? At the beginning of the evening, my New Year's company, who unfortunately loves pitchers of beer and golden bottles of champagne just like I do, thought: ‘hey, hooray, let's take a polaroid! For the wall! Fun! Excitement!’ We posed, laughed charmingly, and of course, the automatic filter that makes polaroids so popular masked all our watery drunken eyes. Three euros were collected at the bar for the photographer and tada. The plan was immediately followed by the next brilliant plan: ‘let's send this to our friend who isn't here tonight!’

To avoid further embarrassment, I won't name names, but friend X (a man, of course) decided it was more original to send the polaroid through on his naked body. As in: in the middle of the pub, his denim shirt was enthusiastically ripped open, the photo was placed on his bare body, some shots were added, all ‘hahaha’ and up, a new photo was taken with the phone. Yes, with nipple, chest hair and all, the group picture was thrown into the wide world called WhatsApp.

I wanted to send the nipple pic again around two o'clock, when I often feel more cheerful than not, let's say, in a group chat. A group chat with friends. Friends who can appreciate something like that, let that be clear. But because all those group names look so similar, the confusion is often quite large, around that time. The specific friends app I was looking for is called ‘Foute Party’ and as soon as you search for ‘F’, things unexpectedly go horribly wrong. I sent it. To. My. Family. ‘Family Heinhuis app’. Without any text. Without explanation. Just nakedness. And yes, I know you can delete a sent message in WhatsApp, but you have to do that within seven minutes. I only saw it the next morning when I was already a bowling ball.

And now you have family apps where there might be laughter and where cousins and uncles also send back naked nipples and such after receiving a nearly naked picture. But you also have family apps that, let me put it this way, don't really know what to do with it. As in: an app with cousins, nieces, and uncles and aunts that you see once a year. At most. So no one said anything in that app. Dead silence. And everyone opened the photo. And I hadn't even wished them a happy new year yet. Can you imagine.

No, next year I will gladly throw all Flügels over my shoulder. And perhaps I'll skip the next family outing a bit subtly. But that polaroid will definitely hang on the wall.

FACTS

• Dutch people drink about 2.5 million bottles of champagne a year. At least 95% of these bottles are opened in the last week of the year.
• On average, we have a hangover for about 2 years of our lives. Just calculate it, weekend after weekend…
• After 10 years, every polaroid fades and the shelf life has expired.