The Night Ibiza Came to Our Garden.

By Sylvie, France

Sometimes discovering another world does not mean travelling anywhere. Sometimes it arrives in your garden, turns up the music, jumps into the pool and politely tells you that it is time to leave your own party.

When we started talking about “discovering other worlds,” I wasn’t completely sure what that meant. Another country, perhaps. Another culture. Maybe even another planet. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that another world does not have to be far away at all.

You can enter another world when you read a book. You can find one in a conversation with somebody who sees life differently from you. You can discover one through a new hobby. Even when you are sleeping, your dreams can take you somewhere completely different.

For me, that is where curiosity comes in. I think curiosity helps us stay young because we continue learning. We stay interested in people and in things we do not already know.

And then I realised that, without planning it, I had just spent part of my holiday helping to build another world in my own garden.

My daughter was having a birthday party, and she had chosen Ibiza as the theme. It was very much her party, and she knew what she wanted. She helped with the preparations, the cooking and the decorations, and luckily the weather cooperated too. We had already had rain and wind during another family celebration, but this time there was no wind and no rain. We had the pool, the decorations and the music. People arrived dressed for the theme, and slowly our ordinary garden began to look less like home and a little more like somewhere else.

Of course, if you are creating Ibiza in your garden, you also need cocktails.

I had already tested one cocktail at the family celebration the week before, and my daughter liked it, so I made it again. It had vodka, sparkling wine, something similar to champagne, and different fruit juices, including pineapple. I prepared about six litres.

Six litres sounds like plenty until you look around and see how many people have arrived.

At one point I remember thinking, Oh no, perhaps we don’t have enough drinks.

Fortunately, we also had beer, Malibu with pineapple juice, some lighter alcoholic drinks and different flavoured vodkas. Some guests brought their own drinks as well. By the next day, a few bottles were considerably emptier than I remembered them being.

The cocktail was actually very easy to drink because it did not taste particularly strong. But I knew that after five or six glasses, people might become a little more funny.

The following morning, perhaps a little less funny.

There was plenty of food too. We ordered enormous filled pretzels from a bakery, around sixty centimetres long, with fillings such as salmon and ham. We had three of them. We made wraps too. My daughter prepared some things that morning, while other food had been prepared earlier, frozen and taken out again for the party. We had small tomatoes with mozzarella and different fruits.

It made me laugh a little to think that I was supposed to be on holiday. Holidays sound very restful until you start organising birthdays. There is shopping, preparing, cooking and, afterwards, cleaning. It can become quite a busy kind of rest.

But this party belonged to my daughter, and after all our preparation, there came a moment when she was ready for us to understand that.

At the beginning, my husband and I stayed with some family members. We helped at the bar, had one or two drinks and enjoyed the atmosphere. About two hours later, my daughter looked at her watch.

It was time for us to leave.

Our house. Our garden. Our food. Our six litres of cocktail.

But apparently, no longer our party.

So we left.

We went next door for a while and came home later. By then, the party was carrying on perfectly well without us. People were in the pool, the music was playing and the garden had completely become their space.

Upstairs, we had a window overlooking everything.

Naturally, we had a little look.

We did not switch on the lights. We stood there quietly, watching what was happening below. Then, at exactly the wrong moment, my daughter looked up.

She saw us.

Our secret observation of Ibiza was over.

We moved away from the window.

Eventually we went to bed, although going to bed and actually sleeping turned out to be two different things. My husband had prepared another place behind the house where they could continue the party and play louder music. Some people went there, but others stayed in the garden, which was unfortunately quite close to our bedroom.

The music was loud. The people were loud. And as the evening continued, some of them seemed to discover even more energy.

We were also thinking about the neighbours. Eventually my husband went downstairs and asked everyone to be quieter. My daughter was not especially pleased about that. From her point of view, this was still her party.

Afterwards, though, it became better. They moved to the other room and carried on there.

Until about five o’clock in the morning.

Six people slept at our house that night. And I have to give them some credit: by the time the party finally ended, they had already done some cleaning and put rubbish away. For people finishing an Ibiza party at five in the morning, I thought that was quite good.

Only afterwards, when we were talking about discovering other worlds, did I see the party differently.

While it was happening, I had been thinking about practical things. Was there enough food? Were there enough drinks? Was the music too loud? What about the neighbours? What would the house look like tomorrow morning?

But my daughter and her friends had been doing something else. For one evening, they had created their own little Ibiza. They had not needed to travel there. They created the feeling of another place through the music, clothes, decorations, pool, food, drinks and, most importantly, the people sharing it.

And perhaps I had discovered another world too.

For a little while, I was allowed to see the world my daughter shares with her friends. I helped prepare it. I stood inside it for a couple of hours. Then she looked at her watch and made it quite clear that my visiting hours were over.

There was something funny about that, but also something interesting. Discovering another world does not mean you have to belong to it. Sometimes you can simply be curious about it. You can enter for a while, look around, enjoy what you understand, wonder about what you do not understand, and then allow the people who belong there to carry on without you.

Perhaps that is why curiosity feels important to me. It keeps the mind open. There are always other people to learn from and other ways of experiencing life. Another world might be a country you have never visited, a book you have never read, a hobby you have never tried or a conversation with someone whose life is different from yours.

Sometimes it might even be another generation.

And sometimes, if you are lucky, you do not have to travel anywhere to find it.

You only have to look out of the upstairs window.

Preferably before your daughter looks back.