The OFM first birthday party proved to be a bit of a riot. First of all a certain supplier's wine didn't show up (tut, tut) . Patricia Lima from Mark Borkowski PR, who kindly provided both red and white Bertie Eden wine (organic, delicious, everyone loved it), tried her best to track down even more crates but to no avail. As the editor of OFM was running out of the door, credit card in hand, to Majestic, 65 bottles of warm Jacob's Creek champagne arrived in the back of a taxi to supplement the wonderful Moët that was being quaffed along with endless cold, cold, bottles of Stella. The super-efficient staff at Adam Street Private Members Club crammed the bottles into the fridges and soon tempers and nerves were as soothed and as cooled as the champagne.
By 8pm, an hour after the party officially started, the place was heaving. There was Skyy vodka downstairs in the discotheque. Those who imbibed both champagne and vodka suffered the consequences the next day (some suffered them that night).
At 1am there was many a swaying body on the dance floor, not to mention a certain young lady who was witnessed almost in flagrante pushed up against the cigarette machine by a rather attractive floppy-haired young man. But that's parties for you). The lovely Locatellis were expansively well-behaved in the way only Italians can be. Everyone wants a piece of Giorgio and Plaxy right now (as well as their stylish and sylph-like PR Emma Brook). Alan Crompton-Batt cornered our restaurant critic and writer Jay Rayner to harangue him over a piece Jay had written on the internet. Luckily, fisticuffs were avoided and lunch has been arranged. Top foodie Roy Ackerman, on his crutches, was being particularly sociable and was seen talking to absolutely everyone as was award-winning photographer John Reardon.
It seemed the whole of the country was there in one form or another. Food writer Jill Dupleix and her restaurant-critic partner Terry Durack were in fine form, dominating most of the room. Literary types were represented by agent Clare Conville and her working partner Patrick Walsh, American agent Stuart Krichevsky, writer Sophie Radice and her husband the film-maker Dan Weldon plus documentary director Stuart Mitchell, Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop and travel writer Polly Rodger Brown. Literary scout Louise Allen-Jones and husband, booksman Keith Allen-Jones, kept the table of luminaries in stitches including novelists Louisa Young and Nicholas and Sian Lezard, man-about-town John Walsh and House of Magic man Simon Drake.
Lowlights: Observer editor Roger Alton having to leave early to help his daughter do her homework; the fact that we didn't provide enough M&S food - we miscalculated, sorry!
Highlights: an impressively pregnant, but perfectly shod, Kathryn Flett tracking down the one waiter who had any M&S canapes; watching John Burton-Race chatting emotionally to Newsweek's New York-based art editor Patty Alvarez; marvelling at myriad thirtysomethings trying to dance to garage and house (at least I think that's what it's called); the soon-to-depart editor of OFM arguing loudly about nothing as per usual with her long-suffering eldest brother. Yes, she called him the next day to apologise. Neither of them could remember much anyway, only that somehow she'd ended up in casualty with a cut eye. Just another day on OFM...
