Sunday marked the housewarming party my friend Pad invited Simmy and me along to. And it turned out to be an “Only in England…” affair… at least for me.

The house I live in, in Carlisle, is a normal, terraced house which looks just like any other house on my street, or in fact my entire neighbourhood. 5 rooms, plus kitchen, bath and a living room that’s a joke.

Turns out, Pad only lives a couple of blocks from me, but it seemed like a whole other world. We turned the corner, and stood in front of this massive, stately home, complete with large garden and turret with skylight. Who knew Carlisle can be this nice?? He lives in the flat on the top floor (the one with the skylight) and even his bathroom is bigger than the room I have been living in for the past 20 months. And he only pays 30 pounds more than I do! Not fair!

Simmy and I have made a plan. We’re going to move into Pad’s flat… Pad just doesn’t know it yet! That means, one of us is going to distract Pad, the other will be stealing the tenancy agreement and change the name on it! But pssst! Don’t tell Pad! ;)

The original invitation to the party had contained a picture of the house, and I thought it was a joke. But standing in front of the real house, I began to get jealous.
The garden was spacious, old stone steps leading down to the lower terraces. We had a BBQ and a big bucket contained various, ice-cold forms of alcohol. The sun was shining and it couldn’t have been much better.

And then Austin Powers appeared.

A guy called Brian showed up, dressed like Austin Powers in blue, striped suit and red dotted shirt, complete with the hair-do and glasses. You don’t believe me? Here’s proof:

Most of us giggled at first, to which “Austin” just replied: “You’re laughing now – you’ll be screaming later”. Aww, bless British pop culture! He kept it up for the entire time we were there, which was close to six hours. Honestly, he was Austin Powers, doing the moves, and he even had Mike Myers’ pattern of speech! As the evening progressed, he got a Cuban Cohiba cigar out and passed it round the bonfire, which we lit in the fire place in the back of the garden. I’m not a smoker, but I have to admit it was kinda cool to smoke a cigar with a super spy!

Since I attended the party together with my boyfriend, it’s obvious we kept together quite a lot. This prompted one of the party guests to come over to us and say “Can I just say: you’re such a cute couple! Honestly, it really warms my heart!” Awwww, how sweet is that? A bit weird, having a stranger walk up to us and tell us, but nice nonetheless!