Despite trying all day and into the evening on the Fourth to get one of the hippies, drunks or Democrats to come back and fetch me so I could join them on the Extremely Small Island, I failed.  There was nothing for it but to go to the other party.  The invitation said 6:30 and by then it was half past seven.

I cut flowers from the garden and made a sweet bunch of poppies, snap dragons, toad flax, delphiniums and peonies (everything is late this year), threw together my salad contribution and grabbed a bottle of wine.

The party was at a beach house with a panoramic view across the water – so wide that the hostess (who just about knew who I was after I told her my name) told me that this time of year they could see the sunrise on the right edge of the horizon and the sunset on the left.  Alas, she seemed unimpressed with my posy wrapped at the stem in wet paper towels and cling film.  I guess hers was more an exotic hothouse plants from the florist sort of world.

I added my bottle to the shared table (where, unpromisingly, it was one of two) and poured myself a large glass. (I was right in predicting it would be the only glass I would get.) Passing a table laden with salads, chips (crisps), and rows of red white and blue cupcakes topped with mini American flags, I tentatively wandered over to the tail end of the barbeque.

As he deposited a hotdog on my paper plate the cook said, pointedly, “So glad you could come,” and I realised at once that he must be the host and that he was quite sure I had crashed his party.

I ate my hot dog and chatted a little to the few people I knew or recognised, including Dancing Man whom I had spotted from an internet dating site (where I occasionally lurk but never have the nerve to post a profile myself).  I didn’t let on that I knew he was Dancing Man.

Most people had eaten and, for something to do, I helped clean up. Then, beginning to feel sorry for myself, I sat alone and watched the sun set.  Across the water firework displays were getting going, and from the next door house, hidden by a bank of trees, there was an occasional bang.  The several dozens of guests at this party pulled up their chairs to the water’s edge and waited.

After a very, very long time two young men rowed out to a barge loaded with fireworks and lit a fuse.  Loudspeakers began to play The Star Spangled Banner and the first rockets went up.

There’s nothing like being abroad for thirty years to bring out patriotism.  It has been at least a couple of decades since I was in the US on the Fourth of July and the anthem with the rockets thrilled me.  But I am afraid my enjoyment of the show ended there.  The music became increasingly loud and the lyrics increasingly aggressive and unpleasant until there was one that seemed to be saying we would put a bullet in your butt courtesy of the red, white and blue.

On the way home I caught the tail end of a much better display on the other side of the island.  I went to bed feeling sullied and fell asleep to the sounds of distant bangs as my fellow Americans celebrated on into the night.