I CAME; I saw; I partied. It wasn't pretty, but I did it.

As some of you may remember from last week's column, I was invited to a party on Saturday night, a proper grown-up affair with booze and fags and everything, and I was terrified that I might not know what to do without a gaggle of children around to distract people from the fact that I am not very cool.

Fortunately, I don't have to be cool in my everyday life. I'm a mum for goodness sake, I'm supposed to wear baggy cardies and compulsively mispronounce pop stars' names. It's part of the mum code, along with telling unfortunate tales involving nudity and wee when our sons bring home their first girlfriends, and continuing to buy them inappropriate knitwear long after they have left home or, if the sweaters are really bad, the country.

But when the kids are stashed safely in their grandparents' spare room and you have to face the world as a free woman - a non-mum for a night - then the code goes right out the window and you have to pretend you know what you are doing. You have to pretend (gulp) to be cool.

And you know what? I think I just about got away with it. With a tip of my hat to Eliza Doolittle, I shrugged off my mumsy cardie and my naff ways for a night and walked among the cool without drawing too much attention to myself, even when I talked for half an hour about the rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain.

I would not go so far as to say I was wholly accepted into the cool colony, I would have had to have known all the words to a Nellie Furtado song for that to have been a possibility, but I was also not relegated to the nice-but-dull corner where well meaning folk were forced to talk to each other about On Digital and Volvos. In my book, that's a result.

The party itself was also a bit of a result. The house was packed to the rafters with 30-somethings acting like teenagers and one 70-something acting like James Bond (Harrison, Doug Harrison: licensed to charm younger ladies and put up a few shelves while he's about it).

There was much drinking, much dancing, much singing and much laughter, particularly when my other half and his brothers were doing the singing and dancing.

And because we were all sensible grown-up types underneath, there was no fighting. All right, there was almost a punch-up over the music but it was sorted out in a very adult fashion when the Indie crowd rushed the Dance divas, wrestled the Shaggy CD from them and threw it in the garden.

The morning after the night before - I say morning but it was actually a tad after midday if the truth be told - I was the first up. After a quick bath and a quick squint at my brother-in-law's lad mags, which he stacks quite stylishly boob-side-up in a towering pile next to the loo, I ventured downstairs into what had been a perfectly nice dining room but what was now a slightly less hygienic version of the bowels of hell.

Cans and bottles littered every surface. Some had been drained and then simply crushed under foot leaving a glistening carpet of glass for unwary sock-wearers to stumble across, while others had been dumped on the furniture half full and were now superglued to the wood by a sticky patch of alcohol that had evaporated to the consistency of treacle toffee.

Piles of fag ends were strewn about the place like a collection of unimaginative Damien Hirst fakes; a sight which initially made me very glad I gave up smoking years ago and then reminded me that I had in fact cadged a number of ciggies from my sister-in-law and shared a cigar with a Scottish scribbler called Kirsty just a few hours earlier.

It was a pitiful scene. Not quite as pitiful as the living room - what I found in there would have made Mulder and Scully run away screaming - but it was indeed a pitiful reminder of an almost perfect party.

So, I did the only thing I knew how, I put on the kettle for a nice cup of tea and got the vac out. It was then that I realised the party was really over, my temporary bout of insanity had ended and I was once again a distinctly uncool mum.