My friend is going to visit her ageing parents in America. She hasn’t seen them in three years, but now she’s booked her ticket after months of calls home invariably ending with: “We miss you so much.” She hasn’t told them she’s coming though. I’m writing this from my own mother’s house.
I arrived on Saturday, and she’d been counting down the days, just like I had. There were clean sheets on the bed, Chuckles on my pillow, fish paste in the fridge and a tasty soup cooked for dinner. How would you feel if I just turned up, I asked, for a surprise?
While she’d be delighted to see me, she said as a qualifier she would be completely thrown, unprepared, aware of all the plans she’d have to rearrange, of the things she would like to have done before I arrived. She’d have missed the build-up, the anticipation, the excitement. This may be controversial, but most surprises are, by their nature, more fun for the person doing the surprising.
We tell ourselves it’s about the recipient, while we gleefully plot and scheme, licking our keen lips, delighting in our own cleverness. But it’s a medical truism that the dopamine hit comes in the planning, in the expectation. Surprise parties, surprise guests, surprise changes to plans like when you think you’re going camping and you end up at a fancy hotel, and all you’ve packed are takkies and bugspray – frankly, you can keep them.
Surprises need to be either low-stakes or as spectacular as diamond rings and lottery wins; crucially, they shouldn’t rob anyone of the pleasure of anticipation, or catch them short. I once attended a surprise 40th party. The birthday boy arrived with his wife, thinking he was fetching his parents en route to dinner in his favourite restaurant.
Instead, there was a pig on a spit, a mirror ball in the garage and us hiding behind the furniture. Late that night I found myself sitting beside him quietly contemplating the pig carcass suspended over the dying embers of the evening. I asked how he had felt when he realised they weren’t going to the restaurant.
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