As we all witnessed last week, turning up to a party wearing the wrong outfit can be excruciating and difficult to live down.

A lot of the fancy dress parties I've been to have left me with egg on my face but I had a sense of schadenfreude when I dressed up as a belly dancer over New Year in Cornwall.

I decided to go down to Newquay to see in the New Year with a group of friends, with a view to surfing on January 1 and, after a bit of research on where we'd be staying, which was a converted barn near Newquay, we discovered that it was protocol to celebrate New Year in fancy dress across the whole of Cornwall.

Now, there's dressing up as a pirate by putting on an eye-patch and then there's embroidering your own Bo Peep dress, and Newquay's revellers fell into the second category.

We hadn't taken the whole fancy dress thing very seriously and I'd slung some old skirts and jewellery into my travel bag just in case I'd be forced to carry a "prop" as a nod to the fancy dress tradition.

Meeting my friends, I found that they hadn't taken it seriously either. One hadn't bothered to bring anything and the others had brought the odd Native American feature and a stetson.

It was only when we hit Newquay that we began to get worried. The first sight of 12 pirates, complete with peg-legs and stuffed parrots, was quirky. The second group of revellers, this time a bunch of lads dressed as an Army platoon, with hard hats and blacked-out faces, got us thinking about how seriously this "dressing up" is taken. But it wasn't until we hit the heart of the town that the truth dawned on us.

The scene resembled the Mardi Gras. There were cartoon characters, celebrities and rock stars. We even saw a group of road-signs heading for a pub. And these were not costumes that had been cut out of an old bed-sheet.

A wave of horror passed through every one of us. If only we'd paid more attention.

The minute I got to the barn, I started rifling through my stuff for garments that I could add to my disguise as an Arabian Nights character. One of the guys decided to go as a squaddie and spent a couple of hours making a hat out of twigs and leaves; another used every suede item she'd got to dress up as a Native American and one back-combed her hair and used her jumper as a skirt to look 80s.

We headed off for the pub feeling proud of our efforts. And thank heavens we had dressed up. The pub was spilling over with the most outrageous costumes. I had a conversation with a stylish Uma Thurman (in Pulp Fiction mode) and marvelled at a couple dressed in matching red to resemble the cover of a White Stripes album.

But amid the wondrous splendour, I noticed three men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, looking miserably into their beer. I felt a moment of satisfaction. I was in fancy dress and I was having a great night. This made up for all the times I'd turned up to parties overdressed, underdressed or not dressed up at all.