Christmas Parties - ho ho f*cking ho!

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas parties. When I was in paid employment, works’ dos always filled me with consternation... 

Apparently, it is not de rigeur to piss oneself at the office party.

On the one hand: How and why should you endure hours of enforced frivolity, whilst sitting next to or opposite someone you fucking hate? Surely, everyone knows how it feels to look at the cheap, sweet cooking wine and think, if I don’t drink this, I am going to die to death of brain deflation. If I do drink this, I am going to tell Mr. Sweaty Knob Cheese and his over-inflated, ego-inflicted side kick, Miss Hoity Toity Pointy Tits exactly what I think of them. We’ve been there, many times, haven’t we? Looking down at your poorly cooked turkey and stuffing, pondering how you could be at home, snorting supermarket own brand gin; having farting competitions with your other half whilst watching Grand Designs and writhing with semi-sexual anorak envy at Kevin McCloud’s McMurdo parka. 

As you can see, I don't like to overdress at parties but I do shave.

On the other hand: This is the offer of a NIGHT OUT. Shoreleave from HMS Parenthood and Grand Designs. Of course you’re going to fucking go! For once, you can take off the thermal vest that is starting to get stiff under the armpits. Kick off those disintegrating slippers! Do your roots! Shave your cleavage! Take a chisel to the kid-puke stains on your favourite coat! So, you shoehorn yourself into something ill-fitting and sparkly, that looked good when you lost all that weight four years ago. You slide your crispy trotters into the fuck-me shoes that make your arches sting and require you to use the short arse in the office as a walking stick. You put on your best knickers and the bra that aren’t grey with perished elastic. 

And what happens?

It’s a disaster, because your boss expects you to be nice to Hoity Toity and the Knob Cheese. You have to do Secret Santa and buy the bastards something witty, like a tartan scarf with a depressed cat ironically embroidered onto it instead of depleted Uranium and a Jaegermeister bottle full of Harpic 100% Limescale Remover. Then come the crackers. As if wearing a brightly coloured paper hat and reading out remedial jokes isn’t denigrating enough when you do it with your family. Now, you have to do it in front of the accounts manager, who hasn’t stopped looking at your saggy, lacklustre boobies for the last twenty minutes.

You CAN polish a turd! Treat spotty Gail to some of this.

Maybe....maybe you’re obliged to dance and you forget yourself. Twerking to Slade, because it reminds you of the time when you didn’t need gastro-resistant capsules or cod liver oil. And now your pile has come down and you’ve left a little trail of soggy arse-maltesers on the dancefloor because your pelvic floor collapsed in 2005. Maybe, you have to make a quick getaway before you have a complete prolapse into Goolie Julie’s clutchbag or you accidentally tell the boss that he/she is a humourless, tedious cock gobbler of epic proportions that even cooking wine or scribbling out his/her face with permanent magic marker won’t temper or repair.

So, my fine friends, the trouble with Christmas parties is not Noddy Holder or my Father-in-Law scratching his ear flakes at the dinner table. The trouble lies with me. When I had them, I hated them. Now that I’m self-employed and don’t get invited to any, everyone else’s seem to be wonderful, exotic functions. For yet another year, I shall therefore sit, festering in the shadow of my sticky laptop, festooned with ironing and peeling Dead Beryl wallpaper, wondering that invitations to glamorous events simply do not land on my door mat. But once they do start to come my way again, it will be good, for lo! They will be literary parties, where my modus operandi of getting horribly drunk really quickly, talking bollocks at a deafening volume and then mooning at people I’m not very fond of or flashing a tit at those I am will blend in seamlessly with the other quasi-alcoholic sociopaths. But for now, perhaps it’s better I stay at home this year. Again...

Remember! Beer goggles are an essential Christmas party accessory.

Flighty Birds

Nobody likes wet socks. Right? And nobody really hankers after freezing their tiddies off. Do they? And it definitely makes sense, in the event of having to walk a mile through horizontal rain, to wear an anorak and put the hood up. Or is that just me? Utilitarian Woman. Thelma from Scooby Doo.

Lately I have been feeling aggrieved at the regular sight of what my mother calls Flighty Birds – young and pert women trotting with bouncy hair through the daily downpour, wearing high heels and almost invisible skirts. I hope they’re going to work. I would feel better if I knew they were just another office drudge like me. But I strongly suspect they might be going shopping to Harvey Nicks, where they will max out Daddy’s or Hubby’s platinum card on a load of designer crap. They are like colourful birds of paradise in an urban, grey jungle with their stick legs, yellow hair and orange faces. They look sort of nice in a highly groomed, designer label-clad, conformist way.

Cowbags. How dare they? Am I the only sour old bastard that looks at these extraordinary creatures and thinks, how come your feet don’t get bloody wet in the rain? How is it that you don’t feel the 11 degrees of cold and can wear a waist-length flimsy jacket, flashing your flat stomach and gravity defying arse? And here I am, dressed up like Nanook of the North in my sensible Goretex walking shoes. I catch my reflection in windows of smart shops that contain mannequins dressed just like these show-ponies but instead of seeing hot totty, my reflection shows me Ranulph Fiennes with droopy tits, a sodden handbag and slightly more toes.

Why? Why are these women different from me, with their impeccably trowelled-on makeup and perfectly coiffed hair? I have makeup but the school run and herding children always stands in the way, leaving me with no energy to put it on or take it off. My hair is so unruly and crap that I stopped bothering forking out on a real hairdresser fifteen years ago. Instead, I have a man called Stan who comes to the house and gives me a dry trim for £6. He tells me that my crowning frizz is “like fanny hair but not as nice”. I’m in fairly good shape too because I run a lot but whereas these flighty birds look like gazelles in leggings, I manage to look like Samwise Gamgee in drag. I only ever buy skirts to hang in the wardrobe “Just in case” because, let’s face it girls, who the fuck fancies a Force 10 gale blowing up their woo woo when they could be armoured against the elements in trousers?

But this thing with the flighty birds: it was ever so. At college, twenty years ago, they had the lads queuing up to worship them. They always had tresses of long hair which they would flick with panache at the men, marking their territory like a dog peeing on a lamppost. These girls cried a lot in public and simpered. I thought they had hairspray between their ears and nothing more. But the lads were intoxicated by their ability to wear hot pants and high heels in the snow. They would walk to the ends of the earth for these girls just because their fanny was a bit visible through their leggings and they had really long hair. In later life, I see these girls as women in their late thirties, pushing expensive three-wheeler prams, still perfectly groomed, wearing Uggs and beatified grins and coaxing their fragrant, Jottum-clam offspring in gentle musical tones to the Audi Q8, whilst the rest of us drag our ketchup-stained, mouthy Borstal Bills to the cruddy finger-marked, bird-shit splattered crapwagon, where they will kick chunks out of each other all the way home because of a badly divided chocolate biscuit.

So there you have it. Women like me with strong characters and sound minds can earn our own dollar, tile a bathroom and make a good dinner from scratch. We make our own beds and notwithstanding the odd forgotten, half-eaten sandwiches, we lie in them happily. But these creatures, these 24/7 Barbies, in a box-fresh state of perfection with real plastic and space on the inside of their heads are actually the alpha females. They move through life effortlessly on a cloud of whimsy and want in their high heels and sheer tights, impervious to all weathers and with almost visible muffery. And when their arches finally collapse, they will be carried onwards by a throng of adoring men who would always rather settle for Daphne than Thelma out of Scooby Doo.