Dialogue: Office Christmas party a right dog's breakfast

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Arriving home from an office Christmas party in my early 20s, not long after the sun of the 20th century was in decline from its apogee, I decided to take some vitamin B tablets to fight off the hangover that would otherwise clamp on to my head when I awoke the next morning. I found the pills on the vanity in the bathroom and washed them down with a glass of milk.

I was sub-editing on a provincial afternoon newspaper in those days and when I groped with tentative feet for the floor at 6 in the morning and prepared for a standoff with the breakfast prepared for me by the Management I was married to at that time, my stomach was doing a Rotorua - bubbling and hissing, despite the pills.

My wife then set about finding the buttons to sew on the only clean business shirt available.

To cut a long horror story short, we gradually deduced that I had taken two shirt buttons the night before and washed them down with baby formula.

The office function had been billed as a wine-and-cheese party but at that stage in our evolution as a culture the wine was plonk and the cheese was cheddar; so it was really a traditional beer-and-peanuts do, with the blokes standing around loudly telling bad jokes with increasingly slurred diction, and the women, huddled together, bizarrely over-dressed in the desperate expectation that for once they would attract attention and be included in the fun.

I remember the manager saying with pride that he had provided two blocks of cheese and two one-pound bags of peanuts to go with the 20-gallon keg "because I don't want it to be one of those boozy dos."

When I got to work the next morning, the other early-shift sub-editor, whom I shall call Spencer for the very good reason that that was his name, was nearer the White Island end of dyspepsia than Rotorua.

He explained that when he had arrived home in the early hours he was ravenous and found his wife had left him a bowl of stew on the bench. He heated it up, slopped in some Worcester sauce and enjoyed a wholesome meal.

When he went to bed, his wife sleepily asked him how the evening went and he said fine and thanked her for the thoughtful gesture of the stew.

Their bed shook for fully five minutes, he said, not with lust but with her laughter. The bowl had contained dog food from a can with some scrag-end chopped up and mixed in.

Spencer said he found the can in the rubbish and the label carried the legend, "Not fit for human consumption."

I said, "Well, who would want to eat a can, anyway." He said he might, later in the day, find that remark amusing but in the meantime would I mind if he smacked me on the mouth.

Yes, I would mind, I said, because my bile was in litigation with two shirt buttons and the verdict was hanging in the balance.

Spencer apologised and said he wasn't quite himself and I said that was fine by me because it was himself for whom I had antipathy. He let that go past him and said he wasn't sure whether his problem was primarily physical or mental. Would he feel as bad as he did if he hadn't found out about the stew?

A few minutes later, he went to the toilet and vomited. When he came back to his desk, I suggested that at least he knew his woe was physical and he said he still wasn't sure because he felt the vomiting was also a load off his mind.

By mid-morning I was feeling a bit better and I went to the toilet down in the print room, a cathedral-like corrugated iron shed. As I stood in the posture of a man at his stall, feet apart, weight evenly distributed, like a golfer at the tee, I noticed a white line painted on the wall in front of me with barbs pointing the way up the wall and the words, "Look heavenwards for the answer."

Around the cistern went the long arrow and on up the wall into the dim recess of the gabled ceiling. By now, consumed by curiosity, I was leaning back almost to toppling point and to the right, squinting at the message at the top of the wall. It read: "You are now piddling on your left shoe."

And I was.

From behind me, I heard a chorus of laughter from the printing staff.

I tell you this cautionary tale from the odyssey of my life to warn you against the excesses of the office party, but also to urge you, please, to remember the best antidote for almost anything is long, loud laughter. Have fun at the office this week.

Oh, and did you hear the one about the group of Irish tourists kicking up a fuss outside the Hampton Court maze? They couldn't find the way in.