Fun, flirty and wild – it’s time to let your party animal loose!

WITH the festive season almost upon us, this i s no time to be turning the party animal into an endangered s pecies. And yet it’s happening.

On his disastrous Newsnight interview, Prince Andrew was at pains to deny that he might have ever been one – contributing to the growing, joyless movement transforming this once desirable persona into a figure of ill-repute.

When did being jolly and sociable begin to smack of dubious, predatory behaviour?

We need our party animals. I would go as far as to say they are essential. How are we going to manage over the next month if we don’t have a few around to keep the whole Christmas show on the road?

The neighbourly drinks, the office bash (complete with next-morning mortification) the extravagant annual shindigs would all fall painfully flat if deprived of party animals. There’s little fun to be had in a gathering of circumspect wallflowers.

For party animals, it’s the whole business of being at the party they love. They aren’t sad saps for whom the invitation is the main poi nt and who, once t hey’ve received theirs, would really rather stay at home and watch Succession for a second time.

They want to be out and about, centre stage, dressed in their glad rags. Hurling themselves in the action and all the tantalising social possibilities – the mingling, the flirting, the charged-encounters, the gossip – is what drives them.

Generally, fully committed party animals don’t much mind who their fellow guests are since pretty well any gathering gives them, what an acquaintance who fits the bill describes as a ‘contact high’. These sociable beasts get their buzz, not from alcohol or any other drug, but the thrill of the festive jungle.

Without these fun-loving creatures our world would be a so much drabber place and we should do everything in our power to preserve them.

After all, who else is going to be first on the empty dancefloor?