Fun, flirty and wild – it’s time to let your party animal loose!
WITH the festive season almost upon us, this is no time to be turning the party animal into an endangered species. 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 point and who, once they’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?
Free pack of food poisoning anyone?
SOMEWHERE west of Taunton, a member of the CrossCountry Rail catering staff walked through our train carriage with a tray of packaged sandwiches.
They were closing for the day, she explained, and she had to get rid of them all. ‘Won’t you have one?’ she asked, waving what I think was a ham and salad. ‘Else, they’ll just be thrown away.’
I asked if it was really necessary to chuck them out when surely they could find people in Penzance, where the line ended, who would appreciate some free food.
She answered that if it was the homeless I was referring to, they had tried that, but when someone had got food poisoning and sued the company, they stopped doing it. So I guess they only consider it worth risking with paying customers.
£80,000 earns you a wallop from Corbyn
THURSDAY’S Question Time saw a member of the audience express incredulity that he could conceivably be a member of the top five per cent – those who will face increased income tax under Labour.
But since he admitted to earning more than £80,000 a year, that’s exactly what he is. While £80,000 is unquestionably a substantial sum, I doubt that the audience member is alone among people in that wage bracket who is surprised to find this income – and the lifestyle it affords him – makes him a target for punitive taxation. But if Labour win a majority at the General Election, they have made it clear that that’s exactly what will happen.
The night I blew my chance to sniff snuff
WE WERE lucky enough to dine in splendour at Oriel College’s High Table in Oxford earlier in the week. At the end of the meal, there was a huge surprise on offer along with the port: snuff. I wasn’t sure if snuff was an Oriel dining tradition because Sir Walter Raleigh, the man who popularised tobacco in England, is one of its famous alumni, or if it was normal Oxford practice.
But since I’d never taken it before, this seemed the ideal opportunity to test it out. Sadly, as so often on such occasions, I wimped out. Worried that I might have a sneezing fit or it might make me feel sick, I took such a small pinch that all I got was a grubby smudge on my nose rather than the nasal-clearing, energy fix the tobacco is meant to provide. But even so, how much more civilised than having to shiver outside in the cold, sucking on a fag.
Why every politician needs a spatula...
ANOTHER first this week was a spot of political leafleting. Dropping off some keys to our neighbours, I saw they had piles of targeted mailshots waiting to be delivered to potential supporters. I volunteered to help out, as much a diversionary tactic from finishing the book I’m writing, as anything else.
After a couple of hours I’d learnt two big lessons. Firstly a plastic spatula is an essential tool to avoid trapping your hand as a letterbox snaps at your fingers – as well as helping to make sure you push the stuff right through so the next canvassers don’t yank it out. And, secondly, you can’t determine anyone’s political allegiance from the state of the paintwork on the front door.
Stunning Zoe could NEVER be a nerd
AN UPCOMING TV series based on Nick Hornby’s brilliant novel High Fidelity features Zoe Kravitz, pictured below, as the books’ central character Rob Fleming, now recast as a woman.
That’s all very modern but the problem is that Rob is a guy. And not just any guy, but that thoroughly nerdy kind many of us know. The kind who thinks all problems can be solved be recataloguing their vinyl collection – and who retires into the safety of compiling top five lists of his favourite music tracks when he can’t deal with his disastrous love life.
Women don’t behave like that. They don’t find salvation in the comparative merits of Led Zep’s Stairway To Heaven and Dylan’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door. They just don’t. But that’s Rob and his like for you – and that’s the whole point of Hornby’s story.
Two words – women and diversity – are all-powerful in Hollywood right now, which is why we are going to have to suffer a stunningly beautiful female Rob Fleming.
But when the pendulum swings in a different direction, should we be looking forward to a male Bridget Jones?