I wish my fan club would stop following me around at this time of year

What a strange day it was yesterday. My last day of work for the year, yet the first working day of the week so far. It all felt strangely detached. Why did I go in for one day in the middle of the week? Well, two reasons, really. First, it was press day, and second, it was the Dennis Christmas Party.

Fortunately the mag was more or less done by the time I arrived, as the power went out not long after three, we were turfed out of the building for health and safety, and that was the end of that.

That’s when things started to get particularly interesting. The party, you see, was fancy dress, and Chris of the Phin was going at Dr Evil, complete with facial scar. He doesn’t have one naturally, so we walked down to the theatrical supplies shop in Covent Garden. What a bizarre place. Looking through the bottles of nasty coloured liquids on the shelves was like poking around in some evil witch’s pantry. Labels like ‘mucus’, ‘puss’ and ‘vomit’ were neatly pasted onto the sides of innocuous looking bottles that sat alongside ‘zesty mint’ flavour blood. There was all manner of moustaches called ‘Lenin’, ‘Bismarck’ or ‘Poirot’, universal horns, small space ears, tombstone teeth… the list goes on and on.

Anyhow, after some extensive digging around in a back room they found the necessary bottle of scar mixture and we decamped to Starbucks where Chris sat and applied it with a fine paint brush, using the back of an iPod as a compact mirror.

We mis-timed things badly, leaving there at six without realising the party didn’t start for another hour, so killed time in an unpleasantly packed Borders on Oxford Street where the queue stretched right back to the doors. We needn’t have stayed so long, though, as we arrived at Wax Bar an hour later to find the place already fairly packed with becostumed colleagues, some of whom were so well disguised they weren’t easy to recognise.

Aston and Ruth came as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill characters; Jules Winnfield and Elle Driver respectively.

Although there was an uncanny resemblance to Borat in some of Aston’s poses.

Phil and Claire

There are way too many unflattering pictures for comfort, which made for a bizarre but very fun end to the year. It was a bit like a surreal Awards ceremony seeing all the people I work with in strange costumes. I would have had a John Malkovich mask like the PC Pro team if it hadn’t been for that power cut, but the lights had gone out just as I was carefully clipping around the ears and I’d left the unfinished disguise on my desk, expecting to pick it up again later.

No such luck. The lights stayed out for the rest of the day, and so my desk stayed in its messy, scattered state, and will be like that when I return next year. Not a thought to relish. In the meantime, though, there’s Christmas and the New Year to enjoy, and I suspect that for the next week and a half, all thoughts of work will be a long, long way from my mind.

Clive and Nik

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