Do's and Don'ts

Yesterday evening, well, more late afternoon really, we went to Kevin's work's do.

At Mayhem, the end of the Christmas term was always one long trail of celebrations, or perhaps a mish-mash. We'd start with the Eid party at the end of Ramadan, then we'd teach our classes Christmas songs and carols in French and German, and then there would be the classroom decorating, which at Mayhem was an extraordinary event. In other schools I've worked at, decorations had to be kept to a minimum because they were a fire hazard. At Mayhem, you were supposed to encourage your tutor group to be as over-the-top as possible. There were some outrageous offences to the eyeball. My own classroom had a very high ceiling, so young lives were risked in traditional Mayhem fashion, standing tiptoe on a chair perched precariously on a table.
Then Christmas cards would flood in and be blue-tacked all around the whiteboard until you were short of space to write, which may of course have been the intention.

During the last week of term, lessons were disrupted by the Christmas dinner. This was a yummy platter of overcooked and overboiled meat, gravy and veggies, but it had to be done.

Then finally, there were the actual Christmas do's, so fraught with politics. The department would go out. My own department was somewhat dysfunctional in this respect, in that one of my colleagues was a Jehovah's Witness and two of the women didn't get on with any of the men. Mostly we managed to put differences aside and go out, depending on the degree of rancour there had been during the preceding weeks.

I know another department where the whole department organised themselves to go out without the Head of Department.

The school itself didn't provide us with any sort of party, but usually some socially minded individual (Sleepy) or some bossy-boots (someone else) would organise a pub crawl or a pub that we could all go to where we hadn't yet been banned.
But even then, there may be factions, so the smokers for example, who as everywhere were actually the cool people, would go to this place, and the young things would go to that.

There was another Christmas event that was organised in this way, and this was one faction of the support staff's do. I was favoured by the leader of this group and was invited the first year I was there, and thereafter, but it had to be kept quiet. There was a kind of charm to that event, because it reminded me very much of going to my mum's work's do's back in the sixties. Big room, lots of different companies represented, dinner, which wasn't unlike the school Christmas dinner, followed by dancing. Good times, good people, the opposite of posh.

And this was the grown-up one, my sister and I always had to go to the special kiddies do in the afternoon, so now finally, I was able to go the grown-ups' party.
The lady who organised it was incredibly good at getting everyone, all ages, into the groove, all danced, and the music was great. Fabulous and totally Pompey. I loved it.

Kevin's work do was a more sophisticated version of this. It was held at the Hotel Vancouver, which I was less than impressed by because we had to spend too much time working out whether to trust what passes for public transport here, or try driving around downtown looking for parking. We settled for the latter since I knew we might have to make a quick getaway given my not feeling up to scratch.

Many people told me how prestigious the Hotel Vancouver is. Well firstly, if you have to tell someone that, then it isn't, and secondly, so what?
The Pyramids at Southsea wasn't prestigious, but it was totally appropriate and accessible and that's what counts.

The dinner was lush, absolute perfection. The ambiance was lovely and the music was dross. But we enjoyed it and got to talk to people we liked and the car was still in the car park and with all its wheels on when we got back, so you can't really ask for more.
Oh well, except for a DJ who knows what he's doing of course.