THE OFFICE SUMMER PARTY 

In an organisation made up in equal measure of French and English employees an evening, social event has at least one reliable outcome. At midnight the Brits will be on the way to an unselfconscious drunkenness, collected in small vocal clumps nowhere near the dance floor; the French will be centre stage, in full-ceroc swing, on orange juice.

I work in such an organisation. Last Thursday was our party. 

Large-scale ‘get-togethers’ are not my preferred context. There is too much in them of what it was like to be 16, with fewer of its possibilities; too many of the disadvantages of the snapshot, rather than the cumulative. I am better over a contract than an evening, better through the tired and energetic shared space of the day-to-day than in a studied formal moment. 

Special moments adhere rarely to ‘special’ occasions or those of collective banter. They fly to unmarked days and shine. But I wait for the night to produce the core within the core, those with who lines can blur and truths surprise.

As cigarette smoke crept above the gathering in the London Courtyard of a Piccadilly club a magician ‘transformed’ Iraqi dinars into £50 notes and removed single facet Rubik’s cubes from unknowing pockets with the whisk of expert deception while guests stood in feigned or genuine comfort side by side. 

Three young Frenchmen I had never seen before and who work on my corridor engaged me in conversation. Today they are smiling faces; tomorrow they will have retreated to the segregation of the electronic security passes that prescribe our encounters. At work we don’t know who we don’t know and strangers are across the corridor. 

My workplace houses corridors in which English humour either dies or is over appreciated and Gallic chic lives. Careful or careless, it is never discordant. And neither does it reveal the individual. A Parisian woman once told me it would be unthinkable for a French girl to walk down the Cours Mirabeau in a pair of pink sunglasses. It is not so much that it wouldn’t go as that the thinking would not occur.

I am reminded that I seem, for the moment, to have chosen this office life. But how can this be? We are rarely entirely ‘true’ at work. Such is the face of professionalism. I have, however, never proceeded along those lines but instead sought roles in which the self and the expected face would recognise one another.  But does the fact of the rather wonderful colleagues in my small department and how relaxed I feel with them mitigate the power of the context?

On further musing it occurs to me that I have developed an unhelpful crush on the boss. Related scenarios and images have stolen into my workaday moments. I nurture the crush, then dismiss it, then carry it home.