Show The Dog The Rabbit

My company Christmas / New Year "do" is on Saturday night at a local hotel. Vic and I have been seated by Mandy - who is organising the event - on a table consisting of:

Mandy and her husband.
Lisa and her husband.
Julain and his granny.
My director and his wife.

Considering Lisa refuses to speak to me, and my general contempt for Mandy and Julian, it could be an interesting evening. Vic is especially looking forward to it. Hopefully she will be sat next to my director - who is a nice & normal chap - otherwise we may not get to the starters...

I don't know why Mandy has put me on their table. Either she wants to punish me and make my evening as miserable as possible, or she mistakes my gentle teasing of Julian as "entertaining" - as opposed to the overt bullying that it really is.

The teasing has continued this week with an Office-esque wind-up concerning Saturday evening's dress code. The official dress code is "smart" - so I shall be wearing my new John Roche "designer" shirt and trendy flared cord pants.

As far as Julian is concerned though, I am wearing Black Tie.

This week Mandy - whose husband is also "probably going to wear his dinner jacket" -and I have been feeding Julian little titbits of bait, along the lines of:

"I've had my DJ dry cleaned."
"The front panels on my dress shirt are a devil to iron."
"I've only got one pair of suitable cufflinks to wear."

I even practised tying a bowtie with a napkin prop at lunch time.

Finally Julian took the hook and asked us - with a look of panic in his eyes - if people were wearing Black Tie on Saturday.

"Well the dress code is smart Julian, so I think I might. It's always better to be overdressed than underdressed at these things."

"Oh. I haven't got a dinner suit. I wore one once when I went to a ball somewhere. I think I'll just wear a lounge suit."

Childish I know, but the predictable look of panic was worth it. You could see he was worried that he was going to have to spend £30 on hiring one. In fact he'd been worried all week, but hadn't had the nerve to ask us. I'd almost got to the stage where I thought after being shown glimpses of the rabbit all week, the dog wasn't going to run after it.

I'm going to steal his stapler and set it in wibbly-wobbly jelly.