OUT TO LUNCH

I know that we don't seem to be very good at this sort of thing, but, nevertheless, the three of us that share the tiny grey box next to the sewage works finally did manage to get our act together and head out, however reluctantly, to have some sort of a Christmas lunch last Thursday.

You may have seen us.

We were the three non-"Wildtypes" sitting over there in the corner and wondering what would be considered to be far too expensive to order on the company credit card....

Okay, that's probably not strictly fair.

After all, m'colleagues are probably both more than still capable of a certain amount of Wildtypedness given the opportunity, so let's just say that you might have spotted two Wildtypes and their attendant troll.

I'm referring here to a "troll" in the traditional sense of course; the "lurking around (although, in my case at least, seldom under bridges) making the lives of others (again, this rarely includes gruff Billy Goats) thoroughly miserable" sort of troll that you find in the fairytales, and not the type that posts something provocative on the internet in order to annoy as many people as possible.

And when I say "provocative", I'm not talking about a sultry photograph of someone wearing nothing but underwear of the sort that used to adorn otherwise forgettable paperback thrillers when I was a lad.

Language, hey…? Sheesh! How it evolves so...

But, getting back to my original point (because I may have drifted off there for a second or twelve), I inappropriately used the word "reluctantly" earlier, because it's sometimes hard not to believe that, as a society, we end up doing such things more out of a sense of social obligation rather than because anyone is really bothered about actually doing them.

We, of course, sped to the pub like gazelles eager to get ourselves as far away as possible from the prowling tigers.

That all probably sounds thoroughly ungracious of course, given that somebody else was actually buying my lunch, but sometimes I just can't help myself, or stop myself from fretting over the possible social angst, especially when the email pops into my Inbox about twenty-four hours earlier, long after I'd written off the remotest possibility of such a thing occurring, and then none of us can think of anywhere local that we might actually like to go to, and at least one of us is feeling a little under the weather, another of us is (technically) on holiday, and nobody really seems to see any wisdom in trying to book somewhere in advance rather than just turning up and hoping that they might have a table at lunchtime, one week before Christmas Day.

Of course, in a busy office during the most frantic period of the year (there are the annual Trade Shows coming up in January), there's never really a good time to do this sort of thing, just as there's never (as one of m'colls is finding) a good time to take a holiday, or go out for a good time, and, as yet another small crisis overwhelmed us during the morning, we had to delay our twelve-thirty booking by half an hour whilst we dealt with that, and still ended up spending more than a reasonable amount of our social time checking our emails once we did venture out into the pouring rain and head over for our now one o'clock luncheon appointment.

That said, when we did actually turn up, after pausing for far longer than was probably necessary to admire the "hilarious" ancient stone object sitting at the edge of the car park, there were so many tables available, that such worries as booking did seem to be rather misplaced, but, after last year, when we were crammed into a corner under the big screen TV as the verdicts in the Lee Rigby case were announced in order to add a further downer to the unseasonal cheeriness of the pub we chose to go to that time, it still seemed to be a wise thought.

But the lunch itself was pleasant enough, and we managed to stretch it out to three courses, and the conversation didn't dry up, or drift for too long into talking shop, and so, on the whole, it was probably deemed a great success in as much as we manage to do any such thing over the course of the year.

I am still utterly freaked out by the fact that it really didn't seem like an entire year had passed since we had last made an attempt at seasonal sociability, and that 2014 has, to all intents and purposes, all become a bit of a blur, and disappeared into time's crucible in what feels like the blink of an eye.

And that's not just because I discovered Pinot Grigio (honest!), but also because of my duties as an Executor which seemed to devour months at a time.

Still, after a couple of hours, we departed, with me having just enough time to pop into the loo to dispose of all the Diet Coke that I'd drunk, and discover a notice stuck to the wall about staff recruitment that had just enough typos in it to let me proof-read it thoroughly and decide that it was worth taking a picture of, even though getting a camera out (even one that's just built into a phone) always seems just a tad "suspect" in a Gentleman's Public Convenience even as I'm doing it.

But thankfully I was alone.

Then we headed back to the office and started fire-fighting the emails that had inevitably popped in to our inboxes whilst our phones were otherwise unavailable, and the Christmas cheer was pretty much over for another year.

Still, thanks very much guys, for the nice thought, and for the meal. I know that I'm sometimes an ungracious and ungrateful companion, but I do appreciate it.