Poopers are taking the X out of Xmas

The office party season is here and already the members of Grope Aid, a UK network of solicitors, are rubbing their hands in eager anticipation of the new year windfall that will come their way.

You may have seen their advertisements. “Interfered with, molested, touched up, or goosed? You could be entitled to compensation if, during the past three weeks, you have suffered an indignity that was someone else’s fault.

“Example awards: Ms X – 3,000. Winked and hiccupped at by florid non-executive director. Felt cheap and demeaned for six weeks (Nottingham). Mrs Y – 4,000. Compromised under mistletoe pretext. Suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and bruising to buttocks consistent with digital impressions. (Guildford).

“These are just two of the many thousands of victims we have helped. If you would like to find out free whether you can claim, call our hotline, open 24 hours a day. No-win-no-fee arrangements may be available for legal fees, other expenses are sometimes payable.”

The office party is not what it was and although Grope Aid is partly to blame, other influences are at work. Time was when the annual corporate bash was an occasion of Bacchanalian excess. Jealousies, enmities, rivalries and carnal yearnings that had bubbled beneath the surface throughout the year were released with percussive effect in a few short hours of mid-winter madness. At the best of these dos, truths were told, noses were punched and, yes, physical contact between the sexes, often unexpected and occasionally gymnastic, occurred.

In those innocent times, alcohol was held to blame, recriminations were few, and memories were either short or non-existent. No one waking up the following morning with eyeballs sizzling behind their lids like eggs frying in a chilli sauce, and stomachs rising and falling like one of Mr Otis’s prototypes, would dream of reaching for the phone and calling thickly for the services of m’learned friends. If certain items of clothing had unaccountably gone missing, so what? And if in the darker recesses of the mind there lurked an image of a spotty-faced messenger boy crazed with lust, well, wasn’t that all part of life’s rich, vomit-stained tapestry?

When office parties were parties, people were more robust and less heedful of the morrow. Years of bleating by the Health Education Authority and the British Medical Association have had a debilitating effect. A generation taught to measure alcohol in units and led to believe that more than two a day will cause irreparable damage is ill-equipped to grasp the concept of a small binge, let alone an office thrash.

And in the unbridled days of yore, before sexual harassment was discovered, defined, and embodied in law as both a crime and an actionable tort, few, if any, could be accused of misreading the signals. That was because sensible drinking had also yet to be discovered and defined and many a party-going voluptuary would be too inflamed by drink to recognise a signal if it was raised on a flagpole, let alone conveyed by the lowering of an eyelid.

So if the kind of office party at which a debauchee of ancient Rome would have instantly felt at home is today but a memory, why the eager optimism of Grope Aid? The answer is partly because the net of sexual harassment is now woven with a mesh so tight that even an accidental indiscretion is liable to be caught, and partly because there are signs that the old red-blooded monster called Knees-Up is not dead after all, but stirring.

The 1996 Christmas Party Index, produced by the recruitment firm Reed Personnel Services, shows that 35 per cent of respondents believe that this year’s party will be more imaginative and inventive, 40 per cent foresee a measure of intoxication, and 44 per cent feel it will be more expensive than in the peak of the Eighties boom (with only between ten and 16 per cent feeling the opposite). The mention of “feeling the opposite” brings a glint to the venal eye of the duty notary at Grope Aid.

Rival recruitment agent Kelly Services prints a fact sheet called Surviving Christmas in the Office, in which it counsels against over-drinking. “You can easily slow your intake by adding extra tonics to spirits or making sure you match every glass of wine with one of water.”

Don’t get drunk, it implores. “With your inhibitions down you could do or say things that you may regret for a lifetime.”

When one organisation discovers that four in ten partygoers have inebriation aforethought and another advises its predominantly female clientele to go easy on the sauce and keep its inhibitions up, times look propitious for the no-win-no-fee creepy-crawlies of the forensic tendency. For it is an undeniable fact that men, women and alcohol mix only too well but, in an age of victimhood, retribution can take a shape far more ghastly and prolonged than a hangover.

Employers, who are in law liable to compensate those sexually harassed at office parties, are advised to require that all partygoers sign a form indemnifying them (the employers) from liability for the effects, intended or unintended, suffered by parties of the second part who are leered at, kneaded, pinched, tickled or trifled with by parties of the first part. As the legal maxim has it: “You won’t stop a goose but you can make sure it isn’t you that gets cooked.”