“Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!”
Yesterday was the audit department Christmas lunch. That is to say, to call it the Christmas lunch would be a trifle misleading, as we didn’t actually get a sniff of any food until half four. We’d been booked in for the half past three sitting of Christmas lunch at a local bar, on the grounds that there was a 20% discount available for not eating your lunch at lunchtime. What accountant could bear to turn down a discount?!
We arrived punctually to find that the previous sitting had yet to finish and so were subjected to an hour of standing around in the bar. An hour standing around in a bar might not sound like a very great hardship, but there were in excess of ninety of us, and it was a rather small bar. I managed to get a free lemonade though, because the secretary revealed the secret code to get things put on the partners’ tab. Two friends and I had made a firm resolution to stay sober. One guy was prevented from drinking by the fact that he was driving, my other friend had a medical complaint she didn’t want to aggravate, and I just didn’t fancy it because I somehow don’t find work socials terribly enjoyable. This resolution was a noble one and, like most noble resolutions, destined to be broken.
When we finally got to the tables, I was glad I was still stone cold sober because sitting ourselves down required a certain amount of acrobatics. The tables were laid out back to back in rows, with six people seated at each. Once people were seated on the table behind you, there was a distinct lack of space; so much so that walking behind a chair, pulling it out and sitting down in the normal manner of a person in a restaurant wasn’t even to be contemplated. Instead, the person destined to sit at the far end of the table was forced to climb over the first two seats and somehow squeeze into his own. When, during the course of the meal, someone wanted to use the toilet, all three people on that side of the table had to stand up, and possibly the three people on the adjacent table too. The proprietor of the bar might have called it “cosy”. I personally would have called it “unpleasantly squashed.”
There was such competition for seats that one of my friends (the one who was driving) perished in the struggle and so only two of us remained. Our numbers diminished, our will also seemed somewhat broken and we decided that to have one glass of wine with our meal wouldn’t do any harm and hardly counted as drinking anyway. The wine glasses were slightly bigger than I would ever design a wine glass to be but still, one glass never hurt anyone. The other people at my table appeared to have had three or four, judging from the general level of conversation. We must have spent half an hour whilst they discussed the toilet habits of the tax department, which personally I could have done without before I was about to eat, and then we started to play games which involved drawing on the tablecloth. Hmmm. First, we all had to draw a Christmas picture, which at least wasn’t technically demanding, but things progressed to guessing the name and age of the waiter who, incidentally, wasn’t objectively attractive. One of the (married) girls on my table then proceeded to ask his name and age to see who was closest, and continued to flirt with him outrageously for as long as he would stand there. Back in my not so distant teetotal past, I used to think I would find such drunken antics amusing were I drinking too. Even with the benefit of a large glass of wine, however, I was finding it an effort to pretend I was having a good time.
Then there was the food. Being a slightly fussy eater, I have to confess I don’t get on with set menus very well, but this one could really have been a lot worse. The pudding was a rather delicious chocolate concoction at any rate, which to some extent compensated for the other courses. The starter was cream of mushroom soup. Now I don’t like mushrooms and I don’t like soup, so this was a bit of a non-starter. Nevertheless, I had never before experienced mushroom soup and was prepared to keep an open mind; mushrooms don’t make me feel physically sick if I put them in my mouth, and I have been known to swallow them if required.
When the soup arrived on the table, however, I was unable to prevent myself from having a sharp intake of breath. I suppose the use of the word “cream” in the title “cream of mushroom soup” had made me imagine something cream-coloured. Cream-coloured, however, it was most certainly not. The colour it was almost defies description; it was a shade of grey dirtier than the dirtiest dishwater you can imagine. I suppose one might say that, not unreasonably, it was the colour of mushrooms, but such a matter-of-fact description does not convey the full value of the horror I experienced when I first laid eyes upon it. It was the sort of colour which makes it very difficult to induce yourself to put a morsel of it on your spoon and raise your spoon to your mouth. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Christmas I decided to be brave and experiment. In total, I am proud to say that I managed to eat an entire five spoonfuls of my cream of mushroom soup.
The main course was, predictably, turkey. Two slices of turkey to be precise, along with a very small cocktail sausage and a mysterious blob of stuffing which everybody left. There were the usual vegetables of course, and for once I was thanking the Lord for the cold which prevented me from smelling the sprouts, feeling nauseous and having to climb over the lap of the Senior Audit Manager on my way to go and be sick.
Not the best food then, and not the best company. For me the evening was all made worthwhile, however, by one conversation with one friend, which must have resulted in me laughing aloud for thirty minutes 
The friend in question is, I must confess, a little crazy; he’s entirely lovable, but does have the tendency to find himself in scrapes of a most peculiar nature. Now this friend took his exams at the same time as me, so was likewise waiting for his results and Friday and, similarly to me, was utterly convinced that he had flunked at least one. When his text came through at 5pm he couldn’t decide whether it was better to let open put himself out of his misery by opening the message, or continue in blissful ignorance all weekend. He resolved to let fate choose and, standing in the bathroom, flipped his phone in the air; if it landed screen upwards he was going to open it, downwards he wasn’t.
Did I mention that he was standing next to an open window?!
Needless to say, his phone was soon lying smashed to smithereens on his parents’ patio. The text was lost to him, and for reasons known only to himself, he refrained from checking on the net for the entire duration of the weekend. I got the impression that he regarded the death of his phone as an incredibly bad omen and couldn’t bear to look. It wasn’t until Monday morning, when he accidentally opened his official confirmation letter on the way to work, that he realised all the stress had been for nothing and he had actually passed
While I was standing chatting to him, another colleague came over to congratulate us and asked how it felt to be a qualified accountant.
“I’ll be honest with you,” said my friend, “it’s bloody scary because I know fuck about accounting!”
Tags: Christmas, lunch, mushroom soup