Isn’t the best bit of watching someone playing on a Wii watching them, rather than the screen…
The Race from Richard Peat on Vimeo.
Racing on the Wii
The Race from Richard Peat on Vimeo.
Tag Archives: Christmas Party
The Race from Richard Peat on Vimeo.
The Feast of the Pharaohs
Last night was my office Christmas party – this year going along to the Feast of the Pharaohs, this years version of the big party that the Christmas Company hold out at Easthampstead Park every year.
We’d been along to one of these a couple of years ago when the theme was Cirque Noel so it was interesting to see what was different.
The first and perhaps biggest change is thanks to the smoking restrictions that came in over the summer. Even though it is held in a marquee, the same rules apply as to any other indoor event, so whereas last time we knew a number of people who didn’t really enjoy the event thanks to the smokers on adjacent tables, this time it was totally smoke free – well aside from the copious amounts of dry ice of course…
As before you arrived in the bar area, and there was an hour or so of mingling and chatting over drinks before dinner. The curtain was then drawn back on the main marquee which again was over eighty tables surrounding a central stage. The courses of the four course dinner were again interspersed with entertainment on the main stage, and this was again later turned over to the guests for the disco. They also once again had the dodgems – just the kind of thing to settle your stomach after dinner!
Perhaps the thing that didn’t quite work this year was the theme – as someone on our table put it “Do you suppose anyone who planned this has actually been to Egypt?â€? The dancers performed several times during the evening, with routines that had a vague hint of Arabian Nights at times, and then there was a fire-eater that turned up later on. There was a brief moment of Walk Like an Egyptian, but aside from that there was nothing that you could specifically tie up with the theme. In fact it got positively bizarre towards the end with some weird routine with the fire eater that looked like some sort of pagan ritual, and then an even more weird routine with a net curtain… Maybe as a table full of software engineers we’re not the ideal people to judge, but anyway, we didn’t quite get what was going on!
The food was pretty good though, although the goats cheese and spinach starter seemed to be a bit of a love it or hate it option. As before it all turned up piping hot despite the nearly 1000 guests in the marquee needing to be served. We didn’t stay much after dinner, as with it being a Wednesday night, Beth had to be up and awake for school the next morning. However we did manage to get on the dodgems before we went – pictures of that along with the rest of the evening can be found in our picture galleries.
All in all, it was a great evening, and hopefully we’ll get a chance to go along to whatever they put on next year.
Finding the Right Era
One of the skills of a good DJ at a party, especially your average Christmas party with a diverse bunch of people is picking the right music to play, especially finding the right era for the group. Whilst you can never hope to get music that will appeal to everyone, quite often you can hit on almost a critical era, that brings a large enough number of people to the floor to get everyone else dancing.
Last night we had Beth’s Christmas Party at the school, and we had quite the most dramatic example of hitting the right era I’ve ever seen. One minute there were barely six people on the dance floor, then the DJ sticks on Boogie Wonderland and within seconds almost everybody was up dancing!
It was a bit of a different occasion from last years party, but conversely it was much better attended. The food was a pretty nice buffet, pretty similar to what we have at Harvest Supper at Church, with cold meat, salads and jacket potatoes, and a selection of tempting puddings too.
Unfortunately we weren’t able to stay to the end since our buyers were due round to measure up relatively early this morning, and that was quickly followed by a choir duty to sing at a wedding up at the Church (with all Christmas carols not surprisingly).
Anyway, I’ve added the pictures I took during the evening, to the selection from the parties last week, so you can see what a load of teachers look like when they let their hair down!