Opening Lines - Fighting the urge to dance at the staff Christmas party

Despite all the warnings, some of you will be unable to resist. Drink may have been taken, endorphins coursing in your veins, inhibitions lost. Before you know it, as your colleagues at the Christmas party stand nearby, aghast, you are dancing.

It’s not a pretty sight. You are Vice-President of Strategic Knowledge Implementation In The Cloud With Special Responsibility For Blue Sky Thinking As Long As Isn’t Too Much Cloud. You didn’t get where you are today by being a dancer. You say you work hard and play hard, but the ‘play hard’ bit usually just meant shots after dinner and lobbing the gob in the hallway at a party. Yet here you are: twerking.

The urge to dance goes back aeons.

It’s as primal as a Late Late Show audience’s urge to clap a musical guest. (It wouldn’t matter who they were: Placido Domingo or the Wu Tang Clan. Once the first strains of ‘Nessun Dorma’ began or ‘GhostFace Killah’ dropped a killer beat, you would hear the gradually building Late Late Show Clap.)

There is nothing as energising and mind-freeing as a good dance but there some tips to follow to get the most out of it.

Don’t over-announce yourself on the dance-floor. Get the lie of the land first. Unlikely as it may seem in an Irish gathering, there may be an actual proper dancer in the group. If you make a big entrance, you’ll look like an eejit when Juan Francisco backward-somersaults over you.

Obviously this doesn’t apply if you are ‘a character’. A character can do what he wants.

If at all possible, don’t fall. All your good work can be undone when everyone is laughing at you as you are on your arse like a drunk tortoise. If you do fall, there is an outside chance you can make it appear part of your routine by immediately doing the worm breakdancing move. But only if you can actually do the worm. Otherwise you will just look like someone trying to get ‘the other shoe’ from far underneath the bed.

Speaking of footwear, men, watch out for women’s bare feet. The metatarsel is a fragile bone.

Resist calls for a dance-off. Neither of you have more than one move. It will debase everyone involved.

When ‘Fairytale of New York’ comes on, your time to shine is probably over. Everyone forms a circle and individuals are not welcome. You will see one head-the-ball who thinks it’s mad craic to try and bring the whole chain down by jumping in the air while his arms are linked with people on either side. This is frowned upon even for ‘characters’.

Above all, avoid dance-floors with mirrored walls. They are sometimes the scene of quite an awful reckoning. We’ve all been there – in full dance flow. You’ve just spun around and got back where you started without getting dizzy.

Maybe the floor was smooth enough to allow you to a slidey thing on your knees. Without overstating things, “oh what, oh wow”, you might possibly be “the Greatest Dancer”. You are egged on by the praise of your fellow dancers. They’re all spannered as well so their judgment is suspect.

Then you catch sight of yourself in the mirror; your sweaty head, your clothing askew.

In your mind you thought you were en pointe just like Madame Beauchamps at the Paris Conservatoire had taught you.

In fact you’re like someone who is blindfolded and has been told there are stairs nearby.

Now what are you waiting for?

I think they’re playing your song.

•  Colm O’Regan’s third book The Christmas Book of Irish Mammies is in shops now.