The Party Season Part 2: How to have fun at a party you're not particularly looking forward to

Let's suppose you are going to go to a party hosted by your company and that you work in insurance. Let's also suppose you still haven't recovered from the excesses of the weekend and you want to do nothing that doesn't involve sleeping. Let's also suppose that you can't really be bothered to explain for the billionth time why you're not drinking wine with your meal. Let's also suppose that there're only two people you'll be sitting with at dinner who you think you can have a decent conversation with and one of those has had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency.

This is how to have fun:

1) have an amusing anecdote to break the ice
2) wear a flamboyant red dress you have made yourself (which impresses designers)
3) turn up only to find there is no-one there you recognise
4) make small talk with a man who seems also to be on his own
5) after realising that this man has never heard of your company's head office, a speech is made by a strange American man, the meal begins early and it's a buffet affair instead of a sit down meal with allocated table numbers, go and ask a member of the venue staff where you are
6) collect your coat and bag from the cloakroom and go next door
7) you now have an amusing anecdote
8) you will then be accosted by your divisional managing director and head of the company to whom you can tell your amusing anecdote (you will feel silly enough about your mistake to tell your anecdote with humour and cheer but not silly enough to feel hideously embarrassed by it)
9) find out that the people at your table you thought you couldn't have a decent conversation with are actually people you CAN have a decent conversation with, you have just never had cause to
10) very nearly almost but not quite win a £5,000 holiday voucher whilst simultaneously showing off your flamboyant red dress to approximately 250 people
11) get many many compliments on your flamboyant red dress and how elegant you look
12) get even more compliments on your ability on the dance floor
13) hug lots of people
14) find a likeminded individual who is also into sewing
15) go home in a taxi all the way from central London to Chelmsford
16) have a bit of a kip
17) go ice-shuffling