The art of leaving the party

December is the most wonderful time of the year, but it's also exhausting.

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During the festive season, our diaries – much like our stomachs – are fit to burst.

Every night, there’s a Christmas party, pub booking, carol concert, dinner, or drinks, up until the moment we eventually arrive at the closing New Year’s Eve champagne bender. It’s exhausting to type out, let alone attend. Which is why many people will often employ a sneaky technique to get themselves tucked up at home in their matching pinstripe pyjamas faster - the French exit.

The term, which originated as “French leave” in the mid-1700s, denotes leaving a party without saying goodbye to one’s host. If you think this sounds like a problematic jab towards our friends across the Channel, don’t worry, they hilariously shoot exactly the same insult right back at us: “filer à l'anglaise”, I'm told, translates to “leave English-style”.

I'm a firm French exit apologist. Predominantly because saying goodbye can take forever. One satirical study released in Australia last year claimed it takes 45 minutes to say our farewells at the end of a night, meaning we spend an average of 18 hours and 45 minutes on it each year. So believable was the statistic that the (fictional) study was discussed on local news channels and blew up on multiple popular social media accounts as users debated whether to bother saying bye.