Groups of people are fertile ground for the writer: pick up on their speech and mannerisms, witness the intra-group tension that pushes somebody or other to the centre of events, around whom the rest gather like moths orbiting a naked bulb.
Meanwhile, someone else is flung to the margins, ignored except for a friendly 'y'alright?' every so often.
Writers collect observations like this as the squirrel collects nuts, to be exhumed at a later date and used as fuel when there's not much else about. The remnants of a night in the pub become the power struggle for the soul of an entire religion, the coarse language of the former is the spirit of the latter.
I should, then, be jumping at rare opportunities to socialise as part of a group, yet quite the opposite is true. At the eleventh hour, I turned down the chance to be part of the meat traffic in Lincoln on Friday night just gone - indeed resorting to a blantant lie in order to extricate myself from the prospect.
The evening had been planned for weeks, and I'd grudgingly committed myself to going along at an early stage, happily pushing it into an unused corridor of my mind and locking the door behind me. As weeks until t=0 became days, though, the usual panic and horror about what was to come set in, and I knew it was a matter of when and not if I delivered an excuse (however implausible) to wriggle out of my duties as drinker, dancer and raconteur.
Friday morning, then, I was struck down by a non-specific, vague illness. It's my head. And I'm cold. I just want to go back to sleep. Of the three symptoms I complained of, one of them is certainly true: it is my head.
The usual pantomime of omniprotestations ensued, and I rebuked them all with a sad face. assuring everyone who commented that I really did want to go, and I certainly would have if my body hadn't let me down.
All weekend, I have been filled in on what I have missed - one man drunkenly confirming himself to be gay, and subsequently asking our manager whether he planned to come out of the fucking closet any time soon? This was apparently followed by a toast 'to gays!' and some topless male dancing. This hypocrisy - the marginalisation of people who live different lives as we pretend to incorporate them into our own - is the bread-and-butter of literature.
Yet I'm not sorry I missed it, for all the repetitions of 'you shudda bin there!' which I've been on the end of for the last two days. I only wish I understood better exactly why the prospect of a heavy drinking session, alongside those I spend a quarter of my life with, fills me with such revulsion.
