Low life | 2 April 2011

‘OK, Jeremy, you sit there. Next to Sophie.’ We’re sitting down to lunch, eight of us, to celebrate our host’s birthday. The seating plan is male then female in alternate places. The host is a performance poet and about half of the other guests have been introduced to me as poets, but I’ve forgotten which.

I’m rubbish at dinner parties. Mingling the friendly bowl with the feast of reason and the flow of soul I’m crap at. I just don’t seem to have the necessary social ease or articulateness or even basic sanity to play my part and it saddens me. I’m a good listener, though. If I’m seated next to a talker, I’ll listen unflaggingly from sheer gratitude.

I’m seated on the end, so there’s only the one person to contend with — this Sophie. Obliquely, anxiously, I watch how she wields her knife and fork. She doesn’t muck about.