NO GRIT

I got invited to a birthday party last weekend. Now I’m sure a lot of you normal, rational people will be thinking “Aw, that’s nice!” but of course I didn’t go.

I don’t think that I was ever really expected to, if the truth is being told. Not that anyone would have minded if I had shown up, in fact I’m sure that one or two might have been delighted, but most people who know me know me, and so their expectations remain understandably very low.

The message inviting me along popped in on my answerphone a couple of weeks ago but already mentioned in the invitation itself that I am known to be wary of attending such events but it would be nice to see me if I chose to appear. I replied with a few emails expressing gratitude for the invitation but which remained more ambiguous about my eventual intentions.

Whilst my beloved better half already had “venue” issues, and was never likely to be persuaded to join me, my own position was far more ambiguous. After all, there are certain people in life for whom you are far more likely to make the “effort” and this was indeed one of them, so I gathered together as many of my wits as I was able to track down and managed to at least half persuade myself to go and, right up until about half an hour before I was due to leave, this was the position I took, even though my recent catastrophic levels of insomnia had left me yawning the afternoon away and half dozing off to yet another cricket commentary.

Then the fear gripped me.

Visions of standing alone and unknown in a room full of enthusiastic people in a jolly frame of mind started to form in my mind. The notion of questions and chatter and making small talk started to spiral around and around in my head and, despite the fact that there were likely to be one or two faces there that I knew it would be nice to catch up with, the overwhelming fear of the rest of it was far, far stronger. That, along with the ongoing levels of fatigue and the brewing after-effects of a teatime curry, due in no small part to the stomach-churning anticipation of the merest possibility of an impending social function, set my spirits once more to “panic stations” and instead of heading upstairs to get ready, I took my more usual route of utter cowardice and cried off, or rather decided to simply not go.

Suddenly, with that decision made, I felt more relaxed than I had all day. Granted there will be repercussions, there always are. I did have the presence of mind to post a birthday card to the celebrant midweek but after that I found out that I might have even got the wrong end of the stick over that. Further research told me that the birthday date in question seemed to have been a couple of months ago, making my little card seem rather after the fact, although I still maintain that you really can’t have a birthday party without at least a few birthday cards.

Then I began to wonder whether this was perhaps a more “significant” event than I thought. After all, most people don’t book a venue for any old birthday, but nothing had been said along those lines, so I thought, perhaps, that it was just far easier to have such a thing somewhere else rather than in your own home, a bit like the mums and dads seem to do nowadays with a bunch of eight-year olds to avoid any significant damage to their precious things.

Hmm! Perhaps in my ignorance I have committed yet another massive social faux pas, something else to make any future dealings in such matters, should there ever be any, even more confusing to deal with as I dance the strange mental dance I always seem to have with them.

It’s such a ruddy minefield this social lark…

Instead, and rather ironically, I put the latest rental disc in the DVD player; The new version of “True Grit” by the Coen brothers. A film all about bravery which seemed massively inappropriate to my own cowardly inactions of the evening. It’s a perfectly good and enjoyable film which looks magnificent, and I did rather enjoy a script what refused to have any truck with diminutives, but somehow, I fear, won’t make quite the same impact on the memory as the John Wayne version did nearly forty years earlier, despite having many of the same beats, and by next weekend I will probably be wondering quite what that film was we watched last weekend.

“Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!”

Perhaps to younger minds it will make more of an impact, of course. When you get to my age (much uncelebrated though my own birthdays have tended to be), any remake has to get beyond the weight of the history of the original, but to fresh young minds coming to it anew, it might just seem wild, exciting and different enough to make an impression so that they’ll be talking about it with similar enthusiasm when the next version is made.

So, another evening passed with me choosing not to engage fully with the world. Instead I seem to choose to communicate with it by means of these much-ignored little ramblings and observations which do, at least, seem to not fill me with quite the same level of social angst that going out appears to do, and, if the world chooses not to engage right back with me, as in the main it doesn’t, well I can hardly blame anyone for that.

After all, if I choose to never show up at the party, why should they join in with mine?