LAST FRIDAY EVENING

I don’t want to shock you or anything, but last Friday night, after work, I actually went out for the evening.

I know… Rather incredible, isn’t it…?

The truth is that my Beloved has an exclusive collection of rather lovely chums who, on occasion, she will meet up with to have a natter, drink a bottle of wine, eat some nibbles and, in all probability (although I have absolutely no evidence for this), complain about that rather strange bloke that she chooses to share her life with.

Anyway, for some strange reason – possibly because I hadn’t actually met this particular friend in person for maybe half a decade – on Friday evening she invited me to tag along, presumably just to add whatever idiotic remarks I could to their evening.

After a week of battling with a computer that seemed to prefer to show me “spinning pizzas of death” whenever it fancied “a bit of a rest”, I was rather in need of getting away from the Beast, and, because it finally gave me an excuse to wear my nice new coat, and my slightly less new (but otherwise publicly unworn) waistcoat, I got into the car, and headed out towards a particularly trendy suburb of town for the evening.

Battling my way through the rush hour traffic, I arrived a smidgen too late to rendezvous with them at their meeting point, although I was rather happy at the fact that I’d managed to actually get a space on the free car park after manoeuvring around in the rather tight spaces for a few minutes.

Then, I lurked outside the cheese shop wondering whether they were running late until I got a text message announcing where they had gone to eat, and so, my suspicious lurking suddenly turned back into merely waiting, and the various good folk on that particular High Street could breathe their collective sighs of relief and move on with their own evening business.

Hah! So self-obsessed!

To be honest, I doubt anyone even noticed I was there…!

So, I walked into the restaurant of choice and met them and, hopefully, didn’t disgrace myself too much with my grungy appearance.

My Beloved was ordering at the Bar, so I went over and sat down with her friend and, after that all-too-familiar couple of minutes of awkwardness that I get whenever I’ve not actually seen someone for a while, when the panicky rush of blood to the head makes me talk like an utter arse, things settled down and the evening unfolded pleasantly, despite one of the staff throwing a knife at me at one point.

Food was eaten, chat was chatted, and they drank some wine whilst I stuck resolutely to the soft stuff – although even that proved problematic when the bar “ran out of syrup” (?) for the Diet Coke and I had to fallback on a rather panic-stricken second choice.

Later on, we left, at around 8.30pm, and just as the place was beginning to fill up with the “interesting-looking” people looking for the dubious excitement of  “night-life” so I think that we got the timing just about spot on.

Well, for me at any rate… As to my companions, well, maybe they would have preferred to dance until dawn, who can tell?

Instead, we gave my Beloved’s friend a lift to her exciting new house, dropped her off, and got vaguely lost for a while in an area of Manchester with which I thought that I was once familiar, but which actually did its level best to bamboozle me.

Still, road signs prevailed… I begin to wonder whether, in the “Post-Sat-Nav” era (not that I have one), road signs will eventually be considered to be redundant?

I hope not because, without those familiar blue signs claiming that there was a suitable motorway thereabouts, I might still have been driving around now.

As to my evening of venturing out, well, I think that it was rather successful, on the whole, and, perhaps, worthy of trying again in the not too distant future.

Naturally, I have fretted and obsessed about the content of my conversation and banter throughout the evening, and wondered, in the dark corners of my psyche, whether they would have had a far better evening if I’d cried off, but those are just the normal responses of my inner fears, and are probably best ignored.

Equally, I do find myself wondering about what I actually said all evening. I can remember the general thrust and parry of the conversation, and most of the idiotic nonsense that I was spouting, but the detail escapes me.

For example, I can vividly remember making a point about the misappropriation of a particular word, and emphasising that that word actually means something quite specific and is often misused, but I can’t for the life of me remember in what context I said it.

Naturally, I’ve asked the Beloved but, I suspect wisely, she probably wasn’t paying any attention to a word I was saying.

Quite right, too…

[Note to self: I know I’ve not been out socially for a while, but next time it might be worth remembering to take a notebook to help me remember that sort of stuff… I did used to, you know.]