An Evening Conversation

Pale smears of dried drink on the dark brown surface of the table in the booth said we weren’t the first to sit there that evening. Saturday is a heavy drinking night, the week between Christmas and New Year is the party season, and we were sitting in the cheapest pub in town. It was busy.

The man who I guess is now my oldest friend was sitting opposite me and surprising me by drinking nearly as fast as I was. It was early in the evening, we were the first of our group to arrive, and a mix up in the crush for the bar meant that we had both given the same order to different barmen at the same time. I have never seen my friend with two drinks in front of him before, and despite ordering heavy bitter to make himself drink slowly, he was certainly acting thirsty.

Strange. First, he was drinking quickly, and second, he began to sound curious. Curious about a take on things he wouldn’t normally talk about. Writing, for starts. My oldest friend has a take on life that he simply and without any interference jabs into text, with a brevity, poignancy and punch that might even be able to take a Harry Potter novel down to a length suitable for children. But he was curious. My brain was up for a picking.

He cast around for an example.
"How," he asked, "would you write, to pick something at random, the situation we are in here?"
I chatted for a bit about how I find it difficult, but it is possible to evoke a lot of a scene by writing about one thing that pulls everything else out of imagination or experience. I explained it badly, but he nodded.
"You could pick out the small vase at the end of the table, with dead white headed flowers drooping downwards towards the unused ketchup sachets and scattered grains of salt," I said. But my oldest friend shook his head away from his drink.
"The sachets are going too far," he said. "They make it sound seedy."
I thought about it quickly. As an indicator of what else there was around us, as the one thing to lend life and undescribed background to a scene, they were misleading. I agreed with him. Instead I waved a hand vaguely around the first floor of the busy pub where we were sitting.
"There’s the vase," I said, "which we’ll keep. Drop the sachets, and say, spin in the unlit pale blue mosaic fireplace."
My oldest friend could not see this because of a wide pillar, but he agreed. He took a long sip of bitter.

The first of our other old friends arrived and sat down.

Or, to put it another way...