If there's one thing you can rely on...

...it's that people will always be people.

And I know that in the immaterial jumble of experiences we call life, stories are only stories because we make them that way; we identify themes, spin yarns, spot similarities, ironies and humour in reality - and it's only in reality because we can see it there.

Which is why Sod's Law, or Murphy's Law...whatever you want to call it, the apparently rigid channeling of events into situations which can only be summed up through, 'Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong' holds such a fascination for me.

Take tonight, for example. Of late I have, in the spirit of not being an arrogant bastard (which comes hard to me), joined a couple of writing groups through craigslist. The plan was to go along to a couple of groups and see whatever format best suited me.

This evening I was due to meet with a small group of people and have a chat about writing - to talk about our aims, our aspirations, and most importantly of all, what we wanted from the group. The preparatory emails as to location, group ideas, spacing of meetings and a lot of other details spanned two weeks. There were six people on this group's email round.
One lady was kind enough to turn up.

I say 'lady' because she was a little older than me at 51. I told her about how Krissa and I met, that we had been recently married and all about my work situation. She began to talk a little about herself. She told me how she was single, and as a tutor at an adult school she dated either students who were too young for her or their fathers who were too far away, and neither type of relationship had really worked out. While I sympathised with her over this misfortune, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was in another of Those Situations.

You know what kind of situations I mean. The type of situations which make for a good pub story or blog post after the fact, but in the immediacy of the passing moment make you want to run screaming from the building clawing at your face, or, if you're a clearer thinker, other people's faces.

Because the sample of work I had brought along was a short excerpt from a longer story which I am still writing: that of a woman in her early forties living in a university town who seduces and sleeps with one of the students.

The story goes on to encompass difficulties, the isolations of both distance and social ostracising...obsession...but guess what?
That was the bit I'd brought along.

The other bit which stamped 'Sod & Murphy Woz Ere, And We Had A Right Old Laugh' firmly on the evening was when she coyly pointed out that if there was just the two of us who were willing to make a commitment to producing and analysing work, and at this point she paused and batted her eyelashes, then there was no reason for us not to have the next meeting at her place.