John Butleron the one social task he's going to avoid in 2008.
The new year is hard for me. I have the sculpted abdominal muscles of a Chippendale and the willpower of a monk, and I'm as rich as Croesus already. What's left to improve?
I always make resolutions designed to induce a healthier life of the mind. A friend and I, for example, gave up being judgmental for the new year in 1999. I haven't asked Clare recently, but I wonder how she's getting on with that. I lasted a week, staring piously out of the window of the bus, concentrating on the beautiful trees and trying to ignore the morons all around me.
This year was easy, though, because there was one odious social task I decided never again to do voluntarily. My resolution this year was to avoid being the glue. I'm not talking about sitting between two people you know at a wedding and chatting to each. Anyone with a mouth and unimpeded access to the table wine can do that - besides, it's not your gig. If it all goes belly up and they begin to fire bread rolls at each other, you can lean back, light a cheroot and lay a bet with the next table on the outcome.
No. It's only when three people find themselves hanging out together and two of them don't know each other remotely that the third person - the only person at the table who knows everyone - becomes the glue. The glue's job is to prod the conversation in a mutually agreeable direction, steering it away from topics that someone mightn't enjoy. It's all a bit Jane Austen, and of course if you have an ounce of sense you just let what happens happen, but that's easier said than done.
How does it happen? By accident. Only ever by accident. I was in New York a few weeks ago, and two people I had planned to meet up with for dinner - two people with radically different manners, ideologies and tastes - could only make it at the same time. One was a bookish, sincere art historian and mother-to-be, of the kind you find in a John Updike novel. The other was a level-five Manhattan party machine, drawn straight from the pages of Trainspotting. They had never met, because I only hung out with the art historian in the day during the week, and I only hung out with the party animal during the night at weekends.
The day of the dinner dawned bright, and the birds were singing in the trees. I had known each of these people for years, and I was optimistic. Even though their vital statistics were different, if the planets aligned they might grow to like each other. In fact the art historian and the party animal might end up friends for life, jogging around the Central Park reservoir sharing a single iPod, one sweating out her hangover while the other pushed a three-wheeled pram and thought of Modigliani. When they stopped to catch breath, one of them could remark again how lucky they were to know me, and the other would concur, breathlessly.
Still, a vague doubt was tugging at the back of my mind, a sense that I was steering my little boat into a perfect storm. Certain portentous details had begun to stack up. The art historian knew the city far better than I did, and she had made the dinner reservation for us at a place close to her home. Once I relayed the details to the party animal, she nixed it immediately on the grounds that she hated Italian food and that it was too far from her home. She made a counter-reservation at a place equidistant from their two homes (and therefore inconvenient for both of them), and I called the art historian with the change of venue. She agreed to see us there at 7pm.
At 6.55pm I met the art historian at the restaurant. She was flushed, having walked, and she was hungry, having skipped breakfast and missed lunch. In fairness, the party animal didn't know the art historian was pregnant. Still, the art historian didn't know that the party animal didn't know that she was pregnant, and my little boat was already listing.
Once we were seated I didn't feel it was right to order wine, so we drank jugs of iced water while we waited, which reduced my body temperature to the extent that I was shivering after 30 minutes. The party animal still hadn't shown up, and I decided I could no longer keep the art historian and her unborn child from their food. We ordered.
The whole event felt kind of formal and grim. The food arrived, we ate it, and a kind of tension hung in the air. I began to harbour jealous thoughts about which bar she was in, which cocktail she held in which hand, which cigarette dangled carefree from her lips. By 8pm we had finished our food.
When she finally showed up we were waiting for dessert. She took her seat without apology and feigned horror that we had gone ahead without her. Looking back on this now, it was a hilariously ballsy approach to take, but at the time I twisted in agony. The art historian coldly appraised the foam antlers, slightly askew, on the party animal's head.
Then our desserts arrived - and with them the piece de resistance. The party animal, having declined to order anything, took a spoon, leaned across the dinner table and fed herself a large lump of creme brulee from the plate of the art historian. I flinched, as if she had plunged the spoon into my own back, and realised that glue wouldn't do it. What was required here was some kind of giant social staple gun. I called for the bill and made my resolution there and then.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com