coalescent

Last night, as has become something of a wednesday tradition over the last six weeks or so, I had dinner with Emilia. It was her turn to cook, so we ate with her family (meanwhile, Rae's off on a kibbutz for a month and Sam's up in Durham finishing his dissertation). Afterwards, we went into Reading to meet up with some other of Emilia's friends, old school-friends: David and Nick and Rob. It was David's birthday.

I'd met all of them before; I wouldn't count any of them as friends, but they're people I feel comfortable holding a conversation with. Mind you, I didn't do much of the talking last night - it turned into a reminiscence session fairly rapidly, mostly memories from school.

The point of all this is this: It didn't bother me at all. In fact, the opposite - I like listening to stories. I'm fundamentally nosy. For the most part, I find you can almost always pick up enough context to get by as long as you're listening carefully. The reason I'm saying this is that every so often, I end up in a situation like this, with one person I know well and several more I know peripherally or not at all, and almost always the one person worries about whether I'm feeling excluded. Chances are, I'm not. I don't mind stories full of names I don't know, as long as I can follow the events. I just like listening to stories.