Can I be excused intervals and noisy parties? I’m useless at them!

I attended a local poetry-reading session last night, (I read an extract from Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, which I’ve mentioned before). I really enjoy these events. Partly, because it makes me examine my taste in poetry, and because it forces one to read poems aloud, which invariably reveals strengths, weaknesses and meanings which hadn’t been obvious before.  It also reawakens one’s interest in poets you may not have read for a long time (Ogden Nash), and introduces you to ones you may never have heard of  (Edgar Lee Masters – I must track down The Spoon River Anthology – and D.J. Enright), while confirming prejudice against (Benjamin Zephaniah and Dylan Bloody Thomas) and for (Keats and some D.H. Lawrence).

The very disparate set of people who attend are universally charming (although the one who spent most of my poem craning to read the titles on the bookshelf next to her might be count as an exception – no doubt my fault).

Altogether, these occasions are a lively, stimulating treat.

Except for the fact that there’s a fifteen-minute interval for nibbles and drinks and chat. 

My God, do I hate those fifteen minutes! 

Those readers who know me will attest that I can drone the hind-legs off an EU bureaucrat, given half an opportunity: I’m just one of those awful people who likes the sound of their own voice. (A BBC management trainer once told me I had a “tendency to over-contribute”, which, as I pointed out at the time, is a roundabout way of saying “Put a sock in it!”. )

But in order to run off at the mouth, I have to be in a formal work setting, amongst friends, or in the company of acquaintances with whom I have experiences in common – i.e. we work in a similar field, or share a journalistic background, or our kids go the same school. 

I positively enjoy getting up in front of a roomful of strangers to deliver a talk, or to act as chairman for some talkathon, or to do a sales pitch (or even to read a poem). But when faced with people I don’t really know – no matter how nice and unthreatening and sympathetic and civilized they are – but with whom I’m supposed to mingle and indulge in small talk - I invariably come a cropper. 

In short, I panic. 

It was all so much easier when I used to drink and smoke – with one glass of wine down the hatch, a fresh glass in one hand, and a cigarette in the other, I was happy to turn to anyone and say, “Hello, I’m Scott. Who are you?” Even if the answer proved to be “I sell insurance” or “I’m a social worker” I’d be okay. I’d just do what the Royal Family – those heroes – 

do every day of their lives and say “That must be awfully interesting” (as opposed to “You poor sod!”), while frantically dreaming up the follow-up question, “What’s always puzzled me about loft-lagging is…”. After that, you can just coast along, nodding and smiling, sipping and puffing, stepping aside with elaborate courtesy and enormous relief if someone else wants to join in. In no time, the interval has drawn mercifully to a close and you can get back to the good stuff.

When I do make the effort to talk to someone I don’t know, or (more usually) when a remark is addressed to me, I almost invariably say something inappropriate or puzzling, which usually has my would-be interlocutor desperately casting about for someone vaguely normal to talk to. My most common mistake is to plunge too deeply into a subject without observing the rules of casual chit-chat. 

“Are you enjoying the poems?” they might ask. “Yes, indeed,” I respond, “but I wonder if Ogden Nash can truly be classed as a poet, when he seems more of an extremely talented doggerelist, if  there is such a word. I think I first came across him in that marvelous compilation, Verse and Worse, where they quote his lines about Jews – you know, ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews’, which was funny, but very off-colour, and written after the war, which was a strange thing to do, given the Holocaust, and I wonder if he was really anti-semitic or maybe he was Jewish, mind you, you can be Jewish and anti-Semitic given how many Jewish people are fervently anti-Israeli …” And all the time I’m thinking “Strop talking, you fool!” and the other person, who just wanted me to say, “Yes, very much, especially the Keats. Are you enjoying it?” is wondering why it always has to be her that winds up with the loony.

So now, when not accompanied by my lifesaving wife at this sort of event, I grab a soft drink, return to my seat and pretend to read something – anything!

But even worse than this sort of one-to-one confrontation in peaceful surroundings, is the equivalent scenario at noisy parties, which are absolute purgatory. 

Partly that’s because of the aforementioned dearth of fags and booze, but it’s also because my hearing’s getting a bit dodgy. This, combined with the fact that most of the people I end up talking to are considerably shorter than me, means I genuinely don’t have a clue what they’re saying. Now, if you can hear most of what someone’s saying, you can get away with it: your subconscious trawls for signpost words or tones of voice which signal it’s time to smile, or make sympathetic noises, or look surprised. But when you can’t make out a word, you either have to spend the whole conversation hunched over with your ear about an inch away from their mouths – an arrangement which is both unhygienic and uncomfortable, and no doubt highly unpleasant for the person becoming  intimately acquainted with your auditory apparatus – or you have to make wild guesses as to what response would be appropriate: there’s always a danger of smiling indulgently while they’re telling you about their father’s Alzeheimer’s or of looking concerned as they tell that light-hearted anecdote which everyone else has found so amusing.

The writer and barrister John Mortimer once said he’d like to die during the interval in the crush bar at Covent Garden. So would I – but for completely different reasons!