Thanks for your many iPod response (probably too many for me to reply to you all individually). I have some leads to follow anyway and it seems I might be able to resolve the problem by pressing a couple of buttons at the same time next time it happens. We shall see. It is wonderful to have such ready access to so many nerds at times like these.
It was the Avalon (the evil company that manage me) winter party tonight, taking place in the Royal College of Music, right next door to the Royal Albert Hall. I was looking forward to cutting loose after getting my work done this week (the treatment turned out to be incredibly easy to put together and probably took me about three actual man hours to complete, which made it sligthly annoying that prevarication had meant the exercise had dragged on for at least a fortnight - and it was meant to have been in before Christmas if truth be told). I was looking forward to seeing some friends, having some drinks and finding out what tasteless abhorration the evil brains behind Avalon had come up with to entertain us this year (three years ago they had dwarves dressed as elves serving drinks, which was veering towards the kind of party that Nero might have orgainsed). That year there was also a Father Christmas who gave me a pen in the shape of a turd. That is the kind of thing you might expect from the diabolic comedy management firm.
But tonight was a somewhat moer sober affair - as it turned out rather literally as the drink ran out before midnight, just when I was about to gain the confidence to do something I would regret. There was a lot of people there, many of whom I did not recognise. The invitation list includes all sorts of people from the media and is not just a charming office party for the staff and clients of Avalon. There were still plenty of people I knew, as well as some people who apparently knew me, but who I could not remember, but who I put on an excellent show of pretending that I recalled them. In fact my major problem was that I was finding it difficult to hear a word that anyone was saying. This has always been a slight issue with me in noisy rooms, which is why I never enjoyed going to night clubs as I feel conversation is probably my best feature and it was no use to me to go and try and socialise and meet ladies in a place where I could only be judged by what I looked like. The music was pretty loud at the Avalon party and I do have a bit of a cold which may have blocked my eustachian tube, but I fear the truth is that I am getting too old. Too old to be able to enjoy parties any more. It's a tragedy. I will have to stay in on a Friday night and read books and watch TV and knit and dream of regretting. It leaves you in a bit of a pickle when you are talking to someone that you can't hear in this circumstance. Do you ask them to repeat what they have just said or do you just nod and smile and pretend you agree with them? And what if they have just said "It may be unfashionable but I think Hitler is right. Would you like to join a Neo-Nazi organisation I am starting up? Any sign of consent is legally binding incidentally"?
I usually just smiled and nodded and who knows what trouble I got myself into. But sometimes I would ask them to say something again. But as often as not I still couldn't understand, so I would move my ear closer and get them to shout. But often it was still a garbled mess. What do you do at this point? Surely it's just embarrassing to try and get them to repeat it again, and yet you've made so much effort already that to simply smile and nod would seem a dispiriting defeat. Usually embarrassment would overcome my thirst for knowledge and I would pretend I'd heard and say "Oh right. Cool" and other such non-commital phrases. But at least once I persisted. I think it took the woman in question six attempts for me to unscramble the sentence. I had hoped to end the night with someone's lips pressed against my ear, but this was not what I had anticipated. I felt old and impotent and maybe it's good the booze ran out so I could go outside to a world where I wasn't an aged man crippled by sensory deprivation. Though of course the evening had largely made me realise that there will shortly come a time when the outside and quiet world is as hard to comprehend as the noisy, party-based one.
It's always good to go to a party and leave it confronted with your own mortality.
