"Definitely. We had a conversation; you said you were really tired and you might go home..."
"Flip. I had no idea you were there! That is bad, man."
I smiled politely. How is it that I could have spent an evening with people who subsequently forgot that I was ever there? I thought back to the Curry Night. True, I'd been quiet - perhaps not the life and soul of the party, but I don't think anyone would have expected that. I hadn't sat next to Os, and as I recall, some way down the table, he'd been working through a bottle of red wine and a series of hilarious anecdotes with the students.
But we had had a couple of conversations - particularly around the time I was wearing the pac-man rain mac. He was guessing everyone's age as I remember, with mixed results. He seemed to think I was 27, which I suspected was a guess he'd rounded down to out of politeness.
So either I'm so boring that conversing with me renders the other person with some sort of tedium-induced amnesia... or the red red wine was to blame for Os's patchy recollection.
Speaking of wine, one of the students told me today that he was hosting a cheese and wine party tonight.
"How very middle class!" I exclaimed, thoughtlessly. It didn't strike me as the usual behaviour of students on a Friday night; though my mind instantly took me back to the port and chocolate evenings we spent at Bath, trying to finish the Observer crossword. Ahem.
When he told me that his family go on tours of French vineyards every summer, that his Dad had a stash of fine wines in the garage and that he himself went on a grammar school wine-tasting trip in Year 10, I thought maybe I might have been right after all.
I suggested Vivaldi as background music but he'd already chosen UB-40.
"It'll start off refined," he said, "but I expect it will detiorate into the usual student partay by the end of the night."
I'll ask him on Monday. Chances are though, he won't remember telling me about it.
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