The comeback king

You can go out pur­posely look­ing for inspi­ra­tion, and you can go out pur­posely look­ing to inspire peo­ple. But it occurred to me yes­ter­day that many of the most sig­nif­i­cant inspi­ra­tions I’ve had have hap­pened quite unex­pect­edly, unso­licited and unintended.

I was at a book launch – the sort of event where the atten­dees don’t know each other, but they know that every­one is united by the same enthusiasm.

All was going well – I’d found some friendly peo­ple to chat and assess the canapés with – and I’d at last allowed myself to fin­ish the sin­gle glass of wine the law per­mits dri­vers. I took the oppor­tu­nity while putting my glass back on the bar to slip out to the gents – quite a dar­ing move given that this was a strange place, and locat­ing the gents is one of the great anx­i­eties of the aver­age evening out-of-the-house. On this occa­sion I had had the great good for­tune of clock­ing them on my way in to the event. The only uncer­tainty was that, as I strode con­fi­dently towards them, the door might be locked – so my con­fi­dent push of the door was made with a phys­i­cal caveat: an elbow crooked and ready for the fact that the door might not give.

It gave.

Nat­u­rally, then, my spir­its were high on return­ing to the party, and this must have given an airy con­fi­dence to my walk as, while I looked around the room to seek out the lit­tle knot of peo­ple I’d been speak­ing with, a fashionably-dressed man came up to me and said, “You look like a man who’s just returned from the bath­room! Where is it?”

Imag­ine. You live your life going to par­ties and [a] not find­ing out where the bath­room is ahead of time; [b] approach­ing total strangers to ask where they are; while [c] tak­ing the extra added risk of propos­ing that the total stranger has actu­ally just been to the toi­let.

This man must be of a dif­fer­ent species alto­gether. What if I hadn’t been to the toi­let? I mean – the fall­out just doesn’t even bear think­ing about, does it?

The result of his approach, how­ever, was inter­est­ing. I found myself very well dis­posed towards this man. I ani­mat­edly described to him where the bath­room was and how eas­ily he would locate it, and only by a force of will did I man­age to stop myself enthus­ing about how com­pre­hen­sive and san­i­tary the facil­i­ties were.

So it is that these small encoun­ters change a per­son. I resolve now before the year is out to have that same con­ver­sa­tion, cast­ing myself as the ques­tioner. The only trou­ble is, I’m going to have to deter­minedly not find out where the gents are when I visit a place – and I’m just not sure I can do that. And then of course I’m going to have to be sure that the ‘return­ing’ man has indeed just, well, returned.