the kindness of strangers

When I was younger, prone to introverted reflection and angst, I would often reflect on missed opportunities. In fact, I thought about missed opportunities a great deal. They were usually to do with girls, the failure to follow up on a glance or a drunken conversation, or a night spent chastely with a near-stranger thinking there would be plenty of time for all that later when it never came to pass. But not just that, sometimes it would be trips to pubs or visits to the school library, when you would trade grateful smiles with someone else nearby who knew enough to be on your side - sides being very important to a teenager. One particular time - I think I recall telling Dan this a while ago - I remember being 16 or so, circling and looking for a seat and then being beckoned to a table in a crowded Burger King (other fast food restaurants are available) by a beautiful girl happy to share her table with me. I panicked and rushed backwards, claiming a recently vacated table and then feeling too sick to eat. A missed opportunity. This is the kind of thing I would turn over in my mind.

These days, of course, I am rather better adjusted and not so keen for the approval of strangers, but I still know the feeling sometimes. I'm writing this from my hotel room in Birmingham, and having had dinner out I called into a nearby pub fancying a pint and happy to read my book uninterrupted. But I sat next to the quiz machine and almost immediately a trio of youngish brummies, probably students, gathered around it, shouting and swearing and really quite obviously failing to win. Once or twice the girl, noticing me sitting nearby, said 'ask him!', but both times her companions reached over to claim an answer, making the approach unncecessary. Each one in turn traded a smile with me, and I sat, putting my book down, finding a phrase forming on my lips, something like "oh, it's really hard watching people do a quiz without joining in", or - at a moment when they were fumbling for a ten pence piece - "I've got one". But on each occasion I held back, not for the same reasons I did so when I was a nervous teenager (for fear of rejection) but just because I easily imagined another, better moment to say hello to these nice, similar people who were drinking beside me. And then, of course, the opportunities disappeared, and they retreated from the machine and then from the pub. I was left wondering how my evening would have been altered had I bitten the bullet and said hello; not envious, but wondering at an opportunity I'd failed to take. For a second I was seventeen again, it was strange.