The privilege of being invited back for a formal college reunion was bestowed upon me. Although the invitation did say that, “the pleasure of your company is requested” which really means that I was doing them a favour. We had dinner in long formal gowns in a long formal dining hall that King Henry VIII used to like.
They didn’t bring us much of the advertised ‘fine wines’ at dinner. They wouldn’t even sell us wine during the meal, let alone the tequila, aftershock and bacardi we really wanted. Perhaps the organisers figured that people would want to talk politely about how many wives called Clare they had collected since graduation, how their firm of lawyers was doing, and how the three kids were. My compadres had no wives called Clare, and we didn’t want to talk politely. We wanted to drink. Someone even pointed out a long forgotten habit of a friend who would kick open a door to a room at college, enter and shout, “I’ve been drrrrinking!” and look pleased with himself.
Once the meal and the odd grindingly tedious speech was over, the bar decided to live up to its name, and actually sell us the booze we required for our mission. We set about throwing red wine over each others clothes. Or at least that’s what it looked like in the cold light of the following morning. During the festivities, I was introduced to a man called Evan. The next day I found out that he was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Oxford, but he was not introduced as such. This allowed him to avoid the painful process of me thinking of something clever to say to an MP, or to feign any interest in what he did.
Innocent to his profession, I offered the undercover MP some of our recently purchased wine, that rested by some glasses on the table. The undercover MP went to get some, only to be viciously assaulted verbally by a third party who was determined to protect the drinking interests of those she knew. The MP wasn’t on her list of allowed drinkers.
The following day I found out that he was an MP. I think it was better for both of us that way. Not least of all because he didn’t go to our college to the best of my knowledge, and we would have had to throw him in a river for intruding. Or talk about politics.