Yesterday I went to a bucks party for my friend Mark.  Now this wasn’t a bucks party in the usual sense that stereotypically involves a bunch of guys going out on a pub crawl and ending up at a strip club.  Most of my friends are way too civilised and jaded for such things.  So some of us went kayaking in the morning and in the afternoon we had a barbecue at one of Mark’s friend’s place.

Mark and I go way back, and we used rock climb and go ski touring a lot together in the past.  Mark and all his friends have had very similar lives to me, and it is amongst this group of men that I feel very at home and relaxed.  It’s not very often that I meet a group of people where each one of them has plenty of stories that are as wild, or if not, then wilder than anything I’ve ever recounted.  But in nearly every situation, there seems to be a fly in the ointment and at yesterday’s little gathering an uninvited neighbour gatecrashed our little get together.

Our host Ed was in a bit of a bind because he wanted to maintain good relations with his neighbours, so the intrusion of the gatecrasher was tolerated. The gatecrasher was so different to everyone else at the barbecue. He was dressed in clothing with either alcohol or car logos, splashed all over them and all he wanted to talk to people about was football.

We all found out as well that the gatecrasher had some retro ideas about women. For example, he thought that one of the most important question somebody should ask a prospective girlfriend is what footy team she barracks for. Strangely enough, he’d recently divorced and was single. I have a hunch he is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

In all the years that I have known Mark and his friends, not once has any conversation with them, been punctuated with talk about sporting events.  It’s not as though these guys aren’t active, on the contrary, most of them still rock climb, a few of them do serious mountaineering and all of them have travelled extensively.  I guess that they are all doers, not watchers.

The gatecrasher was so out of step with what everyone else was into, that I was fascinated.  It was a bit like watching a train wreck. Each time he made an utterance, I kept thinking to myself I should remember what he said. I wanted to remember so I could write about it on this blog; because what he had to say was so different in sensibilities to what else was being said at the table.  As discordant as the subject matter of the gatecrasher’s conversation was, nothing really stuck in my mind, as none of it seemed to carry any weight.  His prattle was light and airy, but not in a nice way like a sparkling wine, but more like the off coloured scum one sees floating in open drains.