Last night was one of those evenings that seem to go on for ever, where you look at your watch to see how much time has passed and see that its only 5 minutes since you last looked.

What happened was that we went to a 40th birthday party.  The birthday girl was someone Jayne went to school with and lost touch with at 14 when she moved away from that area. They got back in touch a few years ago and have the odd chat on the phone.

We had a fairly long journey to Hounslow, made longer by not knowing our way around there and having trouble finding the venue.  When we finally found the place it turned out that Jayne only knew one person there, the rest of us knew nobody. So it was a big group of people who mostly knew each other, and only one of them knew one of us.  Difficult circumstances for socialising.

Its not that they was anything wrong with the other guests there, they were a typical cross-section of society, just that it was a bunch of strangers.  We might as well have gatecrashed any party in Crawley at random – it would have used less petrol and there would have been a chance of seeing a familiar face there.

I think we stayed for a couple of hours but it felt like an eternity.   Its all the fault of Friends Reunited – I bet this happens a lot nowadays.