Life and Soul of the Party Read Online Free PDF

about it now can still put a smile on my face.
    We got chatting and he told me a bit about himself. He was in the second year of a Social Studies degree at MMU and though he’d been born in Stockport he had moved around the country quite a bit with his parents before ending up back where he started at the age of fifteen. That was pretty much it for biography because after that all we talked about was football and motor-racing before the conversation as a whole disintegrated into the typical mix of music and films, clothes and trainers, in fact all the usual stuff employed by certain types of men to separate the wheat from the chaff.
    Despite us both proving our credentials with talk of obscure Italian horror films, the back catalogue of the Stones and several shared sitcom favourites, we didn’t have a great deal to do with each other after that night-out, apart from the odd nod of the head or short conversation whenever we bumped into each other (usually either coming in or out of Piccadilly Records). It wasn’t anything personal. I doubt that either of us gave it any consideration at all, but if we had it would have been something along the lines of if we were meant to be friends then it would happen whether or not we did anything about it.
    A few months later, on an unseasonably mild afternoon at the beginning of our final term we once again found ourselves sitting outside The Black Horse with the same group of mutual friends. But this time by the end of the night we ended up making plans to go for a drink, and go and see bands together, and somehow we both followed through with these haphazard arrangements and gradually became the best of friends.
    I tried his number one last time. It still switched to his voicemail. Giving up, I returned my phone to my pocket and caught up with the others.
    Melissa
    There were already quite a few people lingering outside Ed and Sharon’s tiny terraced house by the time we arrived. Some had just arrived and were congregating by the door saying hello to each other, while others were enjoying the first of many ‘last’ cigarettes before they resolved, once again, to give up for ever at midnight – something I could appreciate as an ex-smoker myself. I recognised two of the smokers outside as Fräser and Helen, who I’d first met when Vicky and I moved into a shared house with them in our early twenties. The boys claimed it was too cold to stand outside talking so they headed straight indoors taking Vicky and Laura with them. As I hadn’t seen Fräser and Helen since they went travelling over a year and half ago, I told the others I’d see them inside and stood chatting for a while. I was dying to hear their travelling stories and although they were a bit self-conscious at first, wary of coming across like those irritating people who constantly evangelise about the wonders of seeing the world they relaxed when I assured them I was genuinely pleased that they appeared to have had such a great time. They seemed so much happier with their lives in general and with each other specifically that it made me hopeful about my own future too.
    Leaving Fräser and Helen finishing their cigarettes I entered the house. The hallway was crammed wall to wall with party-goers who – even though I didn’t know most of them – all appeared to be the same vintage as me which was reassuring: at least if I got drunk and ended up dancing I would feel my peers’ sympathy rather than their embarrassment.
    In my search for Vicky and the others, I ended up bumping into an inordinate number of people that I hadn’t seen in ages and it made me think about a newspaper survey I once read that said each person in the UK on average knows at least one hundred and twenty people. I remember thinking at the time how a hundred and twenty people seemed like a lot, but standing here at this party, suddenly it didn’t seem like such an outrageous figure after all. Some were friends, some were friends of friends of