St. Patrick’s Day

Three years ago, Mariella came down from Wellington and she and Archie and I went out for some St. Patrick’s Day drinks.  Not really wanting to throw ourselves into the green-beer-and-novelty-outfits spirit of the day, we took the theme “bringing the snakes back to Ireland”, distributing jelly snakes to those around us, and drinking vodka shots in which we soaked said confectionery reptiles.  This proved less than successful, when it turned out that most of our fellow bar patrons hadn’t heard of the snake-banishing part of the St. Patrick legend.

Not too far into the evening, we were joined by a friend of Archie’s.  He and I talked about student politics, in which he’d been involved; I thought at the time he was a typical blowhard of that scene.  At one point we were stopped on the street by a man who’d come down to visit his son and was worried about the effects of binge drinking on young people.  Overhearing us discussing student drinking, he wanted some advice.  We talked a while, but things got confusing when it became clear he thought we were a married couple and we had to explain we’d just met.

I ran into Archie’s friend one or two times socially later that year, including one morning when he and Archie were stumbling out of Mariella’s house just as I was stumbling in, newly single and in need of a coffee and some eggs.  We didn’t say anything at that time, but it put his presence back in my mind enough that I struck up a conversation with him at a party a few months later.  It would be twee to say the rest was history, but it has been history of a kind.

(Hat-tip to MTNW for the title.)

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