I was meeting old school friends for a catch-up drink after so many years, even though I’d since done some re-evaluating and decided that I wasn’t actually friends - or at least good friends - with many of them, especially as none of us had kept in touch for this long, and it would probably have been better for all concerned had we conveniently “missed” the invite email. 

Still, when you get to my age, you realise the opportunities for social gatherings like this were getting fewer and fewer, and who knows, maybe you were wrong about them, and it would be fun and good. 

I was regretting it before I even made it to the venue. It was mid-week, which past me thought would be fun for future me - a nice way to break up the week - but I was run through the gauntlet at work that week and I just wanted to eat some bad food and go to bed early that night. I went regardless, lying to myself every step of the way. 

We were meeting at this pretend upscale bar. It was in an old fancy-looking building that also advertised bottomless brunch on a chalkboard outside so you knew things were going to be garbage inside. Nice furniture that was worn, bored young staff that were poorly trained, overpriced everything - it had it all. The kind of place someone with no class thought was classy. 

I thought I was late but I looked around (this looked like the sort of place where there would be a maitre’d but of course there wasn’t) and didn’t see anyone. I ended up slouching over to the corner bar where I could look through the bright windows to see anyone walking in. And I had a feeling I hadn’t felt in some time, probably brought on by the memory of those days. 

I remember sitting on the bus to school, looking nervously out of the window as the bus pulled up to a stop, willing it to drive on, and seeing the bullies pile on and then beat me up. The people I was meeting - my old friends - of course weren’t those bullies but I found myself peering out of the windows with the same nervousness as I used to have. 

Someone touched my elbow and I started. It was Emma (not her real name - I’ll keep her out of this), the closest girl friend I had in the group - and she looked great. She told me they were in a private function room further into the bar. I got my drink and we went to the room. 

And there they were. The “old gang”. Looking much like they did back in high school but the longer you looked at them, the more you realised the age. Heavier, slacker faces, thicker bodies, more wary eyes that had a flash of fear in them, forced joie de vivre. I took a deep breath and went into it. 

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It wasn’t bad at first. The usual tedious catch up talk about jobs and families and whatever. I did my best to keep the “No, I’m definitely interested in this and will retain all the information you’re passing on” mask in place. Looking back on the incident, you’d think that was what the conflict would be about: people bragging about their possessions and salaries and power their jobs afforded them (I hadn’t told them about my recent troubles so they weren’t to know what they were saying was doing to me), instead of the seemingly innocuous nonsense that led to it. 

I consider myself to be an accomplished critic of the arts and a fairly decent writer - this was what I had spent a large part of my adult life doing, and doing well, I think. But there was one in the group, I’ll use a pseudonym: Lester. Lester, because he went to a more prestigious university and got a higher degree, well. Lester thinks his views carry more authority. 

Add to that, the others in the group, who seem to believe what he says is actually more authoritative, and you can see what the conflict that followed was about. 

One of my bugbears as a (former) professional book critic is what makes it to the spotlight in the major chains. One or two can be mediocre at best but the majority are quite terrible, year after year. It turned out that Lester works for one of the marketing firms responsible for selecting and promoting these books, and guess what? It’s not arbitrary: it’s about who pays for that promotion. Not a question of quality, just money. 

By the time I had found this out, I was talking about how bad the state of all of the arts is - not just books but film, music, and so on - right now, and Lester quite dismissively said that perhaps I wasn’t looking too deeply into the art itself and that’s why I wasn’t enjoying it. Like I don’t think about the art I experience - as if I wasn’t writing about it afterwards, thinking about it far more than most. As if I didn’t understand it, or was too stupid too. The fucking inferences… 

Lester has this horrible giggle as well to go with his ugly face that really underscored the comment. He even had the gall to wear his shirt open a few buttons from the top, exposing his gross chest hair. He really is a formidably repulsive creature. 

Then another friend - we’ll call him Egon - chimed in to say that he thought things were the opposite: we’d never had it better. He talked tediously about how we didn’t used to have any superhero movies and now we have a half dozen a year, as if that were unquestionable proof of quality cinema. 

I said something about that, Lester said something backing up Egon, claiming that some superhero movies were actually quite profound, or some such rubbish. Emma had generously kept the drinks coming and I had had quite a few by now on an empty stomach (a table was booked for a curry house later that evening but I would never go there). 

As me and Lester had the fist fight in the street an hour or so later, I realised there were different forms of bullying - the more basic, where you got beat up by others, and the more sophisticated that takes the form of subtle condescension by a pretentious twat. As I was carted off by the police, having had my nose broken - Lester did boxing training apparently - I decided I preferred the less subtle variety.