It’s Saturday evening and the whole again half of the tapas restaurant is packed for my pal Ivy’s birthday dinner.

Ivy is queenly on the centre of the desk, bouquets and little present baggage crowding her elbows. A number of strains of dialog movement above the small plates, and drinks and desserts hold coming, as a result of nobody needs to name it an evening. It’s an unequivocal success.

Then Ivy confesses that she’s been racked with anxiousness – from the second she circulated the invitations, proper up till she walked into the restaurant. “What if no person had come?”

I’m bemused. Ivy is beloved, as tonight’s turnout reveals, and she or he’d requested us out for a pleasant dinner – not on an abroad journey, to an open mic evening, or the rest which may have examined budgets or enthusiasm. Why wouldn’t we’ve got come?

I’m such a flake myself that I’ve began to imagine that everybody will do the identical to me