Conversation

In 1908, the iconoclast writer Lytton Strachey – the bad boy of the Bloomsbury set – pointed a long finger at a stain on artist Vanessa Bell’s dress and asked, “Semen?” Later, Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf wrote: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down… It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.” Americans tend to think that the English are sexually repressed and too refined and cultured for such talk I was recently in a bar in Bloomsbury – one that actually serves a “Virginia Woolf hamburger” – when talk among the young women at my table turned to men they knew who were, how should I put this, well-endowed. Of course, I’ve heard such talk before, but not in a long time and not in such anatomical detail.

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

London  At London parties you can find plenty of smart beautiful women and handsome charming men. You can find a cornucopia of drugs and drink. And you can find someone who will sleep with you, marry you, publish you and best of all, flatter you. But what’s hard to find is someone to have a really good conversation with. Think about it. When was the last time you went to a social event and had a really interesting conversation with a stranger? You meet someone and suddenly you click: they get you, you get them. There’s no secret agenda — sexual or otherwise — just the pure pleasure of talking. And now that I don’t drink, take drugs or look for love, all that London parties have left to offer me is good conversation.