The strange little moment when having nowhere to go starts to feel like exactly what you wanted.
There is a particular kind of message that requires a surprisingly careful reply. The dinner you were supposed to be going to has been cancelled, or the friends you were meeting can no longer make it, and you type something appropriately disappointed. “Oh no. What a shame. Hope everything’s okay.” All of which may be perfectly sincere, except for the small and rather inconvenient fact that somewhere between reading the message and sending the reply, you felt delighted.
It is not because you didn’t want to see them. You probably did. An hour earlier, you were quite happily expecting to go out, and if the plan had remained in place you would almost certainly have enjoyed it. But now an entire evening has been handed back to you, unexpectedly and without any of the guilt that might have accompanied cancelling it yourself.
There is still plenty of time to do something else. You could message somebody, book a table, see what’s on, suggest a drink or simply resurrect the evening in another form. The interesting part of a cancelled plan is not really that the plan has disappeared. It is how often we make absolutely no attempt to replace it.
Instead, quite small things begin to happen. The shoes you had been going to wear stay upstairs. Whatever was going to constitute dinner becomes much less complicated, and by the time you would originally have been leaving the house, you are already sitting down.
Usually, it is somewhere familiar. Not necessarily the best seat in the room, and certainly not one selected after careful consideration. It is simply where you tend to end up, often so consistently that other people in the house know it too. Someone else sitting there can produce a moment of confusion completely out of proportion to the offence.
You know where to put your feet without looking, which position feels right, where your hand goes when you reach to one side and what you can see from where you sit. Someone who has spent all day responding to messages puts their phone down and then forgets where they left it. By nine o’clock, the person who was perfectly capable of going somewhere else has become extremely difficult to move twenty feet.
And staying in does not necessarily mean being alone. Sometimes somebody suggests, “Why don’t we just have drinks at yours?” The plan has not disappeared at all. Only the venue has changed.
There is a particular pleasure in watching people you know well stop behaving like visitors. They no longer wait to be told where to sit, and somebody eventually gets up and finds what they need from the kitchen without asking. One person has somehow acquired a preferred chair in a house they do not live in. At some point nobody is really hosting anymore.
There will still be nights when the house feels too quiet, when somebody suggests going out and everyone is ready before they have finished the sentence. There will be restaurants worth travelling for, people worth seeing and evenings when staying home is the last thing anybody wants to do. None of that changes.
But occasionally there is an evening when the restaurants are open, the weather is good, other people are available and there is absolutely nothing preventing you from going out.
And you stay.
Hours later, the cancellation message is still somewhere on your phone. Nobody made another plan. By then, nobody wishes they had.
