Winter flowers, Nelson, June 2018, canon, ©Sylvie GBefore the event. Arriving nervously, looking for one’s  place, a place. Watching nervously all around in case   anyone  you know has arrived. If there is someone  you know someone you want to be seen with. If it is better to be seen with  this one or that one  rather than being seen with no one. Is speaking with this  person better  than suffering the indignity of being alone. Then you  see someone with whom it is better to be seen with  and engage . Hang on, get closer. The eternal masquerade preceding an event. Whenever I go to an  event on my own (this time a poetry event with Rikthemost, a young “word artist” from Great-Britain), I see around me the social suffering being alone causes. It  seems to be one of the most insupportable apprehensions of social life  forcing otherwise reasonably intelligent people into the entrenchments of anxiety that evolution over millennia seems to have been unable to tame.