It could have happened in any number of ways or places, but most likely you live in the UK and work with someone who went to Oxford or possibly do yoga with someone who went to Cambridge. You’re in your forties now, so your budding friendship was probably slow to bloom, the product of months or even years of rubbing up against one another socially or professionally, gradually yielding to affectionate familiarity. Either that or it accelerated quickly, likely due to the sort of drinking that in most places would count as heavy but in the UK is seen as social maintenance.

The chances are you are funny and smart or that you know how to make conversation, know how to piece together amusing observations from bits of low and high culture alike. It is your conversational fluidity that has earned an introduction to your friend’s friendship circle. Your new friend has possibly been sizing you up for an invite to a party with his or her old cohort for some time.

Warning! Things will nosedive at the party. After this you will probably lose your new friend – not entirely, but there will be a deintensification, a lessening of the connection. This sounds dire because it sort of is, but you will survive. If nothing else, you will emerge with an unusual degree of anthropological familiarity with a relatively rare yet very influential tribe.

There is a ringleader of the group, though this is usually unacknowledged. The ringleader is usually the liveliest person, not the person who organises things, though this is variable.

Last note: After nine years in the UK, I have observed every single one of the events mentioned here. This, however, is a aggregation, the details obscured or remixed.

Stage One

The setting is likely someone’s house for a dinner, and most of the gang will be there – six to eight people, all of whom went to university together, barring maybe one other outsider. They will start out in a jocular vein, possibly even deferentially. If you are American, there will be discussions of long road trips across Montana, of happening to be in New York City the night Barack Obama won, of someone’s sincerely deep love of the blues. If you are French nobody will attempt conversation in your native tongue unless they are uncommonly good at it. Pretty much wherever you are from, someone will have something to say about it, and not necessarily the most obvious thing.

Stage Two

Things begin to go downhill the moment you observe something that nobody else in the group has considered. Perhaps this will be a cultural observation, of something odd about Britain, but more likely it will just be a comment, even a throwaway one, about something in the news. At first you will have no clue that you have committed an infraction. A frown will do the rounds. If your contribution was really smart, the de facto ringleader of the group will say “I didn’t realise we were having a serious night” and there will be a gentle ripple of laughter.

Stage Three

You misjudged, you think. Just relax and talk about fun things, you think to yourself. It’s been a long week. Maybe serious observations about current events aren’t appropriate. You try another tack. When music comes up you mention your guilty pleasure of the moment. Maybe it’s Ava Max. This is met by silence. When somebody finally speaks, they mention that their nine-year old daughter is a fan. You try again, with a pop culture reference that’s fun, maybe marginally racy. This time the reaction isn’t quite as cold, though it is followed by somebody forcibly picking the conversation up and moving it elsewhere. (You don’t yet understand.)

Interlude

You realise that one of the friendship circle is a former MP, and more to the point, they’ve realised that you’ve realised this. You have a few options – to freak out, to ask detailed questions, to play dumb, or just to continue on as if nothing unusual were afoot. Even though it’s early in the evening, you recognise that this final course of action is the wisest.

Stage Four

The ringleader’s body has gotten ever so slightly tense. You notice it the way you notice a mosquito across the room at dusk – it’s a warning, though it’s difficult at this point to say how troubling it will end up being. Somebody thinks to ask you a little bit about what you do, and you assume the question is sincere, so you answer in depth. Expertise (yours; not theirs) is dangerous, and the knives of contradiction will come out at this point. If contradiction is not in their wheelhouse, you will face confusion. Confusion is a weapon. “But why would that job be found in London and not Frankfurt or New York?” or “I had no idea it was possible to make a living as a travel writer” or “Honestly I had no idea people still got hired for those sorts of academic jobs, good for you.”

Stage Five

This continues, and you are asked to provide an expert opinion about something you know well. The question is cloaked in conversational lightness but it feels more like a demand than anything else. If you answer definitively there will be a very quiet argument during which you will notice that somebody’s teeth are gritted; if you answer in a more open-ended fashion people will seem frustrated or bored. Whatever your answer, this is the moment when you notice that the friends are looking at each other pseudo-surreptitiously, maybe with faint smiles.

Stage Six

“Right, more wine.” Suddenly there is a bolt of liveliness. It feels strangely theatrical, as if dictated by a script commanding everyone to emerge abruptly from pitch blackness into the middle of a conversation. None of the subject matter of the volleys back and forth at this stage will be accessible to you. They will refer to things shared by the group, possibly years ago. There will be no in-jokes at this point, but references to people, places, and experiences that you cannot comment on. This is also the stage at which people stop looking at you directly.

Stage Seven

The friend who invited you is suddenly scarce. After 15 minutes or so you begin to recognise your own deep annoyance. You feel the normal sheaths of social propriety fall, and when someone comments on something you believe to be utterly wrong, you express yourself. This is the most perilous moment yet, and there will be no return from it. The ringleader is upset, yet his defense of his position is empty; you make the probably unwise decision to simply say “that seems wrong to me” and if you really want to turn the knife, you will quickly and deftly demonstrate why.

Stage Eight

There might be a long, difficult silence; the conversation might also snap back as if nothing at all had happened, with more false joviality. But as soon as the emotional smoke has cleared the in-jokes will be brandished like weapons. Dinner has concluded at this point, and the friends will position themselves in physical arcs. Your friend’s back faces you. Should there be an outsider spouse present, your conversational options will be restricted to him or her. If not, your will find yourself in conversation with the antsy children who for some reason have not been put to bed, or, in the most pathetic scenario of all, a diffident, droopy Basset mix.

Stage Nine

As you leave, thanking your hosts, the conversation is about an upcoming holiday in France or Spain or Portugal, at an incredible villa with eight bedrooms. They have six filled and they are thinking aloud about who else might be appropriate to add to the mix. The ringleader, who officially hates you, has to be jostled by his wife to say goodbye to you. “Hope to see you again, yeah, goodnight,” he says. There is no longer even a shadow of sincerity in his tone, but he is smiling.