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There were seven of us sat around the table Seven grown adults, sat around the table It was late We had eaten, and we had drunk, and now were drinking more The table, the heavy oak table, was if you will a beach from which the tide of a long and boozy dinner had receded, leaving its surface strewn with a tideline detritus of cork, crumb and ash Among which, on the table, having first cleared a space, with his hand, the side of his hand, Matt, a bottle An empty wine bottle, laid on its side Upon which, Matt’s hand rested, like a spider, fingers braced and knuckles up, as if to make a bridge in snooker   He wafted the bottle casually this way and that, the way a hoodlum sweeps a machine gun from side to side to cover his cowering targets, its malevolent arsehole neck-hole eyeing us each in turn   Come on, he said How about it?   God, people said I mean, come on, please   Grinning, he went to do it, coiling his wrist right round on itself to gain maximum torque, but Cath gave something like a snort of disgust and said, You’ve got to say what it is first You can’t just spin it   Okay, said Matt What was your most unusual sexual experience? And bang! he set it off, the bottle, sent it twirling on its axis in a spookily smooth, almost wobbly motion, as if it were moving above rather than on the surface of the table   I watched it spin, all my attention drained to my peripheral vision, to gauge the others’ reactions, their levels of dismay, acceptance, keenness As I did so I tipped my chair onto its two back legs, to signify insouciance, or ambivalence I wondered, in my tilting, about Matt’s choice of tense What was, he had said What was our most unusual sexual experience Were we that old that our most unusual sexual experience was, necessarily, behind us? Possibly, even, all of our sexual experiences?   Certainly we were too old for this game Spin the bottle is for students, a celebration of the fact