You scratch my back, I'll stab yours.

Yesterday, I went to see a screening of ten things, one of which was written by me. (Don't worry, they were quite short things. I wasn't watching ten opera cycles. That's on Friday.) Anyway, in the chat after the screening, I got talking to another of the writers, who asked me which one I'd written, and then when I told her, said she'd liked it. Obviously, this told me nothing about whether she'd liked it or not, just that she was a normal polite human being. We both knew it, and that was fine. But it did mean that I now had to ask her which hers was, and then say I liked it; being bound doubly by the laws of being a normal polite human being (qv), and also by the laws of being a recently complimented human being, required to deliver myself from compliment debt. We both knew this as well, and this, also, was fine. Except that, as I opened my mouth to reply, the stupid part of my brain expressed a concern that this wasn't going to sound very convincing. At this point, of course, the rest of my brain ought to have wrestled the stupid part to the ground and sat on it, explaining between hammer blows that it didn't need to be convincing, it just needed to be polite. Unfortunately, the stupid part of my brain is quite a large part, and the rest of my brain looked at it, and didn't fancy its chances of getting it down and keeping it down. So instead, it asked the stupid part of my brain what it thought we should do about it. 'Be honest!' said the stupid part of my brain, as it so often and so stupidly does. 'Acknowledge the situation! Make light of it! That's bound to work!' All this took only half a second, as the stupid part of my brain is very quick-thinking, in the sense of quickly thinking something really stupid. And so I said

'Thank you! And which one's yours? Although obviously whichever it was I'm going to tell you it's great!'

Immediately, the rest of my brain caught up with what the stupid part had done. This was disaster. I hadn't done anything to evade my duties as a polite person and a complimented person- I had merely made it much harder to discharge them. Because now I'd wilfully and unnecessarily pointed out the situation we were both aware of anyway, a simple 'Oh, right! That was great!', -which was all that required of me a moment ago- would now practically be an insult. The only way out was to put on a big Oscar-winning performance about how, actually, conincidentally, that one (whichever it was) genuinely was my favourite, for the following six good reasons. Or was that the only way? The stupid part of my brain was down, but it wasn't out. Perhaps, it reasoned, stupidly, perhaps now the whole issue is out in the open, there is a humorous 'get out of jail free' card to be played... And so it was that the following exchange took place:

Her: Oh, I wrote 'The Icy Cormorant of Love'.
Me: Did you? That was rubbish!


She looked as if I'd punched her.


And the really annoying thing is that hers was actually one of my favourites. Astonishing the things they can train cormorants to do these days.