Every summer I like to organise a meal out in Nando’s with all of the friends that I know. It’s always a really exciting day and something I look forward to. Of course, what with the ongoing global pandemic, it hasn’t been possible to arrange a meal like this this year.
Still, I didn’t want to miss out on doing something nice, so I decided to come up with an alternative. This year, I decided to host a large virtual quiz. In the end, I had about twenty friends playing in it. I have to say, I really enjoyed myself and, in some ways, it was better than if I had had a usual meal out.
I wrote a set of questions based around film, TV, video games and books, with the hope that I would be able to make at least one question for each person playing. I wanted everyone to have a moment where they felt pleased that their area of expertise had come up – this was a lot harder than I thought, but I really enjoyed putting it together and thinking about the individual interests of my different friends. Being a quiz host to so many is something I’d love to do again.
But what was most rewarding about it was the fact that I was able to have so many friends together at once. My circle of friends is spread, not only across the country, but across the world too. Arranging a simple Nando’s meal out would have meant that my friends who are more than about ten miles away couldn’t have come. For once, I had almost everybody together.
There are four people who I’ve ever considered to possibly be my best friend and I had 3/4 in the quiz. They all come from very different parts of my life and most of them haven’t really met before, or don’t interact together very often at very least – so having them together, in addition to a large number of other people that I feel very close to, was amazing. With so many people from different aspects of life all together at once, I suppose I could say that it made me feel ‘whole’ in a way that couldn’t have happened otherwise.
I hope to be able to arrange something else like this before long, because having all my friends together was really amazing. If I ever get to have a big, real world gathering with all these people – oh my. That will be a pretty darn exciting day.
