Don't chat me up

I see the days in a line. From Monday right through to Sunday. In my head they stretch out as if perched on a ruler, the space between each one and the next always the same.

This line never ends, although when Saturday is over the indentation in the ruler is a little deeper. The months are arranged in an oval. January is at the bottom, with the Christmas festivities sparkling drunkenly behind it and the spring and summer months curving around to meet September, then back along the gently sloping path to December.

A friend sees the days spread out in an expansive circle while the months stand stiff and upright, like soldiers standing for inspection. We see the same things, but we see them differently.That's just the way it is. For example, not too long ago my friend and I were out for one of our far-too-occasional meetings. Two men approached our table. The one with slightly more hair asked my friend whether they could "pop ourselves down" with us on the two spare chairs that were beside our table.

The mood I was in at the time - hassled, frazzled, slightly depressed - meant I wouldn't even look at them, and it was left to my friend to tell them that of course they could sit down. We didn't own the chairs, she said later when I began to harangue her for giving away the seats that were acting as a buffer between us and the rest of the bar.

Almost immediately the man with slightly less hair started talking to us, with some inane comment designed to draw us into their company. I murmured something noncommittal and continued to chat to my friend while she wavered between responding fully to their attempts at conversation and chatting to me.

At each lame gambit - "So, what are you girls doing here?" and "It's not very lively here, is it?" - I, in my bad mood, became increasingly agitated. She was the picture of politeness. After what seemed a very long time both men stood up and walked to another part of the bar, leaving their coats on the seat. "We'll be back," their anoraks weakly implied.

My friend found it offensive that I was so annoyed by their innocent attempts to befriend us. The way I saw it, they shouldn't have assumed that we would want them to interrupt our conversation - a particularly meaty one about relationships, as I recall - just because we were two women out in a bar. "Neither of us has any interest in being with them, so why should we waste any energy, or give them the wrong impression, by talking to them?"

It sounded cold when I said it, but then I reversed the situation in my head. Imagine, I said to her, two women popping themselves down and presuming that permission to pop meant permission to interrupt the night of two men who were obviously deep in conversation. Some level of arrogance would be required to assume they were fair game just because the men were out drinking at night.

I didn't think it would happen. And, if it did, the men, in my view, would have been quite justified in ignoring them.

But my friend insisted there were ways of dissuading unwelcome attention without being rude. She would have had no problem waving her "wedding" ring in their faces and telling anecdotes about her "husband" until they retreated, having got the message she was sending out. Her tactic would have allowed them to keep at least some of their dignity.

She went on to accuse me of being unnecessarily cruel. She said it wouldn't be enough for me that they left with their tails between their legs. "You want to see them whimpering all the way home," she tutted. It wasn't exactly true, but it made me feel guilty. Not quite guilty enough to call them over and ask them whether they came here often, but guilty all the same.

She said that, taken to an extreme, my rudeness - I preferred to call it honesty - could have made the men angry enough to wait outside, to accost me. I suggested that her politeness could have made them get the wrong idea enough to accost her in a display of overly amorous zeal.

We sipped our drinks and thought about this as we watched the men take their coats off the chairs beside us and attempt the same trick rather more successfully at the other side of the pub. I see the days in a line, she sees them in a circle. We decided that, on balance, a courteous but firm blend of our reactions would be more appropriate the next time someone attempted to seduce us.

If, as she quite reasonably pointed out, there ever was a next time.