This week I learn to commit. With a wedding.

I have a friend who, each week, around Thursday afternoon, sends a perfunctory email suggesting we catch up “some time” over the weekend. I attempt to narrow the parameters: “Sunday brunch?” She’ll then reply, not with a concrete time and place, but again loosely: “Cool. Will buzz you Sun AM.”

Invariably, Sunday comes, she doesn’t call and around lunchtime shoots a text, “Sorry hon, can’t make it. Next week?” And so it goes.

The whole flaccid caper drives me rather mental. Her invite is as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise; she wants options to be available for the weekend, but she won’t damn well commit!

This week I took wise counsel from a bunch of nice 22-year-old blokes in Ramones T-shirts.

On Friday night I found myself in a down-an-alley-way-up-a-rickety-staircase bar brimful with young men born since the advent of personal email. They wore winkle-pickers and their older sister’s cardigans and drank longnecks of Coopers. It felt like it was 1983; I knew the words to all the songs.

At the expense of sounding creepily like Germaine Greer (remember that weird book The Beautiful Boy in which she infatuates over barely-adult boys?), I’ve been in the company of very young men a lot lately and find them intriguingly charming. (A shout out to their mothers – you’ve done a stellar job.) I also find them curiously relaxed.

This, in spite of the fact they all seem to be juggling a crazy array of blog design start-ups, music piracy operations and 17 Twitter accounts. “Do you ever get stressed?” I asked Mike, a cherubic kid who runs two street art galleries and DJs at weekends. He adjusted his ironically dorky glasses and said, “No, because these days it’s cool to be calm”.

This week I make my philosophical peace with fashion.

If I may, I’d like to indulge in a run-down of my surreal fashion experience this week. It has a life-bettering point, of sorts, toward the end.

So, Wednesday I find myself tricked up with hair extensions and smoky eye, parading down a catwalk with a dozen professional models half my size and age. It was for charity and all terribly Sex and the City, specifically the episode where SJP trips over doing a charity parade in New York. Mercifully, I merely veered off course briefly, to make way for a model charging at me doing that curious “donkey gait” that models do.

This week I drink chai with a man who used to beat people to a pulp for a living, to see if he knows how to make life better.*

There’s this thing I’ve been doing for a while now. Every fortnight I invite an interesting stranger to share a cup of tea or a wine, so I can learn more about how this mortal coil spins. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. One time it might be an academic I admire. The next a disagreeable blogger I want to understand better, or a work contact I’ve only ever dealt with via email who I keep saying I should actually meet some time. Some time never happens, of course, unless you got off your bum.