At last, an update.

As you may know, the first of my 10 dinner parties for the unknown took place this weekend. And yes, ten minutes before my very first strangers arrived on Saturday night I was, it has to be admitted, questioning my sanity. I had three basic crises.

Firstly, it was quite conceivable that no-one would turn up. My grand idea of a utopian world where strangers trust each other and we can all leave our doors unlocked at night without fear would be proven lunacy and I would have to eat enough meatballs for ten all by myself.

Secondly, it was equally possible that people would turn up, but they would be the type of people I normally go out of my way to avoid spending an evening with. Don't get me wrong, in this respect I am utterly and immutably British - I love a nice odd-socks-and-no-regard-for-personal-safety eccentric as much as the next person - but I'd quite like to end the evening with my life, and ideally all of my possessions intact.

Thirdly, and much more pressingly, no shop within a ten mile radius had any ice. Damn Valentines Day celebrators with their champagne on my ice. Nothing if not inventive, I purchased several packs of frozen raspberries and blueberries to add to our gin and tonics. All was not lost.

So these were my concerns when the doorbell rang. All thoughts of what sort of nutter might be about to walk in were firmly suppressed, and this is what you need to know about my very first set of strangers.

Four were invited, three turned up. That’s OK, turning up at a strangers house is a scary thing to do, and there are a million and one reasons why they may not have made it.
The three who arrived were:

Ayren Honey, apart from me our only other Scot, who works in Edinburgh for a war veterans charity.
Camilo Cienfuegos, who arrived in Edinburgh 22 days ago from Madrid under the pretext of learning English, but actually here just for a sabbatical from work, and some fun.
And Amanda Leduc, a Canadian novelist who came to Scotland three years ago to do a masters degree and stayed because of the weather...

The great thing about a social occasion with strangers is that you can dispense with all the mundane small talk that normal dinner parties often degenerate into. No "So how's so-and-so" or "did you hear about such and such" or "Did you see this or that on telly?" Because we had absolutely no commonalities to begin with we were straight on the fundamental topics of the night. What's the point of this? (a grand social experiment on the nature of contemporary 'community' and just plain old curiosity), why people had come? (more curiosity, the need for a new challenge/a bit of excitement, decreasing circles of friends, meeting new people) and what we thought about the nature of trust and humanity? (lots).

People relaxed, and conversation, laughter and red wine flowed. Everyone had been wondering what type of person would answer a request like mine, and consequently, what we all had in common. Interestingly, Ayren revealed half way through his starter (goats cheese and roast beetroot salad) that he had previously changed his name. This kicked off a pretty heated debate about the nature of human identity and how much we can choose who we are. The really fascinating stuff, however, happened after desert (chocolate and amaretto ice cream). I asked each guest to tell us three facts about themselves, two which were true and one which was a lie. We would then guess the lie.

I went first, and here are my three:
- I have eaten dog
- I have eaten silkworm
- I have eaten donkey

Amanda was next. Her three facts are as follows:
-Turtles make me uncomfortable
- I had major brain surgery when I was five and died on the operating table
- I like climbing things.

Ayren was next, with the following:
- I used to manage a warehouse
- I used to figure skate competitively
- I have sailed twice round the Isle of Wight

Camilo was up last with:
- I once climbed between the seventh floor of a building and the sixth via the balcony
- I used to be a corporate lawyer
- I once dated a girl for two years without her knowing my real name.

The first three I'll leave you to make up your own mind about, but I can't help but elaborate on the third one. We established that the false 'fact' was that about his previous career. I still have no idea what he did or does for a living, (he had told us that he doesn't need to work at the moment) but it's certainly not corporate lawyer-ing. This begs the question of how he managed to get away with being in a relationship with someone who didn't even know his name. And, perhaps more importantly, why! "Because I don't like lying" was his perplexing response.

Then Ayren pipes up: "But Camilo isn't your real name either, is it?".
"Camilo" agrees that this is true. Ayren had apparently worked this out earlier, when we had been discussing Ayren's own change of name. Apparently there had been a look passed between the two of them that seemingly one might only recognise had one been through a change of name. Apparently, Camilo Cienfuegos was a famous Cuban revolutionary – who knew? Damn my lack of education!

So now you see the situation in which we found ourselves in. One of my guests makes up fictional characters and situations in novels; one has reinvented them self in order to leave behind his past and move on from where he had been; and one... Well I know absolutely nothing about my third guest. I don't know his real name, his age, his family, his interests, his career... does it matter? Not a bit. He was charming, amusing, and great fun to spend an evening with. I have my theories, of course - I suspect he may be on the run from Interpol who are looking for him in connection with a particularly daring and clever bank robbery. Or he may be the son of a wealthy aristocrat who prefers to dissociate himself with the privilege of his upbringing. The point is that it doesn't take much to join the dots between the four of us; we're all involved in a merry dance along the border between fiction and reality, scuffing and shuffling it to the point of obscurity.

So what have I learnt from my strangers this week? Well perhaps I've learnt that what one chooses to tell you about oneself can reveal more of who they are than any amount of facts you can learn about them. Or perhaps I’ve learnt that you can know someone better after an hour of conversation than you can after years of intimate relationship - maybe the few salient facts you learn about a stranger during that first meeting gives you a clearer, cleaner picture of them than one mottled with the minutia of details you will learn after a week, or a year, or a lifetime of friendship. Perhaps the evening was about the liberation of meeting with strangers – about how you can be completely free from the constraints of people who have already judged you, or know you to be exaggerating, or to whom you have already introduced yourself in such a way that you have no room for experimentation. Or maybe I just learnt that no matter how many frozen blueberries you add to your gin and tonic, still nothing can compare to the humble ice cube.

One thing I know for certain. I had a darned tooting time on Saturday night, I met three interesting, funny, warm and fundamentally good people with whom I would love to stay in touch, and I can't wait to do it again. And I still have all my silverware.

So next time, then. Dinner at mine?