it's my party and i'll discuss social engineering if i want to

House party in Dublin.
Three Spanishies.
Two Poles.
Two Italians.
A Bulgarian.
And me.
I am the only Irish person there.
They are beautiful people.
So I fit right in.
When the revel is at its height someone pronounces the following legend.
"You know as recently as ten years ago in Ireland you couldn't get condoms without a prescription."
All eyes turn on me.
There is silence.
I think I genuinely heard a bullfrog croak.
And I definitely saw tumbleweed blowing from the kitchen to the loo.
I thought for a moment.
There was a certain temptation to go along with the crowd.
It would have been so easy to dissociate myself from the past. I could just smile and make some cheesy remark about days gone by. No need to express any reservations about condom culture.
"Well," I said in a long exhale. "Forty years ago, you couldn't get condoms in any of our countries. Your countries or mine."
There came a quick rejoinder.
"Yes," shot back the Perfect Fit. "But that's forty years ago. Come on."
More perfect silence.
"Well," said I, "I know someone who spent his teenage years talking about condoms. It was condoms this and condoms that and hooray for all the condoms. He kept on and on about how condoms would free the masses. Then he spent the next twenty years desperately trying to father a child."
The bullfrog again.
This time he was joined by a few friends.
The tumbleweed reappeared, peeping round the door at me.
The Perfect Fit spoke again.
"You don't really think condoms should be unavailable?" she said.
Hoo boy.
Intent silence.
Like the remotest part of Siberia on an off night.
"Well," I said, this time actually savouring my third trip to the well. "Condoms haven't exactly brought the golden age of peace, enlightenment, prosperity and social harmony which their proponents predicted for them."
There was laughter then.