📙 Part 2: Describe an occasion when many people were smiling

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Questions and Answers

Maria: Describe an occasion when many people were smiling. You should say when it happened, who you were with, what happened, and explain why most people were smiling. What a lovely topic. Rory, could you give us your story? Rory's story.

Rory: Well, there are lots of times this has happened in my life, but I think the most recent one for me at least, was my little brother's birthday party. He just turned thirty-three earlier in January, and my parents decided to throw a party for him in their home. So, when it comes to who I was with, it was my brother, obviously, but also his girlfriend and my partner and I, and my parents of course, because it's their house. Oh, and my brother's girlfriend's dog was also there, if you can follow that. That sticks out in particular because we were all quite taken with her. She's just a big lump of a dog that doesn't really bother anyone and just sits and chills. So that was quite nice. In terms of what exactly happened, nothing terribly out of the ordinary for a birthday party. We talked a lot because, well, a lot of us had just come back from various holidays over the winter. So we had a lot of news to share, and that was interesting. My brother had been away to South Africa for a month, and that was very fun to hear about. And we had just been back from the Canary Islands. So that took a long time to cover and go into detail about. And once we were done talking about that, we settled into our usual sharing stories from the past and telling people from outside the family how things seem to have changed over the years. As for why most people were smiling, well, not only was it a fairly positive occasion already, what with it being a birthday party and all. But it's also just par for the course since most of the stories we were sharing were rather funny, which naturally makes people more inclined to smile, I think anyway. I'm glad we had the chance to do that. If we hadn't, it probably would have been ages before we all got together again. I hope we get the chance to do the same thing soon.