In which looby eats a pie

Me and my ex-boss Barry went to Melton Mowbray for the East Midlands Food Festival. As well as havng a pie, I was also looking forward to meeting one of my oldest blogpals. Homer's now discontinued blog, along with Troubled Diva's, were the reasons I got into blogging about six years ago.  Fewer people did it then and you didn't have to draw the curtains all the time before you chatted together. During the Great Seriouscrush Drama of 2007,  I'd have been lost without online friends like Homer.

She was as drily funny and intelligent as she is online - which is a relief as it stops me having to be tactfully polite about meeting her in this report. She broke off to make a phone call. "Sorry," she said. "Just had to give boyf the codeword to tell him you're not an axeman." We managed to get away from the others for a bit and talked in that familiar way that feels like picking up a normal conversation, which is slightly strange at first as you haven't actually ever done it in person before.

Me and Barry went back to his blank, characterless house in a village near Nottingham before setting off to investigate three lovely pubs. Next day we went to the "oldest pub in the world". We sat in a tiny room which used to be a chimney, where some unpleasant men at the very close next table swore a great deal and talked about being quantity surveyors. We found an exhibition of documentary photographs of 50s and 60s America by Diane Arbus (including this one from 1968 of Jorge Luis Borges), me relieved that without any planning, we'd managed to find something we both found interesting to fill in the featureless time that runs on Sunday afternoons. In the evening we went to see Inception. We couldn't find our way out of the underground car park and were running about it in a way that felt filmic, but eventually found the smallest commercially run cinema in the world. It has twenty-one seats and displays its Guinness Book of Records Certificate in the minuscule entrance.

The three hour journey back was an exercise in self-restraint. I moved after about ten minutes to get away from someone's iPod, had one stop's worth of peace, before another social incompetent gave us well over two hours of hi-hat just in case the carriage was getting a bit quiet.

Last night Seriouscrush and her boyf came round to meet Bela and Csilla (aka The Hungarians). I made the worst fire I've ever built which kept tumbling lumps of coal onto the hearthstone. Socially it went fine; they're exquisitely good in company. Seriouscrush looked utterly sexy and it was a struggle to keep my eyes on her face (as beautiful as her face and hair are). She wore an entirely unbuttoned shirt in a small red check, a black top, the description of which I want to turn slowly over in my mind without sharing it, jeans and flat black shoes. I kept hearing her when we were alone in the pub a few years ago: "I don't mind you looking at my tits sometimes."

We polished off the farm cider I bought at Melton Mowbray, four bottles of wine and some beer. Seriouscrush and boyf left and me, B and C raided the fridge for some more wine and sat up till 3am. We talked about love and marriage and I told them about Seriouscrush. "For sure, she should be with you," said Bela, saying the right thing. "They didn't seem to be together, they're like friends."

Seeing as all our secrets were dominoing out, I mentioned the fact that I like having them around the place and that should they want to stay at chez Looby for the duration of their course rather than just till Christmas as we've agreed, they would be more than welcome. "Thank you. It feels like home," said Csilla.

I sent Seriouscrush a filthy email, and went to bed. [Edit: it was filthy, but that's not really it. I told her that she is beautiful, in a precise way. Of course it was sexual, but there was more to it than that.]

This morning, me and Bela found a companiable silence, me working, she sitting at the opposite side of the table, sewing a button on.