A plaice of my own

I realise that there is evidence of a social error in the above photograph which could result in my banishment from polite society, but Corbière's all I had in.

I've got a Couchsurfer staying at the moment, a twentysomething Syrian Christian who's just finished his doctor's training and has an interview at 8.30am [sic] tomorrow for his first job. Kirsty and the girls had arranged to come round for tea yesterday and I was a bit worried about how it would work socially. Everything went fine, the adults working through a couple of bottles of wine as the background for a long chat about the Islamicisation of Sweden (where Firas studied), a conversation partly promoted by the fact that my part of our street is mainly Muslim. He's looking for flats to rent and is adamant that he doesn't want to live in a Muslim area. Of which, I am relieved to say, there are very few in Lancaster.

We went down the pub this afternoon with a couple of my friends and I realised how incomprehensible colloquial Lancaster English must be to a foreigner. But they all like heavy metal so it seemed to go OK. We came home and I started preparing the plaice which I bought yesterday from the sole surviving fishmonger in Lancaster, not counting the man in Sainsbury's who possesses a certificate about Excellence in Fishmongering Skills which in a couple of years will become a degree, validated by the Pong Ping campus of Lancaster University. I was wondering whether I could buy the whole fish and have a bash at filleting it myself, but the real fishmonger decided it for me. "Plehss? Hawl? Neh mehrt, if y'dunno what ye doon y'v nor chance. Filluts." He showed me two large plates of white fish in the way that a proud sommelier might present a secretly sourced Madiran. I nodded and gave him five pounds something.

Firas, to my surprise, didn't want any tea. "No thank you, I don't eat much." It felt a bit strange to be eating it by myself in the kitchen while he sat in the front room on his computer.

I emailed Arty, telling her about my show in Brussels, and wondering if we might be able to meet up again next time I'm in Glasgow. She sent me the following effusive email, which I quote in its entirety.

Dear looby
Good luck with your show.
Arty

So I think we can safely assume that one's dead in the water.

Never mind. The other person involved in that exchange is coming over tomorrow and staying overnight. It's Kim's birthday on Wednesday so there are some chocolate truffles for her cooling downstairs and I've got her a card which has a picture of a 50s glam woman in a bright yellow jacket holding a glass of wine. It says "Wine: how posh people get shitfaced." The thing she said to me a couple of weeks ago, "I can get emotionally close to someone, or physically; I find it hard combining the two", rings in my head.