One of my soul music dancing set, someone I've known since I was 17, rang me last night asking if I fancied a drink. I've got the girls this weekend but they're OK for an hour or so, so after their beddybyes I'm out by 10pm.
One of the lynchpins of cultural life here, doing certainly things brilliantly, has a bar which occasionally attracts middle class social inadequates who go there because they are incapable of dealing with people not like themselves.
John buys me a drink and we sit down. Almost immediately a pestilential ragged-out hippy woman comes up to us, smothering John's dog and enjoying the closest attention her tits have had from something male this century. She squeezes in next to John and takes over our conversation, making a performance of flirting with him. John is not only spoken for but is light-years out of her league, in looks, intelligence, wit, social graces and dress sense.
As if this isn't enough, someone else who looks like she's just landed in the bar having dropped through a gap in contemporary British social care provision comes up to our table, which by now is rapidly becoming the bar's female nutter magnet. 50something, and in an ankle-length black dress, she approaches, kneels on the floor a yard away, and starts mouthing words to the dog and making circular motions with her head. The bar is morphing into a loony bin.
Hippy woman, says, twice, that she's going outside for a spliff; she looks at us significantly, waiting for a response. Fucking hurry up and piss off then. Inhale your own radicality. Feel your specialness in your lungs. Exhale and hope that someone detects the daringness on your breath.
I stand this for a while, but then make to leave. "Right, OK John, I'll ring you about next weekend..." Finally she scuttles off, realising that she's broken something up.
"I know she's your mate John but she fucking pisses me off. 'Oh God I'm so radical, I'm going outside for a spliff.'"
"Calm down, calm down" says John, who at all times has dealt with her with far more more patience than I. We get back to our conversation, planning our summer's dancing schedule. Which (thank fuck) is based around a type of music that hippies tend not to like.
Apart from that, I've had a lovely time at Hawkshead Beer Festival, about which I will write when that cock of a woman has been eliminated from my memory.
