A hot date

It was supposed to be the Chilli Festival this weekend. I really wanted to go. I had a great time there last year, eating local boar and chestnut pies, smoked herrings, drinking ale from Yorkshire and fending off Felicity's jealously of Kitty.

I asked Kitty (helping her Mum decorate), Linda (no reply), Gaynor (in London) and my ex-neighbour but three, Margaret, who just this evening has accepted via a mottled message from my Hungarian lodger who called her Lowra. Margaret is pretty, 40something, with good taste in quiet clothes which span the full extent of the spectrum from ecru to magnolia. I unexpectedly bumped into her there last year, switching immediately and I hope inconspicuously into the brightly-lit chat that a drinker does with sober people. 'Tis pity she's a Christian, but I was looking forward to going with her. Then came the news this evening that it had been cancelled due to the heavy rain we've had.

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I waited for Denise outside Imran's Punjabi Buffet, where a man can entertain a lady, flourishly pay for everything, and still get change from fifteen quid. I saw her before she saw me and moved a foot back from her sightlines to drink in her looks. As all attractive women do, she immediately started apologising. Every man who likes a woman has to reserve the first five minutes of seeing her to appease the endlessly varied recitation of female self-dislike.

"Denise, you look gorgeous. What spots?" She pointed to some barely perceptible imperfections in her skin, as if anyone would notice those over her flowing ginger hair, her tightly-fitting strappy purple and white flowery dress, her flat patent leather red shoes, her beautiful curves which are made for my hands.

Our fingers locked together over the table and we inched closer. "I love the way your hair falls over your tits," that kind of thing. "Those texts you send me, looby. I save them and read them to myself. It's nice that [redacted] makes you feel like that."

"...Ever since I first saw you, at Bloom and Doom," I replied. I described the time when she came to my desk holding a fax which I had to do something about. She was standing behind me; I was looking obliquely at the hem of her skirt, thinking how tall and well dressed she was. We started meeting in the canteen at lunch. "A part of me feels dead when I'm here," she said one day.

Denise gets the first invite to the Chilli Festival next year, as long as boyfriend isn't interested. Don't want him hanging around, making us polite.

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In other drink-related news, I accidentally invited Ingrid to a winetasting ("Regional Italy, Part One") next month by dint of my inability to master a simple email program. I hope it will be OK. She became rather volubly drunk last time we went to a winetasting and I felt an imaginary faint chorus of "You're a Nutterlover" rise from the respectable crowd with whom we were exploring the mouth of the Rhône. At the bus stop on the way home she repeatedly told me it will only be friends, to which I happily agreed. Then she stayed on the bus beyond her stop to get off with me and seemed to be angling for an exploration of her mouth, which aroused neither my interest nor anything else.