Magistrates Courts sitting on a Sunday. Immediate punishment for the poor, endless latitude for the selfish rich sequestering the money this country needs to address the problems inarticulately articulated by the rioters. And worse, the tax dodgers are doing it with the collusion of the government.
I have just passed Nationwide Building Society's window, and felt like putting a foot through it. A poster shows a woman from behind in a dressing gown, cuddling a baby holding a teddy bear by its arm. "The kindest thing you can do." And a URL for some website on which you can buy insurance. The privatisation and commercialisation of the most fundamental sentiment of all, that of caring for one's children. Big business and their lapdog directors can pay, won't pay.
I waited for Denise outside Imran's Punjabi Buffet, where a man can entertain a lady and still have 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 women 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 dress with inch-wide white straps, her scarlet flat patent leather shoes, the colour of which sends me back to her hair to look at her sexy dressy symmetry again.
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.
We said goodbye at the bus station and it was all I could do to nod and keep my hands off her, but I did, and she smiled back at me, pleased with me for respecting a boundary.
In other drink-related news, I've inadvertently invited Ingrid to a wine tasting next month by dint of my inability to master an email program I've been using for ten years. I hope it will go OK. Last time we went to a wine tasting she turned rather loudly drunk and unsteady, and I felt embarrassed by association as she missed her footing on les bouches du Rhône. At the bus stop on the way home she repeatedly told me it will only be friends, to which I gladly 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 excited neither my interest nor anything else. Denise's mouth, on the other hand, arouses both my
