Sun 2nd October 2011

I had my first drink yesterday at 8.45am and the last at 11pm. I loved it all. There's an aesthetic quality to drinking, a sensual pleasure that you can't talk about, of your skin being stroked. "I wished he would get out of the car, because I was going to come right there." I spent a happy half hour sexting Denise, who applied her considerable literary abilities to texts of richly precise detail. It involved lipstick. I don't think I'm going to be able to pass the Revlon counter at Boots any more without sighing.

I woke up with a bit of headache, nothing much, but a surprise as I never get headaches. My daughter Jenny came round. "Tickle me", and we made up a game where I was just checking her cardi's hood to make sure it was OK. She loves being tickled round her neck.

I had to get some printing done. No idea, on a Sunday. Jenny suggested the Novel Cafe, a new bookish cafe but more Danielle Steele than Doris Lessing. Staff who are well-meaning to the point of irritation. But they had a printer. Went upstairs to use the computer. A little girl was on it. "Shit," I thought, "How do I kick her off without irritating her parents? Actually, that looks like GorgeousAdminWoman's daughter."

GorgeousAdminWoman was reclined deeply, almost horizontally, into a settee. I met her about four years ago when she was ticking boxes in the Department of Pencil Skirts. "Hello Tina," I said. "I've always wanted to see you laying down." I bent down to kiss her on the cheek. She offered the side of her face up to me to the same uneasy extent to which I felt I was stretching a social boundary.

"You've still got my number, haven't you?" she said. "Yes," I said. "We must do that drink sometime." Do that drink. I'd criticise that in someone else's speech. But I'm not going to ring her. She likes me fancying her but lacks the interest in others that would make me going round to hers result in anything but an unerotic night of her own self-examination.

In town, I met another good looking woman, who was a barmaid for a while in my local, doing an MA at the same time as me. We chatted about her teaching job in Kendal. She's always generously talkative to me in that open, unflirtatious way that says "No fucking chance pal".

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looby, n.; pl. loobies. A lout; an awkward, stupid, clownish person

M / 61 / Bristol, "the most beautiful, interesting and distinguished city in England" -- John Betjeman [1961, source eludes me].

"Looby is a left-wing intellectual who is obsessed with a) women's clothes and b) tits." -- Joy of Bex.

WLTM literate woman, 40-65. Must have nice tits, a PhD, and an mdma factory in the shed, although the first on its own will do in the short term.

There are plenty of bastards who drink moderately. Of course, I don't consider them to be people. They are not our comrades.
Sergei Korovin, quoted in Pavel Krusanov, The Blue Book of the Alcoholic

I am here to change my life. I am here to force myself to change my life.
Chinese man I met during Freshers Week at Lancaster University, 2008

The more democratised art becomes, the more we recognise in it our own mediocrity.
James Meek

Tell me, why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a beautiful evening, or a conversation in agreeable company, it all seems no more than a hint of some infinite felicity existing apart somewhere, rather than actual happiness – such, I mean, as we ourselves can really possess?
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

I hate the iPod; I hate the idea that music is such a personal thing that you can just stick some earplugs in your ears and have an experience with music. Music is a social phenomenon.
Jeremy Wagner

La vie poetique has its pleasures, and readings--ideally a long way from home--are one of them. I can pretend to be George Szirtes.
George Szirtes

Using words well is a social virtue. Use 'fortuitous' once more to mean 'fortunate' and you move an English word another step towards the dustbin. If your mistake took hold, no-one who valued clarity would be able to use the word again.
John Whale

One good thing about being a Marxist is that you don't have to pretend to like work.
Terry Eagleton, What Is A Novel?, Lancaster University, 1 Feb 2010

The working man is a fucking loser.
Mick, The Golden Lion, Lancaster, 21 Mar 2011

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Best laid plans

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looby, n.; pl. loobies. A lout; an awkward, stupid, clownish person

Rummage in my drawers

The Comfort of Strangers

"Just sit still and listen" - woman to teenage girl at Elliott Carter weekend, London 2006

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