This weekend was the Music Festival, a three-year-old event that was started as one person's initiative after our slack, slacks-wearing Council abolished a Maritime Festival which attracted visitors, singers and musicians from all over Europe.
On Friday, at a gig in my packed local, I saw Frances for the first time since she was in nothing but stockings and sitting deliciously on top of me a year or so ago. She wasn't interested. Polite, with a smile that was composed and dissolved quickly. Linda was there, a chance meeting as our worlds revolve ever more distantly. Beautifully dressed as usual, in a grey jacket in fine wool.
On Saturday, me, Kirsty and the girls went down to the Quay to hear some folk music and do the handover of the children over a pint. I've had them girls for a week while Kirsty was on holiday in Ibiza. It's been almost effortless, a bit of understated bonding with my eldest, Faye, who can be a touch prickly at times. As she said goodbye, Kirsty took my arm briefly and smiled and I felt a blood-rush of warm feeling towards her.
Kirsty and the girls left and I relaxed into my deserved evening in the pub. A local band called Baksheesh came on. They play this gypsy / East European / kletzmer music, and half way through a somewhat underdressed woman comes on and does a sort of slow belly dancing. They have a young female trumpeter who is as confident as a person as she is technically adept. There was a suggestion of a fight which was resolved by everyone paying not the slightest attention to the aggressor.
There was someone there who makes me talk (not that I need any encouragement) quite rapidly, and we ended up happily interrupting each other with a tumble of conversation. She has a lazy eye which wanders everywhere but which I find a bit sexy. She is, I assume, "happily" married, but I think she understands the subtext. I met one of my oldest friends, who introduced me to the teacher of French he's seeing. I could see the chemistry between them working well, each happy that they have found someone who naturally performs the roles they would like the other to take.
I'm taking part in an art project called Fortnight, and part of it involves receiving texts and acting on the instructions you receive. We were asked to go into town to make a phone call from a special phone set up in the lobby of a hotel. On my way there I went to the fishmonger and bought some hake. I had to suppress my shock when he told me its price. I sent Linda a text: "Hello gorgeous, long shot. I've just spent nine fucking quid on a fish. You come round to my house tonight and help me eat it?"
Except that I sent it to the organisers of the art project instead, who generously and unbureaucratically replied "Oh looby, that was a diamond in the rough, an absolute gem." Linda was busy though.
