Kitty in Kirkby

Kitty texted to see if I was free for a couple of days.

To the pub, of course. A couple of drinks, and a sinful pleasure for this lapsed vegetarian of duck and orange pâté. A gloomy couple sat silently through a meal about which they complained, their downturned mouths suggesting they have previous.

On the spur of the moment we went to see Robin Ince, whom I hadn't heard of but who is a populariser of science. He did an interesting but tiring show, good material overstated with too much physical energy, dry humour made soggy with shouting. We bumped into someone else I know. I introduced them and told her how I first saw Kitty in this very auditorium, mischieviously adding, as I put my arm round Kitty, that "this is our fifth anniversary."

On the way home, we texted a mutual friend who is having a weekend of sex and drugs and being the other woman. "You dirty shagger, from looby and Kitty X." "What are you incineratig?" she replied.

The next morning we went back to the pub for breakfast and a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir. I love drinking in the morning. Then we drove to Kirkby Lonsdale. I don't drive and being in cars makes me tense. It was a nerve-wracking half an hour of careering van drivers coming round blind corners with one hand on the wheel and one on a mobile phone, and angry drivers behind us who couldn't tolerate Kitty's adherence to the already too high speed limits. I was relieved to get there, and would be happy never to travel in a car again.

Kirkby Lonsdale was looking lovely, its Georgian buildings looking sharply grey in the windowpane light of autumn. In the once calm Snooty Fox where fifteen years ago I heard a teenage girl trying to decide between the veal and the rabbit, canned local radio dribbles its inanities over everyone, like it or not; in the "restaurant" a big screen shows Sky TV. We drank one drink quickly.

We left to do some Christmas shopping. Some eyes quickly scanning me; the mutual pleasure of dressing for the silently acknowledged strangers who think about clothes. Thank you. And I like your dress. I bought Melanie a glass duck for her birthday and Kitty bought her some skull and crossbones tissues. In a cheese and olives shop a twentysomething girl was playing an upright piano.

We went into the Sun Inn. No music, four real ales, a good wine list for Kitty. No table at first but an attentive staff member saved and directed us to one which came free. A tall, bald, pink-shirted thirtysomething maître d' curled and uncurled his fingers with alert enjoyment at keeping the room content. Staff were good at stopping their bodies from moving in situations where the question of who gets to pass through the narrow spots of an C17th inn might, in a strict Rawlsian sense, be a 50/50 decision.

We talked and talked, luxuriating in our unlikely and precarious privilege, neither of having to do the work normally required to fund drinking in Kirkby Lonsdale of a Saturday afternoon. On the slow way back to the car, I paid my £10 for a tutored sherry tasting next month.

Being with Kitty is like having a girlfriend but without the sex and having to sieve what you want to say through a filter of ulterior motives and thinking of how you look in another's eyes. I like how we arrange our sentences with little touches to each others' arms. I remember those skin-touches. They're short and evanescent, but I love giving them and receiving them. Unforced, when it's natural, when you want an italic.