Knees-up

To Silverdale, a village as pretty as its name, and my friends Steph and Tom's house. We go to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival together but I've known Steph for many years. We met when I was employed as an interviewer for an academic who was writing an oral history of women's experiences of work during the Second World War, and Steph was a Lecturer in the same Department. The book was authored by Penny Summerfield, who, for the wrong reasons, deserves the unusual distinction on this blog of the use of her real name.

I enjoyed the work and I was good at it, both the interviewing, as I sat with beguiling elderly women who fed me endless cakes and scones while they talked, and the background research, writing footnotes to explain some of my subjects' references (the "Pilling Pig", for example - the now closed railway line between Preston and Knott End On Sea), and clarifying the pronunciation of proper names (so the village near Blackpool called Rawcliffe is "rake-ler", not "raw cliff").

The project ended and some time later the book was published. I was astonished to see that my name didn't appear in the acknowledgements. Whole paragraphs of that book were elicited by me. I only hope that it was a production error, although she's never been in touch to say this, neither did she bother to alert me to the book's publication.

Steph's invite to their conversazione untemptingly offered "gentle socialising" and "gluten-free snacks", but this turned out to mean a hectare of alcohol, several yards of delicious homemade food and an arty but unpretentious company. The children were low-key, unobtrusive, and autonomous; three very pretty early teenage girls, dressed in the cord pinafore dresses and thick tights favoured by the academic classes for their offspring, were the daughters of a magnetically beautiful woman who reminded me of Seriouscrush: slightly dark complexion, artfully untrammelled black hair; a woollen black and dark green knee-length dress with an attractively kitschy design of cats. Her English was just short of mother tongue. I hope she didn't hear my smitten involuntary sigh when she told me she was French. Her husband was the only person there who was difficult to draw out; I gave up with him after I felt like I was in a game of Twenty Questions.

I rang the doctor's this morning about my water on the knee. It's a recurring problem after I slipped on some ice last year and banged my knee hard on the pavement. I had to swallow a snort of juvenile, tactless laughter when the receptionist said "So that'll be 3.40 then, with Doctor Wong."

Tomorrow I have to be up at 5am to take Melanie to have her eye operation; then, hoping that I can stay lively enough for anything that might occur, I am off to Leicester to see Mary-Ann and stay overnight. She's engaged in diplomatic manoeuvres to park her teenage daughters elsewhere for the evening, but if that doesn't come off we'll go to a pub and embarrass the youth of Leicester with the sight of middle aged people pawing each other.