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Chilly, with a widespread frost
We walked into the tiny room to see a dozen murmuring Slovenians. They are good starers. The teenage girl at the front, was especially relentless in her examination.
Finally the event got under way: Agata read in Slovenian first before the man from the Cultural Association read the translations. Afterwards, the Lancastrians acquitted themselves poorly. Our party--all except me published writers--sat rigidly, without asking any questions, so it was left to me (yet again--this happens all the time) to enquire about the poetry scene in Slovenia, the difficulties of the many dialects in the country, and her itinery.
The room descended into silence again. I pointedly looked at the man sitting next to me, a man who has won a fairly important poetry prize, and tilted my head. "Look, could you pretend, for one minute, that you're not Northern, and actually ask her something?" With chatty grace she finally dragged a few words out of him, even if it was partly a misapprehension that Slovenian is a form of Serbo-Croat.
We swapped email addresses and she extended a picturesque invite to "the land between the [incomprehensible word with lots of zeds in it] and the [incomprehensible word with lots of zeds in it] Rivers", and I went home, pissed off with my fellow countrymen and women, who had just done their bit to hammer home to a foreign guest the stereotype of the taciturn, over-reserved English.
It's something especially distilled in Lancashire: even after thirty years here, I'm still sometimes taken aback with how frosty people are here when you initiate conversation. You can tell that this area was more or less cut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, and that the local historical claims to renown are first, executing witches, then later, clogging down the street, a mass clicking of rickets-bowed legs as we waddled off to get strangled in looms.
I am invited to the offices of Really Late, the organisation with which I have applied to do some voluntary work on reception. An amiable woman with the large head common to those who do too much running showed me round. A poster advised about "Keeping Sex Sexy." Everything went well until she said they'd have to check my criminal record. I'm not sure what's still on there.
I perked up when she said that everyone goes out for a bit of a social every few weeks, since in this kind of organisation, men are in the minority. I'm back there on Tuesday and someone will show me the ropes, although this could all end abruptly if the misunderstanding that arose after I attempted to give one of my A-level students succour comes to light.
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