French people sound funny, but are quite likeable

An Indian sounding woman, up and down voice, rings me about the room. "It's for my boyfriend, he's French." My interest is aroused.

I've promised the room to a Law postgrad from Tennessee but she hasn't returned my call or stumped up the deposit I am hoping to use as my spending money in Italy. Me, Kirsty and the girls are off to Tuscany shortly. I've paid for my bit because of the PhD outreach work at the Girls Grammar last winter, but I need some spending money to sit glazed outside a taverna.

They arrive at the door, a tall man, late twenties, a small thirtysomething darkhaired woman, and a little boy, who is six, and uniformed in the blue sweatshirt of the school at which I did my teaching practice. Subject to any disabuse which may follow shortly, they are favoured bidders. An invented, deracinated family, trying to make a life.

"I am zer beck-aire." "Ah... on the market?" "I am arf weigh." A Pinterian pause. "Half way?" "I am arf weigh, boze on ze bredd, an ze chiz."

He's over here from Normandy, in partnership with another Frenchman. They run a touring French bread stall on our market and that of Garstang, Longridge, and Carlisle. Off-peak, he helps out on the local cheese and olives stall. I show them upstairs, thinking that he must work six, seven days a week; he'll be out of the house most of the day, won't keep late nights, and we might be supplied with decent bread. He only wants it for a few weeks because he's got an idea to go to Edinburgh and make a killing during the Fringe.

In the better, larger, sunnier, of the two rooms, which he wants, the difference between the future life imagined by his Filipino girlfriend and her son, and him, emerges. I shrug with the sympathetic non-committal body language I have learned from a decade of holidays in Brittany.

"But that is the future," I say, trying to cut off a conversation they'd like to have themselves but are having through me as its conduit. "Think about it and give me a ring. Yes, it's [...] a month, spontaneously adding on fifteen pounds a month from the advert which makes me feel, only in my own head, the dominant party.

My email of shame.

The Prof writes:

Sorry not to have heard back from you. Are you on for Wednesday evening?

I've just checked and I did write back, saying her suggestion of some pricey tapas place was a good idea. But I'm hard up. And even if I could afford it, the accusatory tone of the first sentence decides it.

My reply though, was unnecessarily harsh.

Hello Prof

I was in the pub on Saturday afternoon and in one of those drunken conversations in which the interlocutors become assertively convinced of the rightness of their own positions, she said "always go on your instincts."

I think if we all followed that, social life would collapse and lead into dictatorship. But there is an element of truth in it. I think we might be too different from each other in the ways that matter--despite our superficial shared language of a sort of intellectual life.

One of these ways is that I'm absolutely skint and money does come into it. Your suggestion of what to me would be a ruinously expensive afternoon makes the financial disparity appear early on.

I hope you won't mind me declining Wednesday. Twenty-five, thirty quid is a lot for me to invest in what I predict will be one of those head-noddingly agreeable afternoons consisting of an anodyne shared statement of values, never getting on to the kind of reckless, drunken nights with sexual overtones that I'm really after.

A first stone cast, with the insensitivity and arrogance that can come effortlessly to me.

With dozens of reworkings, I write as friendly and unimposing an email to M as I can manage, which tries to convey, without directly saying, the following things.

I keep remembering the delight when I realised that the very attractive woman who had suddenly appeared at my side on Friday was the woman I'd come to meet, and not, as I thought for a second, someone who--the coincidences!--was on a similar mission looking for someone much younger than me.

You were great company, straightforward, interesting. While I was trying not to look at your tits, I remembered your picture of you in a low-ceilinged nightclub, thinking, you'd be fun.

I'd like to see you again, as soon as possible.

A nagging voice in my head. "She won't fancy you; she's out of your league; why would you think someone like her would be interested in you; you're way back on the grid, pal, she'll fit you in as a sop to your feelings before going silent; women see you as friend material not lover material." On and on and on, in endless instances.