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A Gueuze beer yesterday

Trina couldn't, as it turned out, come to the wine club on Tuesday, so her formal début in Lancaster society will have to wait for a while. At the end of our oeneological perambulation around Sicily (did you know that two-thirds of wine production there is white?) I started thinking out loud about whether anyone would be interested in a special one-off--that I could lead--on Belgian beer. The organiser emails this morning, favourable to the idea. Oh the ardours of the research that that would entail!

She's a sexy woman but what a chatterbox. You can't shut her up. Four hours and I had to constantly seize my chance.

We went to the cashpoint so that she could get some money. A familiar message came up: "You have insufficient funds for this transaction." "You have that problem too!" I said, and bent her head towards me and kissed her, partly in sympathy, partly in relief that we are hammocked in the same financial nadir.

We sunned ourselves in the Ring O'Bells's beer garden, until another of the endless fronts of rain arrived. An intoxicated regular started an erudite slurring about the Higgs Boson particle, drunkely pleased that its apparent discovery is consistent with a wider body of knowledge. "Z fantastic. Uniff... Fied theory. My tutor will be happy!" He then graciously realised what he was interrupting. "No, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for interrupting you."

She shook her head after him. "In Liverpool you'd never have anyone coming up to you pissed at 1pm talking about physics." "You're in Lancaster now Trina. We have intelligent drunks here." We umbrellad to the Sun and chatted about living abroad and her kind but undemonstrative ex. Looby 1 Ex 0, I thought. I'll never be "undemonstrative". Except perhaps when people walked past our table: she laughed at my moving apart from her when they did so. "You've got a ridiculous 'demure' face," she said, and mimicked my polite hands.

The more or less hidden bit behind the timetables on Platform three at Lancaster Station confirmed its special position in our erotic life thus far. "Too many clothes," she said, in between kissing.

"I'm really starting to fancy you now," I said, and the rain drilled onto the roof and an endless freight train shouted and banged through the station. She is a slow, withdrawing kisser. I have to resist greedly pulling her head towards me to make her kiss me harder, knowing that to do that would lessen the taunting, sexual, pleasure. As Trina got on the train, a woman in her twenties gave me a knowing, sympathetic smile.