Kitchen of lust

Seriouscrush has put one of her houses on the market. Strange to see the rooms in which I tensed unbearably with desire for her, promoted in the language of an estate agent. Now, I sit on that chair at the back, chat about her baby, and pay my rent.

I was in Kendal on Thursday, to apply to open an account with a local Building Society. Halifax charged me sixty pounds in bank charges last month, for being overdrawn by thirty pounds for a week. Yesterday I withdrew all but two pounds of my money (now back in credit) and they'll get it at a fiver a month, for four months, when I'll default, and they'll decide it's not worth chasing.

In The Globe in Kendal, one real ale, Cross Bay's Zenith. Some members of the inferior orders were in there, loudly threatening a young girl handicapped with the name Courtney with "a right slapping". The barman nipped quickly outside to check on the efficacy of the Council's municipal hygience services. "That was tidy," he reported. "Yes, very tidy."

In Burgundy's, a far better pub, their own brewery stands gleaming behind the glass-backed downstairs bar. In the public bar with its mumsy carpet, the big blackboard with its carefully listed beer, chatty people assumed that the we're all going to talk together, as a group. A beautiful unpasteurised cider "tasting mainly of apples" in Terry Prachett's deliberately obvious definition. I got talking to a couple from Barrow-in-Furness about vegetables and how to live cheaply, while we paid for our beer from the separate alcohol account drinkers have in their heads.

To Trina's narrowboat. We were walking back from the pub and I found an expensive umbrella thrown into a bin. "I'm having that," I said, and tested it. Trina pointed out a flitting group of linnets. "They're paler than sparrows; they always move in flocks."

It had been raining, so I set the brolly to dry on the prow of her boat. We got another bottle of wine open, me talking half drunkenly about her lovely big tits as my right hand went round her neck and down her cleavage, and she started to do her kissy purring. But then all thoughts of sex were arrested by a gust of wind which swept my new expensive umbrella into the canal.

It started drifting up the canal and I felt an irrationally important desire to get it back. There was another boat moored opposite and we shouted, in our polite English way "Excuse me!" A young man came out and took a pole off the roof of his boat and raked it over to his boat. "Thanks! I shouted. "I'll come and get it." I ran up the towpath, climbed over a fence, ran over a bridge, and down to his boat.

"You're not even out of breath!" said Trina. I couldn't understand why I should be. "But you set off like a hare!" We had the laugh-on-coming sex which we have. I'm glad neither of us finds sex serious and transcendental; it's very enjoyable, but immediately one loses one's immersion in it, a bit comical too.