Boring family

In the pub, Friday night, a sixtysomething woman was distractedly playing with her glass on a table by herself. I was reading the LRB, a tiring review of a book about one of my favourite novels, The Portrait of A Lady, one of those times when you feel both your enjoyment of and distance from, analysis. You're reading too much into it. She shuffled her chair towards my table and said "I'll just join you here if you don't mind," and introduced herself. "Of course you can, please do."

An acquaintance a couple of yards away nodded at me, tilting his head towards me and her. "You've pulled there," was the tittering suggestion, as if men and women can't just chat in a pub, with the added implication that our age difference meant I should shun her. Yeah well I don't envy you sitting there with your mute, suppliant wife.

We chatted about how people in Lancaster are unfriendly (as I think they can be), how Thatcher changed this country, and our mutual dislike of spiders. And then New Business Colleague walked in with two swollen heavy canvas bags and was heading to the bar. "NBC!" I shouted, and got him a chair at our table. "Sit down there. What do you want?"

Dorothy went to the loo. I said to NBC "Don't be unkind, I've just met her. I don't know her. She's alright." He sat down and looked at me then away with the unconcern that you would have from a fortnight of exhausting work. "Lager," he said. "Stella." He's so much nicer a person when he's not pretending to big himself up. I talked about about being arty farty in Walsall (he's from not far from there), his dangerous, vertiginous work, and how I know him because his sexy wife is an old classmate of mine. He went to leave and I put my arm round his waist. "I need to have a chat with you, you know."

Dorothy wanted to buy me another but I had to get home, which is where I am now, because a relative of Kirsty's is arriving from the shallow heart of the deep South in half an hour, to stay with her for three days, bringing her noisy sons and her self-obsession and never asking us any questions about ourselves. It's hard work for Kirsty and the girls. Can you not try to show a bit of interest in someone else for a change?, except that she would do for a minute, reminded of a dimly remembered moral obligation and highly profitable conversational gambit, and then carry on in exactly the same vein.

Trina wriggled and snored. I'm tired in the morning after a night constantly awoken by her fidgeting and her low frequency roaring through which she sleeps in unawareness. But we'll work it out. She's got a nice arse which she presents to me curvily at night. I like fucking her, and we've only just started.

I like walking round with her in the hedonistic gleam of Booths in Garstang, the fundamental pleasure of food arrayed in tidy aisles and glossy cabinets. I was flat after being with Kim and our sex wasn't as good as it can be, but I like the evenings of wine on the boat, letting my eyes drift into soft focus at the candlelight in the way you do with a coal fire, and chatting with her without having to think.