In Darkest Surrey and the Way Out

Trina wants me to meet a significant other, a girl she met in the queue for registration at Uni forty years ago. Trina got talking to her and pointed out that A-D meant your county of origin, not your surname. Trina offered to share her sandwiches and they went for a half of cider in the bar.

They've been close friends ever since. Significant Other got a First in Germs and a PhD in Dirt followed by a post in a central London hospital, where she fell for her future husband as he manhandled computers the size of wardrobes. Trina warned me he was "boring" and "characterless".

Significant Other met us at Euston. I shook her hand and apologised for us being late. Then I remembered an edition of Blind Date when a woman recorded her first impressions of her date as "reserved", saying "he shook my hand"; so I placed a kiss from the Guardian's etiquette manual on her cheek. What is the correct way to greet a new female?

We were to meet Mr Boring at Farringdon. Significant Other proposed the awkward route based on the misleading cartography of the tube map. Feeling as though I were taking over straight away, I suggested we walk to Euston Square instead and get a direct tube. Typical man, I worried she'd be thinking.

The Thai meal posed some difficulties because of my Condition, which obliged me to excuse myself to induce vomiting. Trina noticed; the others didn't. Mr Boring was talking about the difficulties of working within trendy bare brick walls in a piped music and table footballed environment as a sixty-year-old computer programmer for a big supermarket chain. I didn't see how this intelligent, chatty man could be considered dull.

He led us round some of Farringdon and Clerkenwell's finest real ale pubs, glad, I think, to have some company separate from Significant Other and his work colleagues from the Visible Underpant Generation. I was a North Country dilettante, constantly distracted by things of interest on a wondrous tour of beer and architecture combined.

St Peter's Brewery tap, The Jerusalem Tavern

On the train home, all of us tipsy (one get doesn't drunk in Surrey, one gets tipsy), we were loosely doing crosswords. I answered a phone call from N who wanted me in the next D**ke*s production he's organising. From the audience's reaction my response may have lacked a degree of finesse.

"You fake", Trina said. "What a crawler", Significant Other said. "Using your children as an excuse." "It's a small town," I said. "You can't be honest all the time."

Good beer, but I know how Oliver Twist felt now

Next day, we went round Borough Market, and I began to feel uneasy that Trina was paying for almost everything. Lunch was a skimpy affair, a mixed "platter" hardly larger than a tea plate, but redeemed by the bitter they brew feet from your table.

The Tate Modern wasn't a good idea. The South Bank is cold and ugly, her dodgy hip was flaring up, and neither of us were in the mood for wading through panels of artspeak. I was relieved when she suggested going to another pub. We found Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and descended into its cellars to join the belanyarded classes in their post-work socialising, which sometimes seemed to have the air of an extension of work.

On the train back she was composing a text to our hosts. "Erm... 'We had a lovely time and Looby...' Looby what? What shall I put?" "Looby thought your husband wasn't as mind-numbingly boring as Trina had made him out to be."

We started thinking about a possible project for next year--visiting the city now in northwestern Ukraine, from which Trina's grandad fled, avoiding thereby being one of the eighteen thousand Jews of the city murdered by the Nazis in Operation Barbarossa. He ended up initially in Hull, which one could argue is a refuge preferable only when the alternative is being murdered.