Hard work

You can easily do anthropology at home. There's no need to travel, Bruce Parry-ish, to some culturally and geographically remote corner of the world to find people who act in ways that test to the limit one's ability to adapt to the alien.

It's someone's birthday do in a noisy pub, midnight on a Saturday night; commercial dance music and twentysomething women wearing heels in which they can't properly walk. Men in jeans and logoed T-shirts. I don't know anyone, but they're mainly women so I was looking forward to it. I tried to make conversation with the girl sat to the right of me. I asked her how she knew our host. "We're friends," she said, looking away, to see if anything more interesting was happening. Trying to dredge something out of this unpromisingly brief and obvious answer, I followed up with "Do you go back a long way?" She refused to speak, but leant across me to speak to the woman on my left.

I left it a few minutes; perhaps she hadn't heard me. I sat looking around at the display of apparently sexualised dancing which is deracinated from any actual sexual intent. "Get me something!" a man yelled at the bar to his friend, his bum nudging into mine. "Two twenty, get a shot or something." I drank my pint as quickly as I could and left, feeling observed like a specimen. And here we have an exhibit of The Older Man. I wish I'd left the evening in the far happier condition it had been in a few hours earlier.

Kitty and Melissa were in the little room at the Whittle. I walked in and the barman was presenting his skinny arse in front of the fire, loading on more wood. Kitty, with her customary air of sexy, impatient debauchery. Melissa at last slinked her coat off her glamour model figure, and I settled into an old sofa next to her. The doleful-looking dog came and jumped up and curled himself next to us, while we chatted and chatted.

Kitty and I had had a bit of a tiff in the Sun Hotel--only hours after we'd been in the same bed. I wanted to make amends, so I wrapped up Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, about life on the minimum wage--which she'd spotted in my room and had been reading in bed--and gave it to her with a card and a message which ended with a resolution to be nicer to her.

It would distress me if Kitty and I were to fall out. I rang Trina and told her all about it. Trina said she misses me when I'm not there. I had to be a bit careful what I said, because I never miss her.

I left the tightly-skirted, unsexy women and uncool cool young men in Wetherspoons, and was delightedly surprised to bump into A Free Man in Preston and Girlonatrain, two blogpals who have more or less given it up now. Girlonatrain's archives are still there; as is AFMIP's library of infrequent but witty, imaginative posts about office life. It was just a couple of minutes in the street, but I enjoyed the lively little conversation. Girlonatrain, with her attractively wonky teeth, is still looking "quite fit", as a blogger described her. Free Man is doing a launch of his new album at the Gregson on Easter Sunday. I might go if I'm free, but I imagine it'll be guitar-based music with intelligent and thoughtful lyrics.