Lancashire is better than Ibiza

The second evening of my weekend with Kitty and Nikki started grimly.

I turned up at the pub to find them sitting outside. Someone wanted to smoke, so the rest of us had to shiver. Rain dripped into my soda water. I could feel myself coming up on the catnip and was pissed off, thinking that it'd be wasted; even catnip can't burnish the wet cold of a Lancashire November, nor can it perfume the acrid drifts of fag smoke.

At last, we moved onto a much better pub and settled in front of the log fire. The drug threw off its reins, and so did the evening. Afterwards, at someone's house, I got talking to a 50-year-old woman who was telling us how went on her own to Ibiza, and was the butt of countless ageist remarks: "What you doing here, Granny?" How Ibiza has changed. Now, it's all booze and coke, full of young people policing the dancefloor.

Kitty took great exception to being described as "a Lancashire lass". I think I know what she meant--it conjures up images of a brawny fishwife stirring vats of pigs' blood to make the black pudding. She seemed to have it in for our host, who adroitly made her accusation that he was "soft on the outside, hard on the inside" into the running joke of the evening.

At one point, late on, I saw Ibiza woman go to dance, check herself, and sit down again. How I wish I had leapt up at the same time. We talked instead, and I was trying to sell her the places I go out dancing. I gave her my email address, hoping we could meet again on a dancefloor, but in somewhere cultured, like Leyland.

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I rang Trina to tell her about a potential new lodger (it fell through, unfortunately). She said that she'd just got back from looking round a home in which to put her increasingly demented Mum, but had had a change of heart about dispatching her there, saying she wouldn't be able to cope with the feeling of having abandoned her. She went through the alternative plan, which would be for her brother to do a bit more in terms of looking after her in the family home.

This apparently innocuous plan then lurched into an alarming sentence. "So that'd mean we could have four days a week together!" she said brightly.

I was speechless for a moment. "Yes!" I said, trying to mirror her vivacity. Sensing that I was dissembling, she mentioned how we would "of course" pursue our own interests in this time. What Trina sees as an opportunity to deepen our relationship, I see as deepening our involvement with the banal.

I don't want to spend any time, at all, with anyone, without a plan for mutual enjoyment. There are several options available with Trina, involving dancing, sex, drinking, a film, a concert, and so on, but I don't want to "spend time together", relying on our own resources. The verb is apt in this case, with its overtones of waste and ennui.

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No such gloom yesterday. In the marble and wood splendour of the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square, we were offered dozens of wines, from small, independent producers, normally inaccessible to me, as the trade prices--before any kind of retail or restauarant mark-up--ranged from from nine to forty-five pounds. They pour them by holding only the base of the bottle, and you proffer your glass, tilted. Trina jabbed her elbow into someone's tits, which sparked off a chat that had little to do with wine.

I thought I'd feel like an imposter, a fraud, aware of my class position. I was afraid that this sense of inferiority would come out in over-laughing and rocking on my heels, subconciously fawning in front of a proper wine merchant; but in fact no-one seemed to mind that we were dilettantes from a small wine club in Lancashire. If anything, they were interested and grateful that we'd travelled so far.

My favourite was a Petit Verdot, made by a female winemaker whose tiny production amounts to three barrels (i.e. 1500 litres in total) per vintage. It's not available in any shop, anywhere. Unfortunately we couldn't run to the £300 it would have cost to buy a case.

I still can't get past my idea that good Chardonnay smells of fart, though.

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London fashion observation du jour Floppy wide-brimmed hats on women. On the tube last night, I noticed three separate women wearing them. They're a bit bigger and looser than the borsolino hats Hipster Yaya mentioned the other day. I think they're just ace. And I'm not sure how they achieve this effect, but they're quite sexy too.