Chilly in the house at the moment and The Sartorialist won't be coming round any time soon to photograph me in my two jumpers, scarf, pink blanky, and Santa hat. I can't afford the heating, just like my parents couldn't. It is the natural order. We shouldn't expect to be warm in our houses all the time.
I rang Kim last night, partly to arrange the next long weekend of malarkey at hers, and to talk out my regrets about us not being able to go to see Joey Negro in Leeds next month. Kim proffered the consolatory straw that the venue isn't really a dancey place. I'm not going to Leeds to see Joey Negro and sit down.
We compared diaries and I think we've got a date. We started talking about non-consensual sex, something which turns me on no end--I mean, in that ludic form in which the terms of engagement are agreed beforehand--and I parted my legs to enjoy the sense of my cock hardening as I was on the phone to her. This is the signal to put the phone down; certain boundaries mustn't be crossed, and phone sex would not be quite the done thing at the moment. It has been explicitly agreed that sex will not become part of us and we have agreed to pretend to forget the time when I had an orgasm of shuddering closeness and intensity with her in my bed a few weeks ago when we were both wanking at the same time. In my head though, that's still "friends".
Ignoring my own advice to myself, I texted her from bed. "That's a lovely way of making my cock hard," I said. "Happy to oblige, sir," she replied. A few hours later, I texted her again and told her that I love her, which I shouldn't have done. This morning I apologised and blamed it on the beer. "I know you do X" she replied.
In the pub later, Trina was hammering the Chardonnay somewhat and got upset when I told her about my plans with Kim. "That woman deliberately wants to drive us apart," she said, her voice quavering, eyes wettening. "And she doesn't want to meet me." You and her meeting would be a fucking car crash, I didn't say.
I put my arm round her and kissed her. "She doesn't, darling. She's not interested in us." I glanced up and became aware we were making something of a spectacle of ourselves. "Let's not talk about this here. It's been a lovely day." The conversation drunkenly meandered away from a dangerous topic, and she was soon laughing and smiling again
Trina went back to mine while I went to breathe alcohol fumes over everyone at the girls' school's 6th form Open Evening. It's a brilliant school and it gives them something a Grammar School education can never provide--how to mix with people of different classes, nationalities and backgrounds. The Girls' Grammar, where I used to teach, really only has one subject on the curriculum: How To Avoid Mixing With The Lower Orders.
Naturally, following five or six pints of Allendale, I put my foot in it a couple of times. I bumped into the Dad of a friend of the girls and started talking about how the A-level subjects are very different nowadays. I went off on one about how vocational subjects shouldn't be taught in a University and how it was a mistake that Polytechnics were abolished. At this point he informed me that he teaches a vocational subject at a University.
I followed this up by what might have been some needlessly extensive questions about the [subject redacted] syllabus, which had nothing to do with the fact that its teacher is arrestingly attractive, with her ginger bob, black glasses and a gorgeous little metal hairclip; she was wearing a pale brown shift dress with small moss-green flowers on it. I regret I am unable to report on the hem position coordinates as she was standing behind a table.
I then went to pick on the Philosophy teacher. The subject is actually called Philosophy and Ethics. I didn't understand why Ethics had to be appended like that to a general term that includes its consequent. It's like saying Music and Notation, or Management and Bullshit. I informed her, because I could tell she was interested, that I started out at Uni doing Aesthetics and Metaphysics, but ended up being quite interested in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, whilst maintaining my interest in Aesthetics. She nodded slightly and politely kept looking away, which was an appreciative yet understated way of showing her fascination with the slurred memories of a drunkard's failed academic career.
My alma mater sent two ridiculous looking ciphers: black suits, ties, standing in front of some managementspeak. The Polytechnic of Black Pudding was just as bad. Their board read "Innovative thinking for the real world". I turned away and ate a good portion of the buffet the school had provided, then went home and thought about Frances and The Reverse Cowgirl.
