Impair, manque

I settled down in the pub and finished Turgenev's Smoke, a passionate tale of an idealised love and the triumph of respectability and "realism", and then bumped into Wilma and her new bloke. Wilma has been off the booze for almost a year now. "I was hoping she'd become a bit less negative when she gave up drink, but she's still the same," someone said recently.

Then, an hour or so of gilding the lily, and it was off to Manchester, where a DJ I like was playing.

It was the coldest nightclub I have ever been in. It was like dancing in a freezer. The club is downstairs but there's an outside area with the communicating doors permanently wide open. I danced in my jacket and scarf, wondering how the girls in their thin dresses were coping. But the music was excellent and it was a friendly, careless crowd. And I got chatted up!

She was thirtyish, small, and had a mousey face, but it'd have been worth taking her home just to warm up. I wasn't particularly bothered about "full intercourse" but she might have had a spare hot water bottle.

She started dancing closely to me before initiating a conversation which unfortunately soon became a little stilted, about where we live and what the nightlife is like in Lancaster. She asked if I fancied a drink and invited me to sit down with them. I declined the offer, and that was it. But to be approached like that is flattering, and I'm definitely wearing that combo again--short brown suede jacket, pale brown and orange shirt with a pattern of little squares on it, dark brown jeans and plain black leather shoes--to see whether it can repeat its girl magnet trick.

The music wound down at 4.00, and my train back wasn't until 6.30, but by dint of some prior research, I had found somewhere I could go. It was a 24-hour casino, and was classier and more dressy than I was expecting. There was waitress service for everything, wherever you were. It was still fairly busy and people were wandering around the tables and sitting in the bar with a look of unconcern. The regulars and the croupiers all know each other, and there was a camerarderie of commiseration and congratulations.

A casino in central Manchester at 5am this morning

I'd never been to a casino before last night and being so close to a new subculture at perhaps one of its extremes--since casual gamblers wouldn't still be there at dawn--was anthropologically interesting. I sat watching the roulette and saw a man win six hundred pounds, and then lose it all within the hour; it's to see a licensed addiction running wild before your eyes. Another man told me he'd lost three hundred pounds that evening. "I leave my cards at home now. I'm trying to wean myself off it to be honest." I let my first train leave and stayed on for another couple of hours.

I had a coffee in Starbucks on the station, and marvelled at the incredible tedium of some people's jobs.