Cathinones I Have Known and Loved

I went to see Kim for a few days while I turned fifty. I'd only been there a couple of hours when I sliced the top of my finger off with a razor as I searched in my bag for something. I was instantly reminded of The Overnight Editor doing the same thing, mid-date, four years ago. Despite trying to hold my finger in my mouth, I left a bloodcrumb trail on her rug and up the stairs.

We went to the market in C---.

Which offers an agreeable melange of tat.

But some good stuff as well.

We got off our heads, played house music at what was perhaps Irritate The Neighbour volume, and danced around her living room.

We went for a long walk, without maps, or plans, over barbed wire fences and through fields of crops. There were some horses which were a bit intimidating.

We scrabbled across a rivulet to escape from the horses, to be taken into a dark wood as dusk fell.

Next day we went to Newcastle. There was a moralising poster near the station about not giving money to beggars on the ground that they might spend it on drugs. The poor are always held to higher standards of behaviour than anyone else. Why shouldn't they have the freedom to spend their tiny incomes however they wish? Immediately afterwards we saw a beggar and I gave him £2, deliberately more generous than I'd normally be.

Alfred J. Lambart RA (1902 - 1970 (?))
Juliet, Daughter of Richard H. Fox of Surrey, 1931

I was transfixed by some beautiful C20th glass in the Laing Museum; photography was beyond me at this point, but I wrote Kitty a postcard, of a painting it owns, of a gorgeous slender girl in an emerald green dress. Back in Kimtown we went to the pub where we've often met, its tiny rooms encouraging collective conversation.

Back at hers, we put some blankets down in the living room and nodded off for a while. She's being mucked about by a man with whom she is smitten and she showed me a text exchange in which he evades, and then turns into an irritatingly lighthearted joke, the overt declarations so untypical of Kim. With the cathinone--an empathogen--stroking my skin and making her even more beautiful than she always is, I felt her near-tears as though they were my own.

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It's now Tuesday dinnertime and I'm on a train to Lytham to see Trina. As anyone who has dabbled with Beecham's Powders will know, Tuesday isn't the greatest day in which to be cheery and interested. I'd rather sit alone in a cheap pub and stare out of the window.