Sex in society

I wanted to follow it up fairly swiftly with Tilly, the tall blonde ex-work colleague, so I wrote her a note, got the Womanly Seal of Approval after clearing it with Erica first, then dropped it round to her house.

Dear Tilly,

I hope you enjoyed trip round the north last week and didn't attract too much attention from the police or strange men.

There's a bit of an open-air music thing going on in Morecambe on Sunday. I'm going anyway and I was wondering if you fancied sharing my tartan rug and a bottle of Prosecco. Would be lovely to see you there if you fancied it.

Looby x

Sunday came and went, and by reply, I received nothing at all. Not even a "thanks but no thanks", nothing. I was in the pub a few days later with Erica and a couple of other people, and she said that there must have been something wrong there -- perhaps she'd lost her phone or something.

I'm not sure what I should do now. I'm not begging. If she's not interested, that's the end of it.

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A friend of mine died recently. I've known him since I was fifteen; he was only two years older than me. I haven't got a proper will, just a Statement of Wishes, since I've absolutely nothing to bequeath, no property, no savings, or pension, but I did say that my friend could have my records, a patchwork quilt of mismatched vinyl, which ranges from my first true loves -- disco, jazz-funk, and modern soul and has branches including Belgian hoover techno, 50s and 60s bebop, contemporary classical music, Austro-German lieder, and a Nana Mouskouri boxed set that I hide when girls come round.

On the one and only time he invited me to DJ -- he had a good eye for spotting who had a future in the field -- he came over to me at Morecambe and in the polite but anxious way he sometimes had of speaking to you, he said to me --- "Looby, can we get it back on track mate?"

He had the poor taste to die on the same morning that another friend was getting married. I lasted the ceremony and standing about a bit afterwards, but the thought of Terry was too strong and I went home. Trina was over for the day and I'm glad she was -- I just wanted to talk about Terry for a while.

His funeral was High Catholic, all incense and fabulous doctrine, but the wake was a boozy nationwide gathering of the soul clan. Next day we did what he'd have liked best -- had a proper bop for him in St Annes, where they put a framed picture of him at the front of the DJ booth.

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A month or so ago me and Trina were in a pub in Ormskirk and got chatting to these two Scousers, one of whom told us that he was doing a literary and historical tour of the pubs of Liverpool last Friday. I gave him my card -- yes, we have those in Lancashire too -- but he didn't ring.

Nevertheless we turned up at the correct time and place to find no-one in the pub knew anything about it; so we did it ourselves, and spent several hours chatting to people whom I understood most of the time. We went round four proper old English boozers, drinking interesting, unusual ales at prices generally lower than in Lancaster and marvelling at Liverpool's Victorian pub architecture.

I kept a list of what I'd been drinking and after calculating that I'd had ten-and-a-half pints on Friday, decided the safest course was just to carry on all weekend, and ended up in that lovely, glassy state of benevolence and carelessness by the time Kirsty and boyf got back on Sunday night.

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Kitty's got six weeks off, and is using the time wisely, doing very little. However, she does ask me and Wendy round for the occasional soirèe, after one of which she sent the postcard above. I texted her the other day at round about noon, and she replied saying "Only just got up and been to the offy already! Oops!" "Some are born to greatness," I responded, "others are born to the chaise-longue X".

In Dating News, I contacted a woman yesterday. Lives in a tarty seaside resort not far from here. Liked much of what she said, but the clincher was that her idea of a good first date is sitting in a cinema watching a subtitled film with little plot and even less action. Shame she's a smoker but we'll overlook that for the time being.

She replied the same evening, bit of banter this morning, and we're meeting in Garstang on Thursday week.