Can't wait to get it over

To Blackpool with Trina, for the house and soul weekender.

I was going to stay in a "hotel" chosen on the criterion of price alone, but she said if I gave her the money I'd spent on that, she'd pay well over a hundred pounds extra to get us into a fine mid-nineteenth century hotel with broken pediments into the function rooms and swirly carpets in estuary colours.

I was miffed when a young couple at the next table in the pub where we were meeting mistook us for ballroom dancers, but they were from Ayrshire, and you have to make allowances for people who grow up on a diet of oats and rainwater, washed down with toddies of sectarian bile.

The weekend itself got off to a bumpy start. I can get good friends their wristbands at a discount, but it does involve a bit of co-ordination when I get there, and the timetable went awry by all of fifteen minutes. When Trina arrived in the bar, she had a face that was a physical expression of the voicemail she'd left a few minutes earlier informing me that I was a wanker and suggesting I could fuck off.

We all went next door to the venue, and collected the wristbands for Trina and two girls with homophonic names whom I was also helping out. I naively hoped that we might now be able to restart with a drink and a bit of a catch-up with Marion and Marian, before we started the long and pleasurable hours of dancing, but Trina started berating me for "thinking so little" of her.

Knowing it's pointless presenting my case in such situations, I excused myself with everyone and said that I still had to go back and get ready. Marian leant over and said, sotto voce, "Go and get ready looby -- we'll calm her down." And they did -- the rest of the weekend she was more emollient.

We went for some pálinka in someone's room, which I will blame for my Saturday night, when I found myself doing a spidery 60s arm-wavy dancing, a depravity I do not wish to repeat. And good-looking, well-dressed women everywhere. There was the stupendously attractive one who looks like Kim who seems to be with a different, and older, man each year; and it was undoubtedly the case that Marian was flirting with me.

---

Sunday dinnertime, and a couple of calming pints in the pub to smooth the morning jitters that can come with my habit. There is always some sort of juvenile dance festival in Blackpool at the same time as our weekender, and the racket of demob-happy eight-year-olds glad to be released from their leotards at last was so jarring that we repaired upstairs, to the floor of cruisewear, a sandbank of beige zip-up cardis.

At the next table, an attractive woman -- mid forties? -- was sitting with a huge man who had an fattily engorged dewlap overhanging his waist, a spectacle which always induces the unwelcome thought about the difficulties such a man must have in finding his penis.

Diane was the same age as me. Thick, naturally kinked and unhairdressered black hair; black denim jacket and black jeans. Her mother left her and her brother for a footballer when she was seven. She's spent the last six years educating herself up to a History degree with the Open University, in the middle of which she'd been homeless for a while. She was now seeing a property developer from Cheshire. Perhaps sensing my nascent interest in Diane, Trina kept turning everything she said back to anecdotes about herself.

Diane told us that she was having problems with her flat. I offered a room or at least a sofa in my house for as long as she'd like it. We swapped numbers and she said she'd get in touch the following day.

That day arrived and by 12ish and I was twitching with wanting to know what was happening, so rang her. She said she'd like to come up with the property developer in a couple of hours, then cancelled that, but texted at 3am: "Gonna come over tomorrow if that's ok with with you, me and a friend T---. I might stay over if u play your cards right lol X".

She turned up with her family friend, whom I assume was acting as insurance against me trying anything on. She told me that she'd ditched the property developer. Too controlling. We had a rather meandering chat with a couple of friends of mine down the pub, before she said she had to get back to sort her flat out. I felt it had petered out already so sent an appreciative text back, which I assumed she'd take as valedictory.

But no; it got quite flirty again tonight. She was getting ready to go out dancing with her friend, a lapdancer -- another Wendy -- and described what she was planning to wear. "Hmmm -- that's a nice image to imagine", I said.

"Tee hee, the dancing or what I'm going to be wearing?"

"Both. I want it all Diane, all the time."

"Ha ha ha, a man after my own heart, or is that body lol."

"Need to get to know the former a bit more first, but the latter's alright x"

"Yeah I believe you looby thousands wouldn't [...]"

"It's all true. Inconveniently, I think you're pretty fit x"

I'm going to hers on Friday. My hopes of getting her on her own are dashed again, as she said that it might turn into a bit of a party, as her friend wants to come round at 11am.

I told her that it was quality to start a party at 11am and said I'd be there a bit after that. "Can't wait xxxxx", she said.

My gut instinct: Diane is another case of over-sexualisation as a result of maternal deprivation. After a brief period of sex -- almost certainly the kind I like, in which the woman is experienced, active but submissive -- I will be offered a role as a "supportive" male friend. I will refuse this role, and this time, it will be me who says goodbye. The ghost of Trish hangs over all this.