Kim and her boyfriend split up earlier this year, so she asked me if I'd like to take the latter's place at Penrith for The Winter Droving, a revived old English festival which was originally an excuse to get farmer-bright after doing something involving sheep. The ex had already paid £120 for a hotel room for the night so there'd be no expense to me, other than my drinks budget.
In the bar at the George Hotel, there is a fake, pre-snowed Christmas tree, canned music, bar staff in waistcoats, and two thrusting televisions keeping us to date with domestic misogyny and foreign civil wars.
Judging by the accents and the bulk, we appear to be in the middle of the AGM of Wirral Weightwatchers, perhaps one of that organisation's less successful branches. A global woman, whose arse begins just under the shoulder blades, heaves herself back into her seat and announces that she's just been to put some make-up on, because it's well known that a bit of eyeliner makes you look eight stones lighter.
Kim walked in in a black dress with cherries all over it, black tights and black boots. Men do a quick full body scan of her, then a glance at me as the phrase "lucky bastard" flashes in their eyes, little knowing that mine and Kim's relationship is as sexless as that they have with their wives.
The actual Droving procession was a bit Girl Guide-ish -- literally so in that we inadvertently fell in with the local pack however much we tried to avoid them. It had all the elements of one of those formless English "celebrations of", in which the point has long been lost -- paper lanterns, torches, and badly co-ordinated marching bands. I had an amiable quick word with someone who was playing in one of them and whose wife helpfully disposed of my virginity when I was eighteen and she forty. I've been imprinted for older women ever since.
One is encouraged to wear masks, so Kim went as a ram and I as a bull, any virility bated by the fact that my right horn kept flopping down over my eye.
It was all over by 8pm, but the council decided to make a late night of it by putting on entertainment for a further forty-five minutes, The best bit of the weekend was just talking to Kim. "I've got the libido of a twenty-year-old," I said speculatively, knowing that she both understood my subtext, and that she'd ignore it.
Next day, Kim left me in town and got herself off. I wanted to look at some pre-Norman burial crosses in the churchyard. They date from the first half of the tenth century when the language there -- and here in Lancaster -- was Cumbric, the Brythonic language eventually ousted by Norman French and English.
In the pub I met someone I'd not seen for years, a Christian, teetotal woman who did her best to chat me up when I was doing my MA, despite the fatal objections just mentioned. Afterwards I composed a text saying it was nice to meet her and that I hoped we'd bump into each other again.
She has the same name as Trish, (which lasted only two weeks last year, but what a fortnight) and I inadvertently sent it to her. Riskily, I decided to ring her, ostensibly to apologise for the misdirected text but wondering if I could turn it into a date for a day of fucking. "Thanks looby, I did wonder what that was about. Are you OK?" We assured each other that we were indeed so, but she wasn't to be drawn. "That's alright then. Bye bye," she said.
Back at my table I get talking to the couple at the next table. She was from Egremont, so naturally the conversation turned to gurning -- a Cumbrian sport in which the aim is to pull the most grotesque face whilst inserting it through a braffin or horse's collar. I mentioned that a friend of mine, several years ago, organised a cabaret evening featuring the then World Gurning Champion. "Oh yeah, that'll be Snowball," they said.
The World Championships are held in Egremont at the Crab Fair, which has been held since 1257. "You should come next year." It's in my diary already: Friday 14th September.
Claire Spedding and Adrian Zivelonghi, 2017 World Gurning Champions