In Morecambe Bay
Back after a couple of days frolics on the canal with Trina to a small pile of mail, including a Summons to the Magistrates Court for unpaid Council Tax. It will "be stopped if the amount shown [£542.47] together with the other sums claimed [£58.00] are paid [...] before the hearing date." It'll be OK. I'm a professional at one thing--living beyond my means.
To Trina's narrowboat on Sunday and the cosy, enveloping feeling as you bend and go sideways through the tiny French doors at the prow and down the two little stairs.
We were up early by our standards, since we were to strike across Morecambe Bay with the Queen's Guide To The Sands, Cedric Robinson, who is seventy-nine and has been leading people across the Bay for forty-nine years on a salary of fifteen [sic] pounds per annun. When he retires they are not making a new appointment, so a post dating from the sixteenth century will be lost, and it will be a brave person indeed who will set out alone, hoping to avoid joining the scores of human and equine corpses that lie below the sands. There is a young pretender who wants to do it commercially but he's had to be rescued twice by the coastguard and Cedric has a low opinion of his abilities.
The event was organised in association with Invisible Flock, a cheery young trio of artists, who provided headphones and an mp3 player for us to listen to a soundtrack. It was bits of interviews with Cedric, bird sounds, distorted bits of the Shipping Forecast--that sort of thing. After a while it became irritating, a muzak to nature's unmatchable music, so I turned it off.
Grey skies and a whipping wind; brief promises of sun were followed by flung rain. Most of us walked in bare feet, receiving a fine pedicure. Shortly before we came to the most treacherous part, crossing the River Kent, Cedric showed us a patch of quicksand, which wobbled malevolently underfoot like a huge jelly. Rolling up our trousers, we waded across the river. Someone gave a little scream as she trod on a fluke, a dab-like fish which lives just below the surface.
The last hour or so was across some stinking marshland, sheep dung and oily black mud everywhere; channels you had to jump across. "I'll be alright here," said Trina, and immediately slid down the bank and into the water. In another patch of squelching mud, her shoe was sucked off her foot. A careless comedy was taking over, as we gave up any pretence of protecting ourselves or our clothes.
Me bird: no post-production in the picture;
just taken at a particularly rainy moment
Trina and I were the last to straggle ashore at Kents Bank. After seven-and-a-half miles, filthy, wet, but exhilerated, we all stole gingerly into a cafe aimed at well-pressed car owners, where Invisible Flock bought us a cup of tea.
Back on the canal, changing out of our clothes turned into something far more enjoyable, making a virtue of the narrowness of a narrowboat. We improvised a studenty lentil stew, pouring off the mould that had formed on the top of the jar of olives, dispatching any harmful bacteria with one bottle of Chablis and another of Tempranillo.
Incognito
We got in the Guardian.
There were a few patches of thin ice on the night but I don't think the audience noticed.
There was some unglamorous shifting of tables and chairs, my little arms straining up and down the stairs. Waiting for people to stop smoking; rain.
Afterwards, we all got pissed and I was a bit delerious. I got chatting to the mother of two gay teenage boys, one of whom had been performing. "Yeah," the eldest son said. "She had me first and she thought 'Oh fuck, a ginger nut, and gay. Let's try again.'" We went to the last open pub in Lancaster. "You're a load of cunts and it's been a shit night. Bye!" I said. "My thoughts entirely!" said David Copperfield, and we broke up.
I came home to an email from Trina sending me a track she likes. Fuck. I don't like people sending me music. It's an effort to find a polite way of saying "That song that you passionately feel vicariously expresses your emotional history sounds like formulaic shite to me." The depth to which my drunken mood sank in the seconds it took me to scan the line was equivalent to the height to which it skied when she said it was a track I've got on the shelves behind me--which I played, and my eyes went glossy.
You can't do everything, you can't go everywhere, but oh how I wish I were at Ronnie Scott's tonight. I play the video over and over again in a masochism of longing.
Incognito - Colibri
All out
I'm in Really Late's offices, being a receptionist. Across the corridor a couple and their problems; should be all quiet for about half an hour. Just been down to see Kitty and Sixth Form Girl at the Duke's. They're going to Dog at Nightime or whatever it's called, relayed from the National Theatre. I'm working this evening so Kitty gave the ticket meant for me to Sixth Form Girl. It's a pleasure to see friends formerly connected only through oneself getting on autonomously. Kitty drove me down in the car. "You're fucking beautiful," I didn't say.
The more yesterday approached, going to Nottingham for the cricket, the less I was looking forward to spending four hours on Birmingham Coach Station, starting at 4.10am. I bent the last twenty-five pounds out of my flexible friend and went down on the previous evening instead. My friend lives in an attractive village a few miles outside Nottingham, in which one expects Janet and John to appear, gaily running behind their mother as she fetches provisions from the butcher to put in the wicker basket on her bike. It reminded me of where Mary-Ann lives. I think of Mary-Ann often, and wonder how she'd react to a suggestion of a friendship.
Booking late for a sell-out match, we had the best and most expensive seats in the house, high up behind the bowler's arm, above where the commentators sit. The man behind us, in a pink check shirt and navy trousers like the ones I used to wear in my disastrous three months at the Bank discussed, without bragging, his ownership of "a few care homes." Next to him, a man who was something in law, discussed how he sometimes would poach or tempt into freelancing, someone who's "shit hot at that kind of contract."
"Would you like a hot drink? Or?" My host snapped the last syllable off sharply, letting me know that a request for a drink would be impolite. They've got a two-month-old daughter, and the house felt like hers and her mother's when we were there, which is perhaps why Brendan reacted with alacrity to my suggestion of a day at the cricket. On the train back from Nottingham, the trolly dolly came round and gave me a Stella when I was 14p short for it.
At Manchester Piccadilly, I tried to get money out of my credit card, progressively downgrading my requests at the ATM until even ten pounds was refused. It was unsettling, all my cards exhausted. I circled Sainsbury's, thinking about shoplifting, but poked my fingers into the seldom-visted little pocket above my main one and found three pounds twelve: just enough for two bottles of Stella Cidre, a drink I would criticise others for drinking.
In less than eight hours from now I will be at the --- in Lancaster for what N, in his imperious manner, calls a "call" for this fucking D**kens thing I've got myself involved in, while I will miss my daughter performing in Preston. The last day in which he can exert his will over us, so he sends a schedule of fifteen hours.
It's not all bad. The not bad things are about Trina, and planning going out dancing, ("I just don't want to look like someone's mad aunt") which I will relate once this ball ache of a spazmodically organised show is over at midnight tomorrow.
Long off
I am beginning what will be a busy week with a neglectful preparation. We had a rehearsal for the D**kens thing tonight. The running order and the timing is still not sorted out, four days before the event. I'm past caring now. I sensed that others were similarly unbothered.
It's been a bit of a nervous few months with New Business Colleague, negotiating the interface between his access to people who have to shove guns off the sofa before he sits down on it, and mine to middle class Lancaster, whose language I can speak to near-native standard. Having to deal with his defensiveness and the poor way he handles his drink hasn't been easy; the way he softens when we're alone. All complicated by the mutual physical attraction between his wife and me.
It's been profitable, even if most of the profits have gone pleasurably up my nose, playing music and dancing around the room and thinking about Trina and, less glamourously, arresting the effects of my drinking. "The thing with that stuff," said a man I met on a dancefloor at the Zap Club in Brighton fifteen years ago, "is that is lets you drink like fuck."
The article in which we're trading is unfashionable. I get far more requests for something five times as more expensive, the accelerant for the Square Mile. I don't like it. It makes me feel too big. And I can't understand why anyone would use refreshments at work. Class, money, tastes--they're all interrelated, and minds far greater than mine have mapped that field.
I am off to Nottingham tomorrow to sit at Trent Bridge with the only decent boss I've ever had, who now buys ingredients for perfumes, at the cricket, prepared with boxes of pies and sandwiches. It will involve getting a bus from Preston to Birmingham at 2am and then sitting in the latter's bus station for four hours, before the cheap train connection to Nottingham. In a rather sadistic way, I am looking forward to seeing Dale Steyn and Morne Merkel, two of the most fearsome bowlers in the world, throwing down unplayable deliveries at our batsmen. I love the physical and psychological violence of cricket. You want to wear someone down.
Kitchen of lust
Seriouscrush has put one of her houses on the market. Strange to see the rooms in which I tensed unbearably with desire for her, promoted in the language of an estate agent. Now, I sit on that chair at the back, chat about her baby, and pay my rent.
I was in Kendal on Thursday, to apply to open an account with a local Building Society. Halifax charged me sixty pounds in bank charges last month, for being overdrawn by thirty pounds for a week. Yesterday I withdrew all but two pounds of my money (now back in credit) and they'll get it at a fiver a month, for four months, when I'll default, and they'll decide it's not worth chasing.
In The Globe in Kendal, one real ale, Cross Bay's Zenith. Some members of the inferior orders were in there, loudly threatening a young girl handicapped with the name Courtney with "a right slapping". The barman nipped quickly outside to check on the efficacy of the Council's municipal hygience services. "That was tidy," he reported. "Yes, very tidy."
In Burgundy's, a far better pub, their own brewery stands gleaming behind the glass-backed downstairs bar. In the public bar with its mumsy carpet, the big blackboard with its carefully listed beer, chatty people assumed that the we're all going to talk together, as a group. A beautiful unpasteurised cider "tasting mainly of apples" in Terry Prachett's deliberately obvious definition. I got talking to a couple from Barrow-in-Furness about vegetables and how to live cheaply, while we paid for our beer from the separate alcohol account drinkers have in their heads.
To Trina's narrowboat. We were walking back from the pub and I found an expensive umbrella thrown into a bin. "I'm having that," I said, and tested it. Trina pointed out a flitting group of linnets. "They're paler than sparrows; they always move in flocks."
It had been raining, so I set the brolly to dry on the prow of her boat. We got another bottle of wine open, me talking half drunkenly about her lovely big tits as my right hand went round her neck and down her cleavage, and she started to do her kissy purring. But then all thoughts of sex were arrested by a gust of wind which swept my new expensive umbrella into the canal.
It started drifting up the canal and I felt an irrationally important desire to get it back. There was another boat moored opposite and we shouted, in our polite English way "Excuse me!" A young man came out and took a pole off the roof of his boat and raked it over to his boat. "Thanks! I shouted. "I'll come and get it." I ran up the towpath, climbed over a fence, ran over a bridge, and down to his boat.
"You're not even out of breath!" said Trina. I couldn't understand why I should be. "But you set off like a hare!" We had the laugh-on-coming sex which we have. I'm glad neither of us finds sex serious and transcendental; it's very enjoyable, but immediately one loses one's immersion in it, a bit comical too.
