My house, whilst simple, is better than a Travelodge for a woman from Durham
Danni replied to my email telling her I don't want to carry on chatting any more with good grace, saying that she regretted that we missed each other by a few days in Brussels when she was working there and I was cavorting artistically at the Belgian State's expense. She also said she's had a couple of big family problems lately which has left her with no desire for "chit-chat".
A nitpicking person might ask why, in that case, she didn't just tell me about them, and then we could have suspended diplomatic relations for a while until things were better for her, but I'm just pleased we've managed to conclude it with decorum.
This evening I bumped into my literate and witty gay friends Keith and Neil in the pub. There were several parents and offspring floating around, looking a bit lost, like foreigners. We deduced that it must be undergraduate open day tomorrow at Lancaster. There was this head-turningly attractive woman there. I moved my position at the bar to be next to her. She was ordering some food in a northeastern accent that was as gorgeous as she looked, with her black hair and a lovely green top pulled together with a thin cord tie just above her tits. I can't remember how I started talking to her but it was something to do with her accent. "Is it so obvious I'm not from here?" she asked. "Yes, it's the colour of your eyes," which I thought was quite a good line. I was trying to see if she had a wedding ring on.
"Do you fancy one more in the Roebuck?" said Keith. "You go ahead," I said. "I'm going to engineer another conversation with that woman." I found her and her son and we had a few minutes' conversation about the relative merits of Lancaster and Aston to do his Business Studies degree. No wedding ring. I bid them a good evening and I hoped that in the tenth of a second in which I looked at her as I left I conveyed how attractive I found her. Nothing came of it but it was good flirting practice.
But the quest for a bird in the hand - or better, two in the bush - continues. Hazel is an architect currently living in Edinburgh who has just finished a postgraduate degree there. In a most welcome reversal of the usual pattern, she asked me if I would like to come up for a drink. As she's not familiar with Glasgow, we're meeting there next Tuesday. She might not want to talk shop, and part of me is hoping that she'll say "No thanks looby I'd rather get shitfaced in some dodgy boozer", but I'm going to ask her if she's been round Alexander "The Greek" Thomson's villa in Pollokshields, with its peculiar mixture of Italianate and cod-Egyptian.
She's taking up a job in New York in October, so if something stirs in us as we wander around one of the architectural highlights of suburban Glasgow, we're going to have to pack a lot in in a few weeks.
Plastered
A plasterer having mucked Kirsty about with a series of feeble cancellations, I suggest she tries one I know. Kirsty's bedroom ceiling is now flawlessly smooth. But what a mess he left. The bedroom carpet is going to be replaced anyway, but it is thick with encrusted black dust which he has trodden through to the bathroom and up and down the stairs. The doors are streaked with wiped staves of dirt. He's managed to get plaster on the shower curtain. The floor of the bathroom is muddied with a tide of black, and Kirsty's bed frame is pocked with the blackstuff and grey plaster. I have just spent three hours in her house trying to vanish the worst of it.
Doing such a work leaves me feeling affronted. I am a doctoral candidate farting weakly into the doldrums of a subject which I am relieved to see, according to the person being groomed to do my viva, "has seen little progress in recent decades." I am employed on a Canadian journal of feminist theory in which the first article I was sent to edit contained a word so rude that it had to be disembowelled with asterisks for fear of offending Québécois feminists. I consort psychotropically with eye-tuggingly bosomed women who are on familiar terms with the more secretive chemists of Yorkshire. I cannot possibly be expected to do manual work.
And yet there I was this afternoon, in my former lover's bedroom, not with an expectant cock, but a scouring pad.
Danni I hope you won't mind me being completely honest but in this terribly cut-throat situation that we're in I'm not sure if there's enough in our conversations to make it interesting enough to pursue. I hope you won't take that as harsh - it's the alchemy, of which I am a part, which fails, rather than either of us individually. Best wishes, and thank you for your patient replies.
Lancaster, una città del nord Italia
I spent yesterday in Lytham in the sparkling company of two classy birds, Kitty and Melissa.
Melissa has been plotting an venture for us which I can't help feeling enthusiastic about despite reminding myself that we have only as yet discussed its outlines. It involves exploiting both our shared ability to fill limitless hours talking about relationship travails, and our discrete talents. Melissa is an experienced marketing and media whizz; Kitty has heroically driven herself through some huge roadblocks, not of her own making, in the last few years, simultaneously whilst teaching in an environment that would defeat most people; I might be able to handle the prose's saturation and contrast controls.
Melissa has scoped out the competition down to the fiftieth page on Google: it's lamentable, and if this project comes off, our feeble rivals will shrink in the dazzle of Melissa-Kitty-Looby Ltd., of London, Lytham and Lancaster. We'll bring you more on this story later.
Tonight I'm off to the launch of a new local brewery, Cross Bay Brewery, which now brings to three the number of breweries in the city. Lancashire's becoming quite a gastronomic centre, what with the breweries, the three cider makers, the boar farm, the samphire, the shrimps and smoked herrings, the cheese, and most memorably, the rye and spelt bread from Silverdale.
The latter is sold on market days in Lancaster by a very attractive baker, a tall girl with dishevelled hair and a reluctance to smile. I imagine taking her by surprise mid-knead.
In fact, if you ignore the way that Lancastrians constantly search for clothes which attain a more profound nadir of ugliness, Lancashire, at least in one way, is becoming a little bit like northern Italy. Soon, it will be difficult to say which of the pictures below is of Lancaster, and which is of Turin.
Les Bouches
Magistrates Courts sitting on a Sunday. Immediate punishment for the poor, endless latitude for the selfish rich sequestering the money this country needs to address the problems inarticulately articulated by the rioters. And worse, the tax dodgers are doing it with the collusion of the government.
I have just passed Nationwide Building Society's window, and felt like putting a foot through it. A poster shows a woman from behind in a dressing gown, cuddling a baby holding a teddy bear by its arm. "The kindest thing you can do." And a URL for some website on which you can buy insurance. The privatisation and commercialisation of the most fundamental sentiment of all, that of caring for one's children. Big business and their lapdog directors can pay, won't pay.
I waited for Denise outside Imran's Punjabi Buffet, where a man can entertain a lady and still have change from fifteen quid. I saw her before she saw me and moved a foot back from her sightlines to drink in her looks. As all attractive women do, she immediately started apologising. Every man who likes a women has to reserve the first five minutes of seeing her to appease the endlessly varied recitation of female self-dislike. "Denise, you look gorgeous. What spots?" She pointed to some barely perceptible imperfections in her skin, as if anyone would notice those over her flowing ginger hair, her tightly-fitting dress with inch-wide white straps, her scarlet flat patent leather shoes, the colour of which sends me back to her hair to look at her sexy dressy symmetry again.
Our fingers locked together over the table and we inched closer. "I love the way your hair falls over your tits," that kind of thing. "Those texts you send me, looby. I save them and read them to myself. It's nice that [redacted] makes you feel like that."
"...Ever since I first saw you, at Bloom and Doom," I replied. I described the time when she came to my desk holding a fax which I had to do something about. She was standing behind me; I was looking obliquely at the hem of her skirt, thinking how tall and well dressed she was. We started meeting in the canteen at lunch. "A part of me feels dead when I'm here," she said one day.
We said goodbye at the bus station and it was all I could do to nod and keep my hands off her, but I did, and she smiled back at me, pleased with me for respecting a boundary.
In other drink-related news, I've inadvertently invited Ingrid to a wine tasting next month by dint of my inability to master an email program I've been using for ten years. I hope it will go OK. Last time we went to a wine tasting she turned rather loudly drunk and unsteady, and I felt embarrassed by association as she missed her footing on les bouches du Rhône. At the bus stop on the way home she repeatedly told me it will only be friends, to which I gladly agreed. Then she stayed on the bus beyond her stop to get off with me and seemed to be angling for an exploration of her mouth, which aroused excited neither my interest nor anything else. Denise's mouth, on the other hand, arouses both my
A hot date
It was supposed to be the Chilli Festival this weekend. I really wanted to go. I had a great time there last year, eating local boar and chestnut pies, smoked herrings, drinking ale from Yorkshire and fending off Felicity's jealously of Kitty.
I asked Kitty (helping her Mum decorate), Linda (no reply), Gaynor (in London) and my ex-neighbour but three, Margaret, who just this evening has accepted via a mottled message from my Hungarian lodger who called her Lowra. Margaret is pretty, 40something, with good taste in quiet clothes which span the full extent of the spectrum from ecru to magnolia. I unexpectedly bumped into her there last year, switching immediately and I hope inconspicuously into the brightly-lit chat that a drinker does with sober people. 'Tis pity she's a Christian, but I was looking forward to going with her. Then came the news this evening that it had been cancelled due to the heavy rain we've had.
I waited for Denise outside Imran's Punjabi Buffet, where a man can entertain a lady, flourishly pay for everything, and still get change from fifteen quid. I saw her before she saw me and moved a foot back from her sightlines to drink in her looks. As all attractive women do, she immediately started apologising. Every man who likes a woman has to reserve the first five minutes of seeing her to appease the endlessly varied recitation of female self-dislike.
"Denise, you look gorgeous. What spots?" She pointed to some barely perceptible imperfections in her skin, as if anyone would notice those over her flowing ginger hair, her tightly-fitting strappy purple and white flowery dress, her flat patent leather red shoes, her beautiful curves which are made for my hands.
Our fingers locked together over the table and we inched closer. "I love the way your hair falls over your tits," that kind of thing. "Those texts you send me, looby. I save them and read them to myself. It's nice that [redacted] makes you feel like that."
"...Ever since I first saw you, at Bloom and Doom," I replied. I described the time when she came to my desk holding a fax which I had to do something about. She was standing behind me; I was looking obliquely at the hem of her skirt, thinking how tall and well dressed she was. We started meeting in the canteen at lunch. "A part of me feels dead when I'm here," she said one day.
Denise gets the first invite to the Chilli Festival next year, as long as boyfriend isn't interested. Don't want him hanging around, making us polite.
In other drink-related news, I accidentally invited Ingrid to a winetasting ("Regional Italy, Part One") next month by dint of my inability to master a simple email program. I hope it will be OK. She became rather volubly drunk last time we went to a winetasting and I felt an imaginary faint chorus of "You're a Nutterlover" rise from the respectable crowd with whom we were exploring the mouth of the Rhône. At the bus stop on the way home she repeatedly told me it will only be friends, to which I happily agreed. Then she stayed on the bus beyond her stop to get off with me and seemed to be angling for an exploration of her mouth, which aroused neither my interest nor anything else.
