In Brussels
Last Tuesday I got up at crack of dawn to wave the girls off on the bus to Sixth Form College, silently protective and concerned. It's a long bus ride to Preston and they have to be out of bed at 6.15. Neither me nor Kirsty are sure how long it will last. Once they'd gone, Kirsty said "I wish they'd chosen Lancaster. This means I can't stay in bed now."
At Wine Club, there is no-one I fancy, and I am stuck with the elderly male bores who always pour themselves bigger measures than everyone else. The woman who said "You [plural] must come round" two months ago has still not offered a date, despite me reacting warmly and saying that she should suggest one as I've probably got more free time than her. In some middle class circles, "you must come round" means "goodbye."
August's book club meeting was cancelled as no-one was around, so we had two books to discuss this time. H is for Hawk, and Frenchman's Creek, Daphne du Maurier's piratical bodice-ripper. "Perhaps nothing has happened yet. But as we are dealing with a Frenchman, it is only a matter of time before something dastardly happens!" T-- , the actor who chose it, couldn't act enough to suppress his bridling at us dismissing such a corny book. N--- was doing that tic in which he keeps scratching himself close to his cock.
I'd met him in the pub earlier; the secret society of habitual heavy drinkers. He said he's not sleeping very well. Money problems, he said, but I think he's forgotten that a few months ago he told me that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. He rents a comfortable old house in a village up the valley where he goes back a long way. I asked him if they could move somewhere cheaper, but he doesn't want to leave his village. The locals can't afford to stay. We're being zoned now, like in America.
On Friday, my benefactress took me to Brussels. It's her birthday round about now and she wanted to go away somewhere, but I didn't realise it would be Brussels.
"I'm a gigolo, " I tell my friends. It's true. I give her an access to a life of dancing and drugs and fun that she'd never get from her friends, all human rights and yoga. She thinks the sex we have is brilliant but it's pretty ordinary.
This is how it's going to be from now on. My poor background, my ambivalent class status, and being class-ly bilingual, and my "daring" lifestyle, will be the currency which I will use in relationships with women, which will remain at heart, commercial. The women I find sexually attractive with whom I have giddy nights of druggy, unpredictable fun -- Kim, Wendy, Kitty -- don't want to fuck me.
Inexpressible lust crackles between the tables at
Les Gens Que J'Aime
So with that much tacitly understood, Trina paid for almost all of our long weekend at the Brussels Beer Festival, where we got through about 10% of the 450 beers --- all Belgian --- available in a crowded Grand Place. It was a very poor show on the train at Calais, not a hitchhiker to be seen.
Late afternoon, a brewer stood on a pedestal and sliced the top of a bottle of beer off with a sword. We found our favourite bar -- Le Coq -- where we sat drunkenly talking in my mediocre but adequate French to the locals. I pretended to be Cypriot when the France v Cyprus match came on. Trina told the bony, uncommunicative man sitting next to us that he had lovely hands and asked if he was an artist. He looked at her with the wide-eyed stare of lunatic solipsism.
The Flemish pronunciation is quite a challenge. I had particular difficulties with asking for a "Leeuwse Schutter". My attempts to say it raised titters at the bar and an impromptu lesson. The bloke I was talking to said -- "don't worry, we can't say those words like 'Worcestershire', which is a shame because I really like Worcestershire sauce."
It's hard
Apologies for the several mistakes in an earlier version of this post. I was very tired.
Went up to see my Mum over in Middlesbrough. Got back and two weeks later, she rings me, voice cracking, to tell me that the last of her brothers has died. "It's just us [sisters] left now."
I was in the pub the other day when our local MP walked in with a couple of friends for a drink. She's definitely the most attractive and well-dressed member of the House. I dashed over to her as she was about to leave and congratulated her on defying the leadership and voting against the latest Bill to punish the poor, and for mentioning fracking in her maiden speech. To my astonishment, when I mentioned my uncommon Christian name, she knew my surname, and talked me into going on a phone bank at the Labour Hall to ring up existing members of the Labour Party to try to persuade them to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election.
I was given a mobile phone, a list of numbers, and an instruction not to leave messages. It was in a run-down hall in Scotforth. I was offered a "drink". I declined, thinking it the usual shredded tea or instant coffee, but one of the choices was a homemade wine, which was viscous and heady. I noticed that, as the new boy, I did most of the actual work, while they had those self-reflecting conversations for which people sometimes join political parties.
Our MP met me outside and I felt myself melting with a lack of self-control. She was wearing this gorgeous scooped, high-necked dress of black and white dots, black tights, and black flatties. Sex. I want to have sex with you.
Kim came over for a few days most of which we spent in Liverpool. On our way up to the station, we passed by the gorgeous ginger-haired Irish girl I had my one and only date with a few months ago. See what I've got now, I said, silently lying to myself and her.
Kim was being fickle. I thought we were going to the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Tate right up until the last moment, so we never got further than the shop, where I stole seven postcards and a rubber.
We walked back and she diverted us into a dog-rough pub, a proper boozer, where we were instantly accepted. I like how she's fearless about walking into pubs that almost all my middle class friends would eschew, with a mixture of fear and their sense of the boundaries of class. If you look up the pub on YT, you get a video of a woman kicking shit out of a bloke outside, entitled "Prozzer v Drunk, Liverpool".
Back at the hotel, we got into bed and my fingertips crept across towards her. It was hard being in bed with Kim, in more ways than one, but that's not allowed, so I didn't touch her, even though I was longing to do so.
The next morning she suggested scrapping breakfast for cocktails, so we had Bellinis at 11am. On the train back to mine, we got talking to the couple at the next table. I found out the female half was originally from Morecambe, and the fact that we'd asynchronously gone to the same school turned us into bestie mates. They seemed OK so I offered them a wee line of my speed. He was modest about it, but she dug into the bag and shovelled two large artificial nails-full of it up her nose.
She lit up a cigarette. A teenage boy came over and told her that she couldn't do that. “Oh it's OK, love, don't worry about that.” They invited us back to their house in Wigan. No.
At Preston station, I fancied a last drink. The man poured a pint of Heineken and asked me for £4.20. "Four twenty?" I said. "We're in Lancashire, not Surrey. Sorry mate, I'm not paying that." We walked out and he poured it down the drain.
Don't come back a wanker
Kim was off her head the other night. In an admirable act of forethought, she maxed out her credit card on something in the week before it became illegal, and is blessed with ample stocks.
She left me a long message around midnight. I was asleep and didn't hear it, but turned my phone on when I woke up. Her voice was unintentionally sexy. I texted her to say that it was a pleasure having her in bed with me this morning. She'll literally will be in bed with me on Wednesday, in that unsexed way that is half compliment, half insult.
The woman from the dating site I was supposed to be meeting last week ducked out the day before, saying that she was leaving the site (she's still there) because there are "too many dickheads" and she's "not ready for anything." The crumb I was thrown was an invite to connect on farce book.
Thanks for letting me know. Although can I just say --- having been let down in this way several times before, I wish women would make up their minds before they go on dating sites whether or not they are interested in actually meeting up. Never mind though, I understand that you can sometimes get cold feet.
I'd rather not get in touch on FB. An impersonal, online connection isn't really what I'm looking for.
All the best and hope you have a nice evening.
To London, where my middle daughter was at a summer school at the National Youth Theatre. My youngest had been warning her about the effects of the city's miasma, and as we set off to the station, she opened the front door and yelled down the street "Don't come back a wanker!"
I am out of practice with London, and I underestimated the amount of time it would take to get out to Greenwich and back to Victoria. I missed my coach, so blagged the train instead, working myself up into that quality of lying in which you almost convince yourself. It was a hot day and I was pleased to notice a speckle of sweat on my forehead, which I hoped the guard would take as an indication of honest anxiety.
"Right, it's OK, just calm down. Just take a seat and I'll be with you in a bit."We sped through Milton Keynes, Donna's home town, and I started mentally re-running, for the hundredth time, the Sex on the Stairs Session.
The guard came along. "Look, it's alright. You can tell the genuine ones. I'm happy to accept you've made a genuine mistake, so you'll be OK to Lancaster."
I had also lost my phone, so I asked to borrow one from the man sitting opposite me to inform Trina, who was meeting me at the station. The following day, I discovered that when he got off the train at Crewe, he'd texted her. "Hi this is the man from the train. Sounds like your friend's had a really awful day, so I hope you're going to take him out for a couple of pints tonight!" How exquisitely kind, searching and flirty.
I went back down a fortnight later to fetch her. I stayed in a hostel in Elephant and Castle, whose one redeeming feature is that it's far too rough an area for the hectares of cawing American tourists that waddle all over the canonised bits of London. (Do they not have long trousers in America?)
I went to a pub where groups of elderly black men with greying hair and pork pie hats looked as though they'd just finished putting down some backing tracks on a Cameo album. I got talking to someone about shoplifting; he'd been made redundant from his job as an assistant supermarket manager.
At closing time, he said that there was another real ale place a little way off. Rather disinhibited at this stage, I said "Would you mind if I gave you a snog?" "Not in here!" he said, with some alarm; and I felt incredibly stupid, finished my pint and bade him goodnight.
Trina had an early meeting in Burnley, and was staying in a budget hotel there. I was rather elbowed out from my house for the night. A Chinese girl, to whom I'd explained that there would be a room coming up in about a week to ten days' time, turned up to have a look round, then informed me that she'd like to move in that afternoon, as she had nowhere to stay.
I told her she could go on the settee for a few days. Then the other lodger informed me that there was a couchsurfer coming that night and asked me if he could sleep on the sofa. I asked Trina if she fancied a bit of company in Burnley, and moved the Chinese girl into my room.
In a beautiful old pub, we got talking to the blokes on the next table. It was slightly awkward as they were on a lower level, so they eventually all moved up to ours. The elderly man sitting next to me noticed I'd taken my shoes off. "Yes," I said, "I know it's not very classy but my feet are hot."
He bent down and massaged my feet for a few seconds. "I've got a foot fetish, you know. If I was to suck your toes, my cock would get hard."
A younger man with such a large chip on his shoulder that I'm surprised he could stand up straight, was telling us over and over again that he's been told he's one of the best songwriters in the country, and that he's a plumber's son and has lived in Burnley all his life. He kept interrupting us with question of the form "What about..." and then it would be Plato or Marx or someone.
I had ignored him up to that point but couldn't stop myself. "Oh God this is boring mate. I feel like I'm being quizzed about my knowledge of the Routledge Very Short Introductions series." This made him quite aggressive and he told us to "get out of Burnley", which had a comical opposite effect to that which he was trying to create.
We turned back to the mixture of conversation and foot massage. At the end, I gave the footman my card. The following morning, there was a message from him. "Hello, it's Ernest. I would love to suck your toes. I think you're a lovely man and if you would like to ring me and let me suck your toes, it's [number]. I would just like to do that and give you a cuddle and be kind to you."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do not get on the wrong side of my cat
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Faces contorted with hate, the floppy-hatted Prosecco-swigging socialists of Lancashire's anti-fracking rabble loll about plotting their next move. |
I have mainly been opposing fracking.
The louche scene above took place at a picnic we held at Lytham windmill to celebrate Lancashire County Council's refusal of the first two fracking applications in the county. The councillors voted 9-2 against, despite what one article called "a morass of pro-fracking bias and legal and scientific misrepresentation from those meant to be providing impartial advice." It was a relief to do something purely enjoyable for a change, rather than standing around for seven hours outside County Hall.
They were long days, but not without their pleasures. And if anyone thinks that the reason I went and spoke to her had anything to do with her strikingly gorgeous face, the beautiful long bunches of the world's best hair colour on a woman, her lovely smile, her fantastic charity shop hat and secondhand dress combo, the latter of which slinked attractively over her lovely hips, well then, I pity you for how shallow you are in your evaluation of women.
We had Farmers Against Fracking drive slowly up the main drag to deliver a trailer-load of frack-free Lancashire produce -- strawberries, eggs, cheese and other things in which we excel. We had the police take over the percussion for a few minutes. I was interviewed by someone from a Norwegian newspaper, and had my fifteen seconds of fame on the news one night on that prominent media organ, Channel 5.
Mid-afternoon at the back end of last month, we all went quiet as the decision was about to be made, huddling around a computer which was relaying the live stream from inside County Hall.
This is how I wrote about it at the time.
I am absolutely exhilarated with the decision to reject fracking in Lancashire today, and am glossy-eyed with pride that Lancashire's county councillors have shown immense courage in the face of intimidation, verbal and written threats, and an Infrastructure Act which begins the task of dismantling planning law that the Conservatives passed as soon as they returned to power.
I am FUCKING PROUD today to be from Lancashire, because standing up to corporate power and the arrogance of these rich kid shits we are governed by, takes guts. We have shown that this county will not be a pushover.
A small socialist sherry was had afterwards, but it's far from over, and there'll be more on this story soon.
You will no doubt not remember my tall, blonde ex-work colleague and long-time neighbour, who sports a fine line in the tight trouser, who turned up on the dancefloor at Morecambe a few weeks ago and requested my complicity in getting rid of her date.
During some flirty banter with her and her mum the other day, I said that I'd bumped into her sister at the beer and wine tasting at the Town Hall. We chatted a while, my head ringing with the knowledge she was single. When I got home I had the idea of inviting her to our wine club meeting. I wrote a note doing this, in which I attempted to continue the flirtatious tone of the evening.
She texted back and said that her daughter was having an exhibition opening that night, in the local yoghurt knitter's bar, but if I were interested in seeing it she'd be happy to meet me there for a drink another day.
Both Tilly and her mum Renee turned up. I had made a bit of an effort, attempting to signal that was interested in something other than her daughter's photography. I was relieved that I had, since Tilly was wearing a beautiful and quite revealing dress in green and cream and a thin margin of black bra. They're both good fun to be around. Scousers, so I don't have to censor my speech.
"The art of wooing is dead," said Tilly. Hmm. Do you think so? She's away with work all this week but I might try to find something to suggest to her for the next.
Thursday was a good day. 1) My actual plastic Booths loyalty card arrived. 2) My youngest just casually mentioned that when she went to Morecambe on Saturday she bought an album by Sun Ra. 3) I concluded a brief meeting with a few young lads in the pub, who joined us on our table, by saying "Right we're fucking off, 'cos you sound like a right bunch of boring cunts," which resulted in laughter and handshakes.
This proves: I am proper middle class; I have finally achieved something as a father; and that I am from Lancashire.
But my most momentous news -- well, apart from a funeral and a wedding, which I'll leave till next time -- is that Trina went on a date.
It's someone we both know from the house music event we go to. Trina said that he talked about himself all the time --- I gather some men even set up websites in which to do this --- and smoked throughout. He made a tea of overcooked pasta on top of which he'd poured a tin of tomatoes, and the apple strudel was shop-bought and microwaved. He said that he bought a dozen copies of a book called "How To DJ." He doesn't DJ himself but in a helpful spirit he's given the book to some of the most practised and talented DJs in the north of England.
The date didn't work, but I'm hoping that this indicates -- finally, after three years -- that Trina is becoming more autonomous.
