Irish Sea
I spent Wednesday out with Trina delivering Labour Party election leaflets, jumping out of her car and haring up pathways and drives, in the ugly uPvC'd flatlands of rural Lancashire. When possible, I filched the Conservative party's leaflets out of the letterboxes and threw them away. The leaflet I was delivering contained an article, illustrated with a picture of the invertebrate Ed Miliband in his anonymising suit, pointing upwards somewhere, to make him look authoritative I suppose, about how Labour will "make work pay". What about making idleness pay? When you read the detail, it amounts to some trivial change in tax relief. And to think, this is a party which, in living memory, advocated the common ownership of the means of production.
It was hot and tiring work, for a party I don't support, so I was compelled to repair to the pub in Preston to gather myself. A man at the bar was wearing a T-shirt which recast the Nike logo and typeface to say "Pikey. Just nick it." I settled down to read a bit more of The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, my choice -- because Kim recommended it to me -- for our book club next month. "Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle, they are acted." I texted texted Kim to thank her for putting me onto it. "It's like having a talkative, interesting but meticulously self-obsessed person sat opposite you."
Last month's book club was even more drunken than they usually are, due to the plentiful supplies of Prosecco. The following day I had to text another bloke (it's chaps only) asking him to remind me what book I had chosen. "No idea, date or book. Too pissed at the end," he replied.
This was the scene a year ago in Morecambe, and we're doing it again this year. The weather is gorgeous here at the moment, so some of it can take place outside. There's an excellent video on YT which one of the regulars made, which gives you an idea of what we'll be getting up to. "They were blatantly enjoying themselves. Some of them must have been at least fifty," said one eyewitness.
I've had one or two enquiries about the room, at last, and someone came round last night to look at it. I think it's important to give everyone a fair chance regardless of age, looks etc. However, at the same time, one has to be very careful about EU discrimination law, so I'm going to give first dib to a gorgeous twentysomething Italian brunette glasses-wearing nurse, for legal reasons.
Cock, fanny, whatever
For one day a year all normal canons of taste are cast into the indifferently style-erasing maw that is the Eurovision Song Contest. I was to watch it with my girls and a friend of mine I met thirty years ago on teaching practice. I printed the scorecards off, then prepared a buffet tea of hydrogenated vegetable fat, salt and sugar.
Francesca turned up dressed as a Dutch peasant, all golden tresses and a long white milkmaid-type dress. Although she's a couple of years younger than me, she's a bit deaf, and in cahoots with my children, who appear to suffer from the same impairment, she turned the TV up so loud I had to stuff bits of paper in my ears.
Iceland had an MP in their band, while Poland brought a washerwoman, chosen for her singing ability alone, which helped them win the UK televote. Hungary judged that a pissed-up Saturday night audience of Czech farmworkers and Russian postmen would take to a song about child abuse and neglect. Russia's entrants tied their hair together and toyed with perspex poles on a see-saw, and Ukraine brought a dancer in a giant hamster wheel--one of the usual crop of redundant Eastern European acrobats. On the internet, we didn't have long to wait before the traditional foreigners' exchange of insults over Eurovision, expressed in the default phrase of girls who don't speak much English: "You are bitch!"
Our song, ("Something's stirring in the silence / And it reeks of passive violence)" finished 17th, up two places from last year. The contest was won by a bearded Austrian transsexual, prompting one Russian politician to remark that "the participation of the obvious transvestite and hermaphrodite Conchita Wurst on the same stage as Russian singers on live television is blatant propaganda of homosexuality and spiritual decay," whilst the former Speaker of the Duma, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, announced that this is "the end of Europe." The leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party said "Fifty years ago the Soviet army occupied Austria. We should have stayed."
I pored over pages of comments on the Guardian about the words "conchita" and "wurst". It's a fecundly polysemic dyad, having many different resonances in slang in South America and Austria. It could mean "little shell sausage", but it also suggests "cock, fanny, whatever, I don't know" in parts of Austria.
Trina watched it at her house, and rang me up in drunken midnight enthusiasm saying that we must go to it live. The following day she'd booked us a flat in Vienna for that week.
"So, who's that girl you've been flirting with on Visage Livre?"
"Oh her [Italian-Looking Woman]. No, you've met her. You met her the other day. She was sat over there. She was that girl at the party."
"She's very pretty. So why are you... dallying with her?"
"No, no, there's nothing there. She is pretty, but do you think I'm going to run off with someone who works in recruitment? That's a fucking non-job for a start. I tell you who is pretty. That girl who took over your job. She is gorgeous. I loved that necklace she had on, do you remember--those grey stones on a silver thread, and that beautiful grey skirt and those black boots--you know, when we all went out to that Chinese. She is gorgeous." Trina smiled and started riffling her hands through my hair.
When we got in I noticed that the bailiffs had been round again. Fortunately we'd all been out. I swept the note up as quickly as I could but Trina saw it, and this morning she rang and asked me the usual questions, "I'm not having you go to jail," "how much would it cost just to postpone them," and so on. I want to hasten my imprisonment, not postpone it. It would be a bit embarrassing, being in the local paper, but it's hardly something that will hinder my future prospects, seeing as I have none.
Before my fifteen minutes of infamy, I'd prepare Kim with a list of what has to be done while I'm in the Queen's Hotel. Trina would add more to my problems, by making me explain why I hadn't entrusted the task to her instead of Kim, but Trina cannot handle situations with which she is not already familiar, having had a narrow upper-middle class life. She'd get in a tizz and go tearfully in person to the bailiff's offices in Liverpool, where they would light up at the sight of a comfortably off but legally uninformed, love-smitten girlfriend. "But they were so kind and understanding, looby. They gave me a cup of tea while they put my card through."
Never mind, at least I'll be secure when I'm old. Got this from the railway pension people the other day.
Let's talk about sex, baby. Could I make a polite request to the women of Lancaster please. More white cotton short-sleeved broderie anglaise tops with the first couple of buttons undone. Saw this girl the other day in town wearing one, lanyard dangling down her cleavage, and I was transfixed. Oh dear, I have become a tit-starer in middle age.
I was googling how to get to Vaduz, because I am not going to meet this European Marketing Manager for Zeneca, or whatever she is, in Glasgow next month, and we were flirting and chatting by text and she pre-suggested a second date in Vaduz, where she's been, and I said I've got David Beattie's history of modern Liechtenstein, and in the course of looking how to get to Liechtenstein, I discovered one of those rich women's blogs which consist of photographs taken during showy-offy visits to places where everything is charming.
My position is supported by Kant
Forgot that I didn't have the girls this weekend and so didn't know what to do with myself. Bumped into Erica in the pub. "What are you doing tonight?" she said. "I don't know." "Well, there's a party tonight --- if you'd like to come along."
"I'm going to be alright here, aren't I?" I said in the taxi. "No invite I mean?" "Fine," said Erica. Don't worry." In their house, they've converted the basement, and have put a sound system and lights down there. They'd also set up a yurt on the village green for people who wanted to get away from the music.
There were more women than men there. I got talking to a pretty, slightly Italian-ish looking woman a bit younger than me--although when she said that she was looking for someone "driven and ambitious" I knew that it was game over. She gave me her card and asked me to get in touch. Next day, I was with Trina in the pub and saw Erica and her husband, and then, Italian-looking woman, who was with some friends on another table. Her friend was wearing a pale green, almost khaki dress tunic with a high open collar and buttons down the front, spaced evenly, so that there was that gorgeous little kink of openness as the fabric goes over her tits. It looked like a good-quality thin cotton, as it creased, pulling over her tits, with little fabric ridges spanning out to her shoulders and back.
Trina went to the loo. I said to Erica, "I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this, but I thought ILW was quite keen last night. I don't know, probably putting two and two together and making five." "Well, she said 'Is your friend single?'" Strange, all this attention now. There was nothing like this in my twenties.
On Bank Holiday Monday we went to Wray Scarecrow Festival, travelling up on a careering, bouncing, nauseous, bus. It's a gorgeous village, mainly C18th and C19th century houses on a street leading down to a riverbank where the locals abandon their children. The scarecrows are imaginative, politicised, and sometimes mechanised.
The local hairdresser sometimes slips up
But everything gets recycled locally
England is known for its compassionate treatment of the elderly
["You may be old and wrinkly but I care passionately for each and every one of you, I really do -- Wray Scarecrow Homes"]
The Tour de France is beginning near Wray this year (really), so this is the kind of poivrot that will litter our streets this summer
One can always rely on a Scot to lower the tone and raise the bar at the same time. The sign under his kilt says "boo" but it's not really the kind of village where you can take upskirt shots
We went for a wander in a bluebell wood--a good place for outdoor sex, we both agreed. Back in the village, we saw some salacious old German beermats for sale, depicting a nude fat-bottomed woman bent over stoking a wood stove, admired by two standing male observers.
Then to the pub for a couple of pints. The last time I was in that pub was on Valentines Day when I delivered my Valentines card made out of a pile of tiny post-it notes, for Daniella, a regular there, to the woman who served us on Monday, but fortunately we didn't bump into her. The waitresses wore these black, tube-like minidresses, a sexless hypersexuality.
Half of Lancaster was there, and another review of the Festival can be found at fellow local's site Unicycle Emptiness.
Got in tonight to a bit of a bombshell. Tess came in and told me she's moving out in a month's time as she's been offered free accomodation through where she works. Only the other day I was saying to Trina that I'll have Tess in the house for another fifteen months, until her course ends, so will have nothing to worry about for a while. Every time I think this house is settled and stable, it all changes. But there you, such is the life of the landlord, and I can't afford to live here alone. Or rather, I refuse to do the work that would enable me to live here alone. And I like having other people around. The stairs echo too much otherwise.
One of the legs on my futon has broken and I've had to prop one corner of it up with some books, including the Critique of Pure Reason and Beardsley's tome on Aesthetics.
On the job
Written on Tuesday morning
What a relief. No more of these late night texts telling me she's off to bed and is looking forward to seeng me. What can I say to that? "Thanks, but in the long run, you're going to be disappointed"? I've added a bit to my profile on the dating site: "I really don't think I'm relationship material. 'Where is this relationship going?' 'I don't know. Down the pub?'"
Friday morning
Trina rang, apologising at length for flying off the handle and "over-reacting" and that if it had been the other way round I wouldn't have made such an issue of it.
She asked if she could come over. I told her that I was just leaving to go to Manchester for a concert at the Uni (works by Helmut Lachenmann, et al). We rushed to the station. The train was running more than half an hour late and the clerk said we'd miss the connection at Preston; too late for the concert.
Standing in the station's foyer, we both knew what would happen. At our usual place, we got stuck into some solid boozing. Barry turned up, who was on surprisingly good form. How easy it is to spend money (he ran through his redundancy money in record time), how viciously uncaring this Government is, something about Newcastle United's owner, and so on. I was gabbling on about my night in the casino at Manchester after fending off frostbite in the nightclub where Richard Earnshaw was playing. He talked about Chris a bit (from whom he recently split up) but I really don't want to get involved in arbitrating between those two.
And then Richard turned up, and immediately pulled his stunt of easing Trina away from the collective conversation, for another private psychotherapy session about his fucking dead wife. She's fucking dead. Dead dead dead.
I gave Trina the nod and stood up. "Right well folks, we've been here since one o'clock so it's probably time we were off." Handshakes all round, including to the next table, (Irish? travellers? both?), one of whom had been playfully chatting Trina up.
"Oh thanks looby," she said. "I really couldn't face Richard at the end of two bottles of wine." I went to the chip shop and back at home we slathered our chips with a curry sauce of a colour that does not occur in nature.
Kitty popped round. "The reason it's called a blowjob is that it is just that. It's a job."
I left her in my room with my computer because I was going out with Neil, his boyfriend, and a few other poofs, to see a play about Eurovision.
I got back in and was pleased that Trina was still awake. We went out to the Whittle, where we had a couple of drinks at the ruinously high prices they charge there. 7.80 for a pint and a glass of red. We came home and got into bed. "Do you not think that's akin to a rape fantasy?" she said, midway. "Yes, of course it is. But I don't really care what you think. I've told you what's going to happen." It's quite difficult to split up with a woman to whom you can say things like that.
The following day Trina had her first ever glass of Madeira. I used to teach out there, and I am forever advocating Madeira's pleasures--both those of the island itself, and especially, its eponymous drink. She said "Why don't we go there?" "Well, yes, but..." And then she got on the computer and booked and paid for it all, the flights, the flat. This is where we'll be if you want to find us in the second week in September.
There's just one slight complicating factor which is that during the time in which I thought we'd split up, I arranged a date with someone who works for a pharmaceutical company down south, who is flying up from London to meet me in Glasgow. I could actually do the right thing for a change and cancel it.
Off to a party with Erica in G-- tonight where a DJ is playing in someone's house, then on Bank Holiday Monday, me, Kirsty, the girls, Boyf, and Trina are all going to the Scarecrow Festival in Wray. This is a pic of me and my daughters there a couple of years ago.
Over here
I was supposed to be on my way to France this morning with Trina, but my new passport hasn't arrived. I sent the application off over a month ago but the payment bounced, and I had to send them the money again. Trina, understandably, was utterly pissed off with me, and has told me that this is the last straw, that she can't cope with my "chaotic" lifestyle any more, and that we must realise we are incompatible. But she added still like to keep in touch for boozy afternoons and nights on the dancefloor. She's also managed to rearrange the holiday for June.
It's such a relief. This is what I've wanted for a long time. I think I just need to make it absolutely clear from the outset next time, that I am not relationship material.
I was down the pub recounting my passport woes to someone who features on this blog often. She told me this story of jumping bail in the Canary Islands after she and her then husband were charged with drug traffiking, for which she was told she should expect something like ten years.
When they went to court, her husband had been so badly beaten up by the police that they were granted bail for him to get medical treatment. The police had their passports. They got an internal flight to Madrid, got a train to Paris on which no-one checked the passports -- and then Calais. They wandered round the lorry park and persuaded a driver -- for a fee -- to stow them away in his lorry, which was full of booze. They created a tiny little space right in the middle of the tins. It was stiflingly hot and cramped, but they got to Dover OK. They stayed in Dover for a few months, making a living from running consignments of cigarettes to Lancaster and elsewhere. She says she daren't go back to Spain now.
As I finished my story, three loudmouths were getting chucked out. As they left they were yelling "He's a cocksucker. He sucks cock!" A moment after they left, a customer said, across the surprised silence, "He's over here", and the whole pub laughed.
My youngest went away to Harrogate for a week with her friend Sophie's family. They accidentally drove into and killed a pheasant. Sophie's Dad stopped the car, scooped it up, and they plucked and ate it that evening. When Melanie got back home, she told us that Sophie had said "you've got a trendy Mum and a poofy Dad."
Down the Yorkshire House with Tess and her workmate Briony, a bright and interesting girl. They keep going out for fags. We're all collectively talking about how to manoeuvre Tom out of the house and getting Briony to move in. Briony lives in a house owned by an architect and his wife in a crap part of Lancaster. The woman, especially, is a hoarder, and the only space in which to cook in the kitchen is an about the size of an A4 piece of paper. Every room is full of mounds of litter and junk. Briony found a plastic bag of potatoes which had liquefied in the vegetable rack.
"Let's talk about sex," said Tess, and we did. Tess said that she was at work the other day and Briony was slightly bent over and looked as though she was in pain. "Are you OK?" said Tess. "Yes," said Briony. "I just feel so fucking horny." At home, I got into bed and sent a filthy text to Chris.
