After we got in from dancing, I kissed Trina goodnight and left her to a peaceful night of bellowing away in my room, while I put a quilt on the old sofa cushion in the living room. The lodger's noisy fan bores its expensive drone through the ceiling.

An hour or so later, there is a loud noise at the door, revving my heart with every bang. I immediately think of bailiffs. I pretend to be asleep, but someone shines a powerful torch through the chink in the curtains, so the game is up.

I pull my trousers on and blinkingly open the door. It's two police officers. They ask about Gail, the girl who squatted here for three weeks last year without paying a penny in rent. Relieved, I want to be helpful, and my speech adopts the middle class register I use in times of bother. I say that although I don't know where she is, I can give them the name of the pub where she used to work. They nod, repeat the name of the pub back to me, then apologise for bothering me at 4.30am on a Sunday morning.

The following morning Trina, the lodger and I have a conflab, and we surmise that they'd bad and urgent news to impart; if they were after her for something criminal they'd hardly have taken my word about her whereabouts without searching the house.

---

My phone beeps and it's Karen, the one with "nice tits"--a phrase that became a leitmotif of the weekend we all spent together a while ago. She is after something you can't buy in a supermarket. I reply.

Hello you sexy girl--lovely to hear from you. Hope all's well in the wilds of W----. I am afraid that the cupboard is a bit bare at the moment. I'd love something myself but if I hear of anything I'll let you know. I'm trying to get something organised for a friend's do next month so if that comes off I'll let you know. In the meantime we could just have sex instead though. JOKING! :) Take care XXX

First though, I send it to the receptionist at the girls' school, with whom I'd been talking about an administrative matter a minute previously.

Karen doesn't reply.

"'Honey'," I say to myself.

---

In further Ramadam news, my china quiche dish is returned. It is crowded with bhajis, pakoras, samosas and vegetable rolls. I must find out, from a reliable Guide to Muslim--Infidel Etiquette, the appropriate way to repay such abundant neighbourly generosity. Or I could just be honest with them and ask them if they're allowed to eat anything I make, or whether the sauce of unbelief fatally mars my provender.

It's Ramadan, and several of my neighbours are Muslims. I distrust them, with their rigid social boundaries. The men treat me with a technical, shunning, politeness; there is a mute group of women in their ridiculous Ninja Turtle niqabs to whom I say "hello" whenever I see them--part greeting, part challenge.

I get home after watching the cricket highlights at Kirsty's. On the kitchen table, there is a plastic container full of some sort of biriyani, and a note from the lodger. "A gift from next door. They only ask that you return the container when you're done with it." "When you've finished with it," I muttered, lamenting the geological inevitability of the drift of English speech as it moves towards that of America. But I am delighted with next door's ground-breaking gesture and immediately plan to reciprocate.

Trina and I made my Gruyère, red pepper and black olive quiche, a dish which has been known to provoke a bit of polite competition for the last couple of slices--deciding against the black pudding casserole in red wine. We took it round and told her--honestly--that the rice dish was lovely. I presented the quiche, assuring her it was vegetarian, in case that mattered. She said that they buy their vegetables from "a halal supplier from outside", wherever "outside" may be. I infer that my expensive, time-consuming and delicious quiche is destined for the compost bin.

Back here we spent five in-depth minutes of research looking at what halal food actually is; the dairy produce might fall into the wrong shade of a grey area. I am pleased we responded to the gesture, even though now I wish I'd just knocked up a pot of Out of Date Vegetable Surprise. It'll be interesting to hear what she says when she returns my china dish.

---

Trina came round on Friday as we were heading to St Annes the following day for some groovetastic dancefloor activity. We had a bottle of champagne before she said that we'd better start preparing dinner. "Just before that though, we could...", I suggested, and we did. I managed not

[July 2012]
Chris walked in looking very pretty, in a grey scooped necked dress dotted with black circles, with a big black bow whose tie hung attractively and eye-drawingly down the parting of her lovely tits; the whole of her was beautifully, curvily shown off by her tight grey felt-ish minidress. Black tights and almost flat shoes with little white dabs of plastic.

to think about being Chris's pornographic photographer.

---

The place is familiar and the people are becoming more and more so. Trina pleasingly reported that someone had asked her whether she was coming to the weekender in September. Whilst she was being asked about, I was at the bar.

"A coke and a pint of Kronenberg please," I said.

"Oh, alright then," a woman next to me said, put out.

"Sorry, sorry, I'm really sorry. I thought you were being served. Right I'll have a Coke and a pint of Kronenberg and whatever this lady is having," I said, feeling a glow of manly chivalry.

"I only wanted a soda water."

"Right," I told the barman, "add a soda water onto that."

"That'll be seven pounds, please."

"Fucking hell," I said and turned away towards her. "Two quid for a soda water. In my local it's free. You're not getting another fucking drink out of me." Me, her, and my small audience laughed, and I felt I'd done something well.

Back at our table, me and Soda Water Woman got talking. She had only ordered the soda water in order to conceal the time-honoured Wine in Handbag Manoeuvre.

We've fortuitously landed pole position both on the obcFekoa page and the event's own sequence of photographs. A careful examination of picture 024 will reveal the extent of Soda Water Woman's egregious duplicity.

In Kirsty's front room a man glistered with sweat is trying to mend her landline phone. "I'm going to have to get a cherry-picker," he says, and I stand there mute, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible requirement for a telephone engineer.

I end most of my sentences to him with the word "mate". I mentally kick myself, yet keep doing it. I feel silly around him, the class inferiority of being apparently well-educated yet doing nothing that is of any practical use to anyone. "Could you come and have a look at my phone please--the line seems to be dead." "Sorry, we haven't got anyone available for that, but we could send someone to have a chat with you about communitarian and individualist models of social life in the avantgarde music 'artworld' instead?"

---

To Liverpool, with Trina. She forewarns me, repeatedly, giving me several opportunities to excuse myself. And herself, I begin to think. "They're just old work colleagues."

"No, no," I say, as she veers towards the ticket office at Lancaster. "I'll get us through." A ticket collector on the train, a privatised enforcer team on the bridge at Preston station, and the man on the barriers at Lime Street are all indifferent to my waving of an old ticket from St Annes to Preston and its ticket-like receipt. Trina is both silently grateful that we've just saved £34, and slightly pissed off with me. That's a relief. Much better than being interpellated as "edgy".

We go to a retro-modern bar, bare brick walls, a collection of old radio sets--the sort of design cliché repeated up and down the country from Stockwell to Shoreditch. One badly-kept, over-warm real ale at 3.75, implying that the pub wants to turn the three unused handpumps into serving gassed dead drinks.

How fat they all are, I think, and I suspect that they practice the Public Virtue - Private Vice Diet, common in female-dominated administrative cadres. A woman with lovely big tits held in a scoop necked dress is a distraction for a while. They talk over and interrupt each other, disrupting any attempt at following a topic. The evening doesn't matter to them. She who is loudest, wins.

Trina gives me a private downward glance at her watch. Thank you. This is turning into a crap night.

Outside, Liverpool is alcoholically brightened. The sunlight is stroking me, I can feel it. I kiss Trina without stopping walking and start slagging off her colleagues.

We miss, slightly deliberately, the penultimate train home, and settle into the Victorian, muzak-free luxury of The Crown Hotel, sunlight contouring its alabaster ceiling and sending sharp mirrors onto its thousand carats of glass. We get talking to a couple of blokes with whom we share the table, their Ayrshire accents close to the edge of my comprehension.

The journey back is faredodged again: the railway's agents have given up on the last train from Liverpool. Back at mine, I can't be bothered with the pretence, the inevitable lack of an erection, the exhausting overhang of her inevitable snoring, and I embrace her as an apology for saying that I'm going straight downstairs to sleep in the living room.

---

Discovered this today, from a commenter on Isabelle's blog. It's very good. I printed sixteen pages of it off (I can't read the eye-straining grey on grey Courier font). It reminded me of The Overnight Editor, in its commenting shadow-self voice, its author's ambivalent attitude to drink, and its vein of sex. All the way from South London, On The Rocks.

First of all, welcome along to the person who found this blog at 2.55am this morning by googling for "sex in a shed knickers on." I hope you found what you were after.

---

One of the pleasures of living in a wind- and rain-swept coastal area of northwest England is the immovable optimism with which people arrange social activities outside, unaffected by any amount of rained-off fêtes, barbeques and other social occasions.

The girls and I went to a slightly stodgy garden party hosted by their best friend's parents, both lecturers at large northern universities. The attractive, almost beautiful, hostess was wearing a necklace in which the stones were threaded onto something that looked very much like a bra strap. A determined ten minutes outside, as plastic cups tumbled across the table, ended as the rain emptied onto Lancaster.

Inside, we recommenced in the dull, default mode of an uninebriated party, segregated by sex, with the men talking about house prices and driving routes to the Dordogne while the women did their voluntary or obligatory--I can never decide which--cooing over babies. I have not the slightest interest in other people's babies or children--I often struggled to feign interest in my own--but I have at least had three children, whereas I have never driven anywhere, least of all to southwest France.

However, I attempt to include one of the older boys in conversation. "Your mother tells me you're starting at the Grammar School next year." "Er...no. I'm in my second year at Uni."

Things improved greatly once, tired of our restraint, we set about the yards of wine and beer, the jugs of Pimm's, and the array of superb food she'd made. The centrepiece was a quiche the size of a card table. Whilst she was becoming more and more attractive by the glass, I'm sure our hostess felt safe: it's impossible not to sound gay when asking a woman how she manages to get her quiche crust so evenly brown. It was slightly the type of party where you talk about pastry.

---

It is a lovely midsummer night; even gone midnight, the sky isn't completely black. Ahead, a woman is standing, looking puzzled, over the grille in the pavement at the back of the Town Hall. "Are you OK?" I ask. "Mmmm. Dropped my cigarette." I fish the cigarette out: it had only fallen as far as the wire mesh below the grille. Immediately, she drops it again. "Where are you going?" she asks, and links her arm into mine. "Up here," I say, and wonder whether we are going to bed. She starts talking in that scattered way that is impossible to follow.

At the corner, her phone rings ceaselessly. She kneels down and empties everything out of her bag onto the pavement. It's not there. I can hear it in her coat pocket and fetch the phone out for her. She looks at the screen. "Oh fuck," she says. "Can you shut the fuck up," she says, not unkindly, putting her finger to her lips. She answers the phone. "Where am I?" she says. She silently repeats the question to me. "Outside the White C---s." "What?" "The White C---s."

She tries, unsuccessfully, to read her watch. "What time is it?" she asks, both of me and the phone. "One o'clock," I say quietly, holding up one finger. We repeat this action a couple of times. She sighs and plants herself on the pavement. I can't leave her. "Where are you going?" I say again. She says the name of a suburb about half an hour's walk away.

A taxi draws up. The driver looks at her with an expression that shows he's seen it all before. He goes to help her stand up and she falls into the car. "Do you know where she's going?" "She's going to mine. I'm her husband." She got in the car and I felt a slight disappointment.

Outside my front window, two young Muslim men are standing smoking. I greet them with the dipthong and glottal stop that counts for hello in north Lancashire. "Y'right?" They look shy or afraid, mumble something, and almost run into their respective houses.

---

I recently put an advert on our local freecycle group:

80GB Hitachi Travelstar HTS 541080 SATA hard drive. It's five years old but in perfect working order. It's got Mepis 8.0 (Linux) on it at the moment, plus an empty partition, but I'll wipe all that if you'd prefer so that you can use it for storage or a different OS.

Despite the wording of this advert I must say that I am actually quite socially well-adjusted and when you come round to collect it I will not invite you in for a seven hour game of World of Warcraft while we sit in black T-shirts eating ordered-in pizza.

I received a reply:

Sorry - I don't want this at all but I had a chuckle at the advert. I am a World of Warcraft player but am that weird breed that also likes to go out and have fun in the real world and I look damn cute in a black t-shirt :P

Hope you have a a good weekend away from the take-away pizza.
Bye!
Laura

Is that just a little bit flirty?

I am laying flat on my back in the living room of my singing teacher's house. My feet are resting on a cradle thing which wobbles them from side to side, causing sympathetic, and, it is claimed, relaxing movements for those, like me, who spend too much of the day typing. As I involuntarily wriggle from side to side, I remember that the button at the top of my trousers is missing. I start worrying that my snaking movements will cause my zip to undo and slowly reveal my underpants, a spectacle which I think would have distracted us both from concentrating on the vowel patterns in Schumann's mid-period lieder.

On Friday I went with Marianna to see the University's film group present their short films. Several tight knee-length dresses in shiny artificial materials; high heels and scaffolded hair. They greet each other with that Americanised embrace which looks as though it is intended to demonstrate a warmth just short of intimacy, in which people keep their fingers from touching each other's backs, as if aware of the desirablity of retaining at least the lees of British decorum.

---

On Monday, when Trina was here, we went to see Après Mai (Something In The Air) and I'd forgotten I'd asked Marianna along, so when I saw her waving at us in the auditorium I worried for a moment about what the social outcome of Trina + Marianna would be, but no-one has to talk in a cinema.

I didn't like the film (my comments on the Guardian's review here) and we had only a short chat afterwards. Marianna's an acute and interesting film critic but she doesn't drink or enjoy social activity that much, especially with unfamiliar people. "She's quite intense, isn't she, your friend Marianna?" Perhaps, but I like her, and she's my friend, and I felt a ripple of defensive loyalty. "Well, I don't know--I've known her so long I don't notice her tics any more."

Trina and I went to Wetherspoons for a bit of tea. From Schumann's lieder to Two Meals for 6.49 in a few hours. We moved downstairs to avoid a meeting of the Lancaster Screaming Women's Club, and drank a fair bit, before we repaired to my house for humid and somewhat effortful sex.

I like many aspects of being with Trina. Sex, drinking, dancing, The Dictionary Game, chatting, cooking together. Unfortunately, she identifies these pleasures as things that exist within a "loving relationship." I have no fucking idea what love is, nor want to be in a "relationship" with its restrictive covenants and sub-paragraphed clauses, its timetables, its unbearable normative language and behaviour.

To tell her all this--to follow the most ridiculous bit of advice anyone can ever give anyone--to be honest--would mean that she would stop having anything to do with me, seeing it as a deception, and throwing out the delightful recreational baby with the sociological bathwater. I'm going to have to tread a somewhat delicate political line, avoiding the Three Little Words as far as I can.