Meeting Mum's New Boyfriend.

Friday February 6^th

We were lying in bed having a snuggle and whispered talk before the advent of our pad-footed alarm clock (if we talk in louder voices Callie hears us and doesn’t come up the stair to wake me up) and I asked my blonde bombshell if something had happened in the last week which had caused her to be upset or anything. She did the, “Ah… Um…” conversation pre-amble.

“Have you noticed something then, MyMy?” [That’s her nickname for me.]

“Well, I am not sure if I am being silly but I think that in the last week you have seemed a bit more assertive than you used to be and more forthright… I don’t know. I am probably just being foolish… Has something happened?”

“You mean the ‘me taking more control of our bonking’ sort of thing?”

“Well, there’s that and the idea of moving Sally’s day so we could do more things in the week. Getting tickets to see Paddington tonight. I am being mad aren’t I?”

“I am so pleased you’ve noticed. I was beginning to worry that you were insensitive to what I have been doing.”

It turns out that her and her friends [mainly Deborah, Kay, Janet, Kim, and Mary] had been discussing our relationship. (Thanks a bunch guys!) They arrived at the opinion that I was a bit controlling and she was a bit of a passive partner. I have agonised about this very thing for the whole of our relationship and we have talked about it ad infinitum, too. Laura had assured me, again and again, there was nothing wrong and she was happy with the dynamics of our partnership. She liked me taking decisions, after consulting her about them; she enjoyed being “educated” into the arts and music and culture, and the like, as she had a huge hole in her life where those things were concerned.

Her friends seemed to think there should be more of Laura’s input into what we did. I was about to protest at this point but she stopped me and explained that she was happy going to the theatre and concerts and exhibitions that I had chosen because she wouldn’t know where to start if she was left to do it all herself. She had told her friends this. They asked her what she did socially before we were a couple. (Sensible question, I thought.) She had to admit that all she really did was hang around in Carlisle with her mates on a Saturday, sneak into the pub in the village – underage, of course - and go to the cinema. Occasionally she’d go out for a meal with family or friends and, even more rarely, to a disco with her friends or something which she absolutely hated as it seemed like a cattle market where the idea was to meet the opposite sex to find someone to shag.

They’d asked her what we didn’t currently do that she’d like to do more. There were three things: she would like to have more spontaneous, dangerous sex. Sex where we could be caught doing it! She’d like to go to other places than the Peak and the Lakes all the time and she’d love to go to the cinema more often.

The two trips to London we have made in the past few months – to see Veronese and Rubens – had opened her eyes to the possibilities of visiting more places to widen our shared experience.

I let out a huge sigh of relief. I’d had the horrible feeling that what she was saying might be going to take a direction that would be heart-breaking for me. I was wrong. I told her this and she started kissing me, telling me that she would never do anything like that. I asked her what she’d got planned, when she could be gently prised away from my face.

She is going to scour the listings for cinema visits. She fancies one per week but one a fortnight may be more realistic. She’d like to visit more stately homes and National Trust properties, we are NT members but tend to use the membership to get free car parking in the Lakes and the Peak! She also fancies more museum visiting and we have to use our static caravan on Arran. It has only been my Dad & Louisa who have used it. I need to get my money’s worth out of it. [That told me!]

Could we do some trips abroad like to Paris or Brussels or Bruges for long weekends away? She feels that because I have seen masses of places in the UK and Europe it seems like I don’t really feel the need to go again but she hasn’t even been to any of them, once.

I told her I was 100% behind this initiative and we’d start today by thinking about a weekend away before Easter and then we’d definitely go to the van for a fortnight on Arran during that holiday. We could do the cinema as and when and museum trips could be weekend day excursions either in the car or on the train.

We spent a good part of our swimming time indulging in speculation about possible destinations, which meant we were much slower completing our 100 lengths than usual. Sarah had noticed and asked if we’d upped the number again. (We did this once before and it completely knackered us!) We explained about wanting to more travelling in the UK apart from the Lake District and she came up with the notion of using Travelodges. Apparently they do amazingly good deals if you book well in advance (I seem to have heard this idea somewhere else before!) and she thinks dogs are welcome too.

Laura said she’d get on the case in between lectures today and I had the brainwave of chasing Cathedrals. I have been to a lot already as part of my Masters’ Degree and Laura has always expressed a desire to see some to, so that is our plan. We are going to chase all the mediaeval British cathedrals, we’ll capture them in photgraphs and words and in our memories. Maybe we could make our own Cathedrals Photobook?

Loll said she’d get sangers and rendezvous back at my broom cupboard for lunch and we could surf using the Uni’s computer network. After we had had some more bonking. I had to put paid to the latter suggestion as Ma Nature had come calling when Laura arrived with the sandwiches.

Laura found that the Travelodge deals didn’t always work out pretty cheap at all. However, with persistence and a good deal of swearing at the computer she found three nights in July, at the Travelodge in Durham, for a grand total of £105! She said that could be our first cathedral. I had to disagree. Whilst she’d been busy on the Uni’s computer I had been tableting East Coast Trains and found us a day return ticket to York, in May, for £11 each (standard class). That could be our first cathedral; plus we could visit the Jorvik exhibiton, as well, and maybe York Museum. All in all a very lucrative lunchtime.

Afterwards Laura said, “You know I haven’t started yet…” I spent a few delightful minutes giving her delight across my desk.

Seeing Paddington in the cinema at 4pm was a master stroke. It was nearly deserted. Well, OK, it was about a third full and the majority of people in there were either wrinklies or mums with children. We found ourselves seated at the end of a row with about a dozen children and three women who could have been their parents stretched out along our row.

If you want a really feel good film this is it. We have seen it before but there is so much more you notice the second time around that you missed before. The audience were very vocal with their laughter and I found myself laughing along with them too. The most amusing audience reaction came when Paddington was using the cordless hand vacuums to climb the chimney. When he couldn’t quite reach the top of the chimney and looked to be falling to a fiery doom below there was a collective sigh from the older people as he started descending. That started me off giggling and Laura wanted to know what had made me giggle in the first place.

Buoyed with the success of Paddington our next foray into a kinematographic emporium is next Wednesday for Into the Woods. Laura thinks that Shaun the Sheep should be on our agenda too. Are we dumbing down a little? Perhaps, but what the hell.

Saturday 7^th Feb.

So, what exactly is Tony like then?

He’s about 6’ tall. He certainly towers over Mum, but then most people do as she is quite tiny. He is slim-ish. He seemed to be a bit skinnier than Dad although, to be fair, Dad has put on some weight round his middle these last few years, so it wouldn’t be hard to be thinner than him. He has all his hair, which was cut quite short and arranged without a parting. It is mostly grey. He has a beard which is about the same length as his hair. This is unusual as it is white at his chin but brown on his cheeks – I assume brown would have been his natural colouring. His eyes are a rich brown colour, a lightish brown, not the really deep brown you sometimes see.

His manner is quite striking. He appears to be very quiet but comes across as very self-confident and happy within his skin. He is so soft spoken at first I thought he may have had a sore throat but it seems that is his natural delivery. This is the strangest thing about him, on first acquaintance. I suppose it is strange to me because all the people I know have to use their voice to address rooms full of people and so they have a much louder natural speaking voice and use a variety of vocal tricks and techniques to make their conversations sound interesting and animated. Tony only ever speaks to his customers on a one to one basis and therefore has no finesse in his delivery. It could be easy to mistake his quiet monotone for a lack of intelligence but you would be surprised by his wit and sharpness, once you have spent some time in his company.

We met in the Circle Bar at about ten to seven so we could be properly introduced and get to know each other before the concert started. His seat was on the same row as ours but about six or seven away, which may have proved awkward but Mum told him they would wait until the final bell had been rung before going in and if there were two seats together somewhere they’d snaffle those instead.

I asked if he was interested in classical music and did he have a favourite composer. It seems he is a dabbler rather than an expert and I am afraid to say he is a Classic FM listener. He did say something which made my face colour and want to slap my Mum: (paraphrased) “I don’t know a great deal, that’s for sure. However, I do know what I like and I know that Mozart wrote the ‘Haydn Quartets’…” If it had been said in a smug, aren’t I clever sort of way we would instantly have become deadly foes but he was so charming with it and he said it with a self-deprecatory smile that my annoyance was quashed before it had a chance to appear. I did try giving Mum a Paddington style Hard Stare, but she just smiled at me in that infuriating supercilious way she has when she knows she’s put one over on me.

He did say he was looking forward to the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez, which, he claimed, was one of the reasons he had agreed to come along this evening, another was the Mozart symphony (the Prague) but he couldn’t recall ever hearing  “The Lark Ascending “ or the de Falla piece. He also said he accepted so he could meet Mum’s often talked about daughter. You could tell he wasn’t being sarcastic, which can be the default setting for some people (erm… that could be me, BTW).

He asked me about my interest in Classical Music and wasn’t it unusual for someone so young to be eschewing the contemporary for the archaic? I don’t know why but I found myself explaining to him that I had started listening as a way of rebelling against Mum & Dad’s loud guitar driven rock music which was played all the time at home. Our home in Norwich had speakers wired in the lounge, kitchen and even Dad’s study/office. So when something was being played there was no escaping it at all!

He asked Laura the same thing and her explanation centred around the fact her home in West Cumbria was a bit of a cultural desert and she had taken to my choice of music as a way of widening her knowledge. How I was her mentor, pointing out things I thought she would like but never trying to guide or define her taste. She admitted she had begun by liking the pieces I liked but was beginning to find her own choices and preferences. She said I was like her water wings at first but she had long since discarded them and was now swimming unaided. I gave her a swift peck on the cheek at that rounding endorsement and he took our interaction without a blink. Another plus point in his favour.

The only time he became more animated was when he started talking about his wood-working. He began to describe his love of the wood and how he took enormous pride in the pieces he created for people. You could tell by the passion in his tone and delivery that this was something he sincerely cared about and was quite probably more of an expert in, than I was about Classical Music.

He spoke about his two children, but not all that much and not in the sort of detail you get from Mum when she is going on about her brood. He did say he was a grandfather and that he loved the role even though his son and daughter lived a fair distance away he tried to see them and their children as often as he could. He has three grandkids, they are all girls! The oldest is fourteen, then one is ten and the other six. The fourteen year old and six year old are sisters. He did tell us their names and showed us pictures on his mobile phone. It is hard to tell a personality from a photograph but they all looked sweet. [I didn’t commit their names to memory, but they were nothing weird or unusual as far as I can recall, no Charlenes, Chelseas or anything equally as chavvy.]

The little job at Mum’s turns out to be replacing her kitchen cupboard doors with real wood ones. She had a contemporary looking kitchen when she moved in and always said she would like to get rid of the shiny door fronts sometime. Well, she has. Tony has installed solid oak doors from a reclaimed source, which makes them very enviro-friendly. She’s chosen a pale oak colour and was disappointed she hadn’t taken a picture of them to show us. Tony had, though – also on his phone – they look lovely.

Mrs B arrived just as the first bell was rung, so we didn’t have time for anything more than a swift hello and a introductions all round before she fled to the interval drinks ordering ( we did ours as we bought the ones we were sipping). We arranged a meet up during the interval. Giving Mum & Tony a breather we wandered into the auditorium and waited to see if she would be forced to come and sit beside us in her seat. She didn’t. I looked round just before the conductor arrived on the stage to see her and Tony way up on the left hand side, she saw me and waved.  

The English Chamber Orchestra was very good. They played the Mozart with the gusto it requires; Xuefei Yang played the Rodrigo so well. She was quite tiny and the guitar looked a bit outsized in hands. Her fingers danced along the fret board and I was really impressed by the feeling she managed to evoke from the piece. Laura, who hasn’t seen a classical guitar player in concert before, was intrigued by the block on the stage before Xuefei came out. I suppose it isn’t something you think about when the only people you have seen playing guitars before have done so standing up! She looked quite young but Mrs B informed me, during the interval, that she was actually 37! That’s 10 years older than me!

Mrs B and Tony seemed to get on quite well. She and Mum are old hands together now and she does tend to be a bit like a second Mum to me at times. She did tell Tony that he mustn’t let me brow-beat him with my extensive knowledge of music and that he had to not take all that I said at face value. [Erm thanks a lot Mrs B] To compound the offence Mum joined in the character assassination telling him I was also dreadfully sarcastic and that was one of the things I had inherited from my father.

What really made me like this guy was the way he came in to my defence, claiming I couldn’t be all they claimed as what he had seen so far belied their description. OK, he was totally wrong, but it is nice to have a stranger fight your corner for you. Laura started giggling when he began defending me. She explained she found it funny that yet another person had sprung to my team, apparently I get a lot of people on myside (usually males) without even knowing I was doing it. Mum and Mrs B then proceeded to list the men who had succumbed to my charms without me even realising it. I was shocked. Amused by their comments but shocked just the same. Could they be right or were they just teasing?

In the second half I asked Loll if it was true and she said that in a way it was. I seemed to attract men like bees to a honey pot but the charming thing was I had no idea it was happening. I just carried on the way I do, oblivious to the attention I appeared to be getting. Well she’s right about one thing, if it isn’t an elaborate joke on their part, I am oblivious to any of what they said.  I can’t be that insensitive, can I? Really?

The second half was just as good as the first. The Lark Ascending was good too. I have seen the soloist, Stefanie Gonley, play the Vivaldi Four Seasons so I knew how good a player she is. She is the opposite in appearance to Xuefei being tall with a tousled mass of curly hair. She also was very expressive in her movement about the stage whereas Xuefei had to remain seated during her performance.

I had not heard the piece by de Falla before but I will have another listen on Youtube, it was lovely.

We had a brief chat with Mum & Tony in the foyer before they went off to who knows where and the Lollster and I headed back home to a dog walk and a welcoming mug of drinking chocolate before bedtime.

Obviously you can’t tell what makes a relationship succeed by looking at the outside, but if Mum & Tony do become a serious item I, for one, will be pleased for her. He seemed very nice. In fact I would go so far as to say he seemed a very fanciable chap for his age. This sort of got me wondering why there wasn’t another woman in the picture and why Mum? Maybe I am being over cautious. She deserves to have someone to share her life with again rather than just being the “Mother” all the time.

Sunday 8^th February

It is our considered opinion that on first meeting Tony passed muster. He seemed nice, polite, amusing in a quiet way and wasn’t a pervert or anything. Maybe our opinions will change or be reinforced over time; whether there will be any time is Mum’s decision to make. I would certainly have loved to have been a fly on the wall after the concert. Not in any prurient way, but just to see if what we saw was really what we were going to get. The key thing, though, was that he made Mum seem happy and anyone who does that has to get the brownie points, don’t they?

We had a bit of lie in and then I walked the dog on a shortish walk whilst Loll cooked up a full English breakfast. Rah, rah, rah. On the way back in I was accosted by Steve who gave me two carrier bags. They were our venison joints. I was able to whizz them down to the cellar and the freezer without them being spotted as Laura wasn’t in the kitchen.

Coming out of the cellar I made Laura scream as she hadn’t heard me pottering about down there and I gave her a surprise and shock. After picking up the dishcloth, which hit me fair and square in the face when she threw it at me, she asked what the hell I was doing. I explained that Steve had given me two carrier bags of spare venison which he got from a shoot and which were too much for him, so he’d asked me if I wanted them. I told her that I’d agreed and now the meat was freezing in our cellar.

She wanted to know all about the meat and I was able to honestly say the deer had been killed before last weekend and the meat had been butchered by a licenced game butcher. All of which was true, even if the truth was slightly elasticated. She seemed fine with my explanation. Phew!

We took a stroll along Rivelin after breakfast, which may have been a mistake as there seemed to be everyone and their father out along the riverside. We went as far up as the Wyming Brook trail end and the road to the reservoir, then we turned round and headed back to the car park. It is a very popular walk it appears, on a Sunday, I wonder how busy it is in the week. When the nights get lighter it could be worth a revisit to see.

I skyped Suze when we got in (pre-arranged) and gave her the low down on Tony. Annabelle and Jill were really interested too. I have been tasked with getting a picture of him to wing across to Australia as soon as possible. Dad called after I had finished talking to Susannah, Louisa is off in to hospital on Monday to check everything is OK. It is just an out-patient’s visit. I did toy with telling Dad about Tony but decided to hang fire, in case there is nothing more to report. He’s all set for our visit on Friday night and is amused by the way my big mouth has got us driving up via Newcastle Theatre Royal and a ballet performance. He isn’t going to the concert on Saturday which isn’t the Halle as I have been previously saying; it’s the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. The Halle play the Sands centre later in the year. It’s an easy mistake to make.

I was going to phone Mum but decided against doing so. I will let her call me and tell her all about the rest of her evening, if she wants. I don’t want to appear nosy – although I am just itching to know the details!

We watched the recording I’d made of the film Hugo this evening, again. It was still really good. It grows better with repeated viewing I feel - as do most films.

As a footnote Laura has now joined me in our mother nature’s prank. We are yet to synchronise to the same day but it is pretty spooky how we have aligned our times of the month so readily. I wonder if this is common amongst female lovers?