Staged

I met Lee in The Oakdale pub up Gladden Road at seven. He brought colour photos I took of him as a corpse: although they all came out I was disappointed in them. There wasn't enough gore and they looked too staged and phony. Perhaps the black and whites will be better.

The Oakdale was too terrible a place to stay for long, so we decided to go into Farnshaw, stopping at his house on the way so I could borrow a coat which, after much haggling, I eventually persuaded him to sell me, but only at the lunatic price of £10.

Lee told me that I wouldn’t exactly be welcome in his house as “there’s an anti-Paul feeling at the moment” as a result of the downing of the Korean 747. Somehow, my supposed ‘red’ politics have been translated in his Mum’s eyes to open support for the shooting down of the airliner. Like me, Lee gets the “You dance to his tune,” etc. . . .

We didn’t do much worth noting in Farnshaw. We walked the windswept streets aimlessly, trying to decide whether or not to scale the scaffolding around St. Anne’s steeple (which Lee has done already) and which pub to go into. We had a drink and ate a Chinese before walking home. Lee stayed the night because he couldn’t face going all the way home again.