Young person with car

In some respects I really have changed very little in the 3½ years I’ve been keeping this diary. In the afternoon I went into Easterby to finish off the rest of my ‘Christmas shopping’ and to buy a pair of Doc Marten shoes. Everywhere I went I had to battle with seething crowds and I hated every minute of it.

After I’d bought the shoes, and quite on impulse, I headed for a telephone box and rang Claire: I knew if I didn’t ring her then I never would. I confidently keyed the number, waited for her to be summoned to the ‘phone, and then asked her if she wanted to “go out for a drink sometime.” She wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as I’d prepared myself for and this threw me off completely. I crumbled into embarrassed talk and fatuousness—I was awful, but she invited me round to her house at eight.

I came out of the phone box and felt sick inside. I just wanted to shrivel, to hide, wanted the earth to swallow me up. I cringed as I remembered a facetious aside and her misunderstanding it . . . I acted as if three years had never been, as if I was still the callow spotty faced kid of the sixth form years. Nothing learned. I think perhaps I was going there with the wrong intention, as though something vaguely underhand was driving me on and the night was something now to be endured as a testament to that blinkered part of me that refuses to let the past be past.

The journey back on the bus was passed in a rigid state of tension and nervous turmoil and I spent teatime and early evening in a state of agitation, as if I were nine years old, not nineteen, but my night out ended up being more enjoyably than I’d expected.

Minutes before I set off Lee rang and I lied and told him I was off to Grant’s (“I’ll come on there with you then”), so when I met him at the bottom of Egley Road I confessed. He was a welcome presence really, dissipating some of my inevitable nervousness.

Mrs. Pearson let us in, and Claire came out of the kitchen to greet us looking very pretty—I can’t help liking her. In other circumstances I suppose I’d be quite contemptuous of the lifestyle she leads, but I can’t be unkind. I just acknowledge my dissonance with that Young-Person–With-Car mentality and our inevitable distance from one another . . . But, when all is said and done, I like her.

Andrew Hudson and Christine Clough turned up, their relationship still going strong, but he is so uninteresting, so pedestrian and utterly unremarkable . . . Christine has redeeming features I suppose, but on the whole they’re well-suited. Claire is, as far as I know, not going out with Adam Hilty anymore.

Why is it I always find myself interested in girls who are hard to get to know?

She told me she dislikes macho big-headed men, and she thought my call was from an RAF man who’s been plaguing her with persistent requests for dates. I was determined to be less of an oaf this time and I think I succeeded. I asked her if I could see her again over the holidays. She’s not free again until New Year but says she’ll ring me when she is.

We all climbed into two cars and drove to the Turf, out in the middle of the moors, and as we walked in, Lee and I were stared and smirked at by the young execs who pollute the place. It was a harmless evening’s entertainment and we got back to Claire’s house at 11.30.

I sat dumbly in front of the TV with Mr and Mrs Pearson and the younger sister Linda. Brother Trevor and his girlfriend arrived back after us. We left at one o’clock and Andrew had arrived when I got back.