feeling listless

Club One of my top five favourite places on Earth (and I don't make that claim lightly) has a web site. The Krazy House was for a long time the only Rock Club in the centre of Liverpool. The first time I visited was on my birthday getting on for five years ago - and there was a Halloween ball (yes - my birthday is the 31st October - and I've heard any jokes you may have). This was pre-Buffy - so the room was filled with girl with red horns and forks and old-style vampires. Oh and a curious looking Darth Vader. I fell for the place - stepping into there from Liverpool City Centre was literally like entering a new world.

Time and behaviour in this club is strangely at right-angles with the rest of reality. One night, one of the last times I went with my friend Chris, my drink addled mind had been in conversation with one of the regulars. From nowhere I asked her if she'd ever had her palm read. She says no - and that she has always wanted to see her future. So I take her hand...

[I should step out of this story for a moment and say I don't know anything about palm reading - nothing could be spookier could it]

...and realising my predicament, and realising I'll have to say something, the improvisational actor in me began to talk about the lines of the hand signifying this and that. I didn't actually say anything she might not have thought and now and then she'd ask me whether 'things would improve' and I just told, generally upbeat, positive things. Her usually sullen goth face for five minutes after was so cheerful I thought I'd ruined her.

Time passes. It's the following week. I'm there again, fighting at the bar for a drink and suddenly a hand is thrust in front of me. This time I'm not drunk and I'm in an episode of the old game 'Scruples' - do I tell the truth? Well no. So I told this second girl (friend of the first) the exact same things - she too goes away happy. Ten minutes later another hand (friend of the second). Then give it twenty and another. And this goes on all night. Each time I tell the same upbeat tale of a possible future - and at no point do they call me on it.

This tells me two things - there are some things girls don't talk to each other about, and that if you're going to do something like this at least have a reason. Believe be when I say that my inability to monopolise the situation I've makes me unremittingly nice, or unbelievably stupid. Or both.