'I won't be catching the bus home straight after work tonight. I'm going to the theatre and my dad's going to pick me up later.' JJ seemed very excited by the prospect of a theatre visit. She seemed nervous, agitated even, but at the same time bright-eyed and eager. I was annoyed; it was close to the end of term and I didn't know how long it would be before I saw her again. I thought it surely must be 'special occasion' time. won't be catching the bus home straight after work tonight. I'm going to the theatre and my dad's going to pick me up later.' JJ seemed very excited by the prospect of a theatre visit. She seemed nervous, agitated even, but at the same time bright-eyed and eager. I was annoyed; it was close to the end of term and I didn't know how long it would be before I saw her again. I thought it surely must be 'special occasion' time.

'What's on?'

'I don't know.'

'I mean what are you going to see at the theatre? What play?'

'I'm not really going to the theatre. That's just what I've told everyone. And I finish work at five o'clock and then I'm completely yours.' Adding coyly, 'So to speak.'

I was disappointed; mainly because I had not been listening. She seemed so happy but I didn't seem to feature in her excitement.

'I thought you'd be pleased!'

'I just thought that perhaps you and I could spend some time together before the end of term, that's all.'

'That's what I mean, you idiot!'

Then it dawned on me. This was it. She was offering me herself. Our relationship was going to move on in one ecstatic leap. 'One day things will be very different.' She'd said it so many times. 'One day.'

'One day soon.'

'It will happen.'

'We can't stop it happening'. All these things I thought were turning into an empty promise. Now today was going to be the 'one day'. I smiled.

My whole body smiled.

The future was about to begin.

'I'll meet you at five, then!'

'You bet!'

'And we'll go straight back to my room!'

JJ laughed a deep, rich, beautiful laugh full of tenderness. 'You're so gallant. We could go straight back to your room or we could have a nice romantic meal, or a bottle of wine; we could see a film; or, hey, we could go to the theatre!'

'No, I hate the theatre. No close-ups in theatre. Everyone overacts and you can never tell who's talking.'

'Oh right, that's 'theatre' dismissed in a few short, sharp sentences.'

I began to retract. 'Oh, sorry, are you a theatre fan?'

'No, I hate it. In fact, I don't know why we've arranged to go to the theatre tonight.'

I put my arm around her. 'Well, let's not go then.'

'Good idea,' she agreed.

'What shall we do then?'

'I know,' she smiled knowingly. 'We could go straight back to your room.'

'Excellent.'

We laughed and kissed and she went off to work leaving me eight painful hours to fill.

What was I going to do?

I sat in my room at my desk.

I looked at the clock. 09.25.

I got up and paced up and down.

I sat down again and looked at the clock. 09.27.

I got up and paced up and down again. A bit longer this time.

I sat down and looked at the clock. 09.31.

Mmm. I picked up the clock and examined it. There was clearly something wrong with it. How could six minutes take as long as six minutes to go by?

I shook it. 09.32.

Right; I'll pace up and down for a bit. I paced up and down the length of the room for as long as I could. Must have been at least quarter of an hour.

I looked at the clock. 09.32.

s.h.i.t, I've broken it. This is ridiculous, what could I possibly do to take my mind off tonight, to calm down, to relax?

I could do some work. I could start the essay on 'distinctive features in phonology'. It had to be in a month ago, so the sooner I started it the better. I opened the relevant book. My eyes darted around the page, alighting on random words: 'allophonic', 'syntagmatic combination', 'archiphoneme' and 'Grimm's Law'. I slammed the book shut. That's enough phonology for a Friday. I looked at the clock. 09.32.

Aha, of course. 09.32. Time to get a new dock! I'll go into town and do a bit of shopping. I picked my jacket up off the bed. I looked back at the bed fondly. That was to be my portal to heaven a little later on. Just an ordinary, inconsequential bed. Oh no! My bed! Christ, look at it! It's disgusting. I pulled back the bedclothes. Jees! I can't take her to this bed. I looked round the room. I can't bring her back to this s.h.i.thole. An urgent list of unpleasant jobs appeared in my head from nowhere. Eight hours may not be long enough.

'How much did you want to spend?' said the florist.

'I didn't want to spend anything,' I replied.

'Is it for a special occasion?' she went on patiently.

'Yes, a very special occasion. A very, very, very special occasion!' I smiled knowingly, hoping in some vain way I might communicate to the florist just what I'd be doing later.

'Twenty-five pounds?' she suggested.

'Not that that special,' I said quickly. special,' I said quickly.

'Well, a single red rose can be as special as a huge and pricey bouquet,' she offered, sensing that flowers were not a regular budget item for a student with a tiny overdraft facility and a ma.s.sive overdraft.

'You took the words out of my mouth,' I said, settling for the simple romantic minimalism of the single red rose. She picked one out to show me.

'Perfect!'

'Right you are,' she said. 'That'll be nine pounds ninety-nine, please.'

Tuck me!'

'Ah, that's sweet. A single red rose. That's a lovely touch.' JJ was looking exactly as she had at nine o'clock that morning and yet lovelier than I had ever seen her.

She was looking around the room. 'Blimey, it's very dean and tidy. Undergraduate rooms are usually pigsties.'

Please G.o.d, don't let her look under the bed. Amen.

'So how many undergraduate rooms have you been in?'

She smiled. 'This is my first.'

Then she kissed me so pa.s.sionately it was bordering on the obscene.

'Gla.s.s of wine?' I said politely when we stopped.

She fell back on to the bed and pulled me on top her.

'We haven't got time for wine!'

There then followed a few minutes of excitingly hurried unb.u.t.toning.

'Clean sheets, look!' I said.

She grinned earthily. 'Not for long!'

NO FOOT.

Decaffeinated coffee. Ha ha ha! How that would have made us laugh back in the seventies. So you get some coffee and take out of it the thing that most makes it coffee. That's mad enough, but then you drink it.

Half-fat b.u.t.ter. But b.u.t.ter is all fat, isn't it? So half-fat b.u.t.ter must just be half as much b.u.t.ter, surely?

Low-alcohol lager. Now you are are messing with things that are no business of us lowly mortals. Tampering with lager. That is surely a job for G.o.d and G.o.d alone. What's the point of drinking low-alcohol lager? Most lager doesn't taste that good any way, so why take away its spirit, its one messing with things that are no business of us lowly mortals. Tampering with lager. That is surely a job for G.o.d and G.o.d alone. What's the point of drinking low-alcohol lager? Most lager doesn't taste that good any way, so why take away its spirit, its one raison d'etre raison d'etre?

What next? Salt-free salt? Unleaded pencils?

But what about this one: flightless bird.

Flightless bird?

Is there not in the word 'bird' a semantic entailment which has to include 'flight'?

This has always troubled me. As a little boy, I was constantly drawing birds. Perching, gliding, hovering, soaring and occasionally swimming. But I don't recall ever drawing a flightless bird.

Yes, penguins are birds, I suppose. Well, there's no 'suppose' about it, I suppose. Penguins are birds. Yes, flightless birds, but not just birds that don't fly; birds that don't even look like birds.

Kiwis are flightless birds but they do look as if they could, if shot at with an air-rifle, suddenly flap briefly into the sky and then disappear into the undergrowth. I mean, a kiwi looks like a bird. It looks like a game bird and we know that they will do anything to avoid flying, and when they do fly it's not that convincing. I presume that's why man shoots game birds and not house martins.

Penguins are odd. But then they're very good in water. Water is a fluid, you might argue, as is air, therefore penguins 'fly' underwater. I'm not convinced. An ostrich is built for speed. But for land speed. Huge, long, tautly muscled legs for high-speed escape. As a birdwatcher I would not be overexcited by seeing a penguin, an ostrich or a kiwi. Well, perhaps in North Norfolk there might be a little excitement in spotting those three. And obviously, if you did see them, you'd have to tick them off the list and add them to your new sightings of the year, but I'd rather see a rufous bush robin.

For me, a bird should be built not for the ground or the sea, but for the sky, and there is perhaps just one such bird. This bird belongs to the sky. Or perhaps the sky belongs to this bird. I'm sure that G.o.d, having gone to all that trouble creating the sky, realized he needed at least one of his creatures to be at home there. Or perhaps, after creating this bird, G.o.d realized that he would have to create the sky specially for it. A bird that comes to earth so rarely that it finds it nearly impossible to take off from the land, a bird whose scientific name means 'no foot'.

The swift.

'Swift': what a great name for the world's fastest-flying bird too. Superb to watch in sociable groups on a summer's evening, whistling and screaming over the rooftops in death-defying acrobatics: black sickles of lightning.

They eat on the wing, they drink on the wing and they sleep on the wing. But there is more.

They make love on the wing. They mate in flight. Can you think of anything in the natural world that we could envy more?

They fly as high as they can into the air and then they drop down in their lovemaking with a dizzy, exhilarating, spiralling fairground ride, tearing themselves away from gravity at the last minute and back up again to repeat the breath-taking plunge of ecstasy.

Can we compete with that? Does anything come near that liberation from the pull of planet and humanity as an infinite downward carefree tumble locked in the embrace of pleasure?

I thought we came close that night. My first time, my first time with JJ, our first time together. My small, sweaty bedroom flickered with candle gloom. The elderly creaking bed was a pathetic stage for this act. It was no match for the vastness of the swifts' heaven. But our two desires rubbed against each other frictionlessly and were single-mindedly united in a determined struggle, a desperate dance, a blazing arrow's flight towards one urgent goal. Our love and hunger for each other had obligingly unplugged our brains from our bodies, so all fear, tension, guilt and anxiety disappeared and we functioned as base organisms: cleanly, effortlessly and perfectly. We were lost for a brief, panting eternity during which we were up there with the swifts in endless s.p.a.ce and limitless pleasure.

In the next hour or so only two words were spoken. 'No words,' JJ had whispered to me. So we lay there clasped moistly in each other arms, savouring the heavy aftertaste of joy, waiting with wide-open eyes for our one body to smash into the ground and burst like a firework into a billion tiny sparks. For once, though, the spell felt unbreakable.

We were motionless. The silence was ruined by the vast thumping of lovers' hearts.

'Fancy a beer?' Kramer was banging on my door. 'Are you in there?'

We heard the door handle being turned. It was locked. How did we remember to do that in the frenzy of our arrival?

'If you're not in there just say so,' Kramer said kramerishly, hoping, no doubt, to tempt me into saying, 'I'm not in here!'

I resisted.

We listened and waited for the neurotic pacing up and down to stop and Kramer's clumsy footsteps to fade in the direction of the bar.

Then, once again, two swifts took off and headed for the stars.

And they landed again; as much as these two swifts could ever have landed.

And flew again.

'This is so lovely,' she said and I felt compelled to agree. 'It feels as if time has stood still.'

I looked at the clock. 09.32.

But then, unfortunately, it stopped standing still.