2005-03-14 - 2:19 p.m.

�Do you think the human race suffers from a specific malaise or just a more general state of melancholy?�

This isn�t really an opening gambit you would expect from anyone, let alone a stripper in a small, dreary seaside town where the wind blows in at the kinds of temperatures used to store embryos. Don�t get me wrong � I�m not putting down the brains of strippers, especially since all the strippers I have ever met have been forty times more intelligent than me and earning more for taking their clothes off one afternoon than I did all last year.

The stag group I was accompanying had decided that an afternoon�s viewing of female nudity was an essential part of the weekend, though we weren�t really expecting a lecture on Marxist politics and the human condition as we took a seat in the horribly intimidating squalor of the Crooze Bar (the town mis-spelled everything with a �z�: Kutz the hairdressers, Burgerz the fast food restaurant and the tattoo parlour simply named Tattooz, though I would be wary of going to somewhere that can�t even spell what they sell).

The place was filled with pasty men who needed another beer like they needed another fight, all severe haircuts and clenched fists. Our group was mostly made up of posho lawyers, so Candi (I�m guessing not her real name) really must have had us pegged as the only people she could mention Trotsky to and not get asked if he was the new centre forward for Dynamo Moscow.

She was preparing to go and change before her turn. She said we could, as middle class males, never understand what she had gone through growing up, and that political philosophy was more or less her only refuge. The ferocity with which she said it was enough to make several rugby players physically back away from her. I�m not sure if management knew she was talking to the punters like this, although to be fair it did make most of us want to go to the bar. I bought a drink and when I came back, she was talking German to a frightened looking solicitor. She rounded it off with a quick deconstruction of the class system in England (1750-present day) and then went off to change into a luminous rubber nurses uniform.

The group was shellshocked. We didn�t even watch her in the end, and sat in our alcove, drinking our drinks. There wasn�t even any bawdy, communism-related chat (�I wouldn�t mind exploiting HER means of production!�, etc). When she�d finished, she walked back past us, looking daggers. �Don�t you even LIKE GIRLS?� she shouted as she stormed back into the changing rooms.

Confusing times, then.

We left as the others warmed up their fighting arms.

Back in town, we stuck to non-strip bars. The cosy familiarity of straightforward heavy drinking.

In a cursory nod to lasting past 9.30pm, we sat down in a high street pizza shop for come cheap stomach lining. We had a window seat. We started talking about how interesting Candi was, but there was no angle to approach her from without sounding like a patronising male shit, so we shut up.

Groups of girls in this town, only surpassed by New Orleans in terms of utter capacity for alcohol consumption I would say, wandered their drunken way past. At least one in each group would lift their tops and press up against the window, and the show escalated to its natural conclusion with a confident young lady impressing her primary sexual characteristics on us as we negotiated our thin and crispy meat feasts.

I�m not sure is Candi would have been proud or thoroughly depressed.

Either way, I am now not going to drink for several millennia.