Days of their lives - Keith

Two girls I must tell you about. They both work down at the lap-dancing club that Keith frequents, but whether he would recognise them outside the dimly-lit, seedy, smoky, beer-sodden, greasy environment that is his flat (he often invites the lap-dancers back to his place 'for a snort or a bit of draw or whatever you like, really' which never turns out to be quite what he would like) is questionable.

First there's Inge, a Danish girl, a redhead with something of a horse-face, or perhaps pony, who is invariably seen performing her rather lumpen gyrations on stage in a bikini that, with its small, light blue, check pattern, is reminiscent of a carefully cut up tablecloth. Keith calls her Gingham Inge. ' 'Ad 'er,' says Keith.

Then there's Imogen. When she dances, the flamenco training that she received while working as au pair to a family of Andalucian gypsies shines through, and her hand movements are something to behold - flowing, sinuous, enticing, suggestive and yet innocently gracious. Keith is happy to let us believe that those long, slender fingers have provided him on many an occasion with relief from the burdens and cares of existence, and refers to her as Digital Imogen.

Keith keeps a record of his female sexual conquests in the kitchen of his flat which he refers to as his Porking Meter. And since he is totally and blissfully unaware that Gingham Inge and Digital Imogen are research partners on an anthropology MA whose library needs frequently bring them within the book-searching ambit of one Miss Streatley of Wellminstow Public Libraries, and their after-hours trips back to his squalid abode are to them simply field work, he doesn't know that we know he's been feeding the meter, so to speak, and that what it registers and what he's been doing are two very different stories. Such is the vanity of Keith, and there but for the grace of Miss S, my dangerously dowdy librarian, go I.