shewhomust | A toast to those who are gone

I discovered early that alcohol was my recreational pharmaceutical of choice, and haven't wavered. My little sister Gabrielle tried a number of options, and her relationship with alcohol went through a series of phases. There was the period when she was teetotal, but always took a half bottle of vodka to parties (if I felt like that about parties, I probably wouldn't go to them, but she persisted); there was the time when she was living in Norway, and introduced us to aquavit (especially linie aquavit: it's better once it's been across the equator and back); there was her gradual mellowing towards wine, first exclusively white, then exclusively red: "The only white wine I can drink is champagne," she said. So tonight, on her birthday, we bought a bottle of one of her favourites, and raised a glass of Fitou to absent friends.

Last night we were at the Lit & Phil for more stories of absent friends - and of not-so-friendly absences - which is to say, that it was the night of the Summer Phantoms, and there was telling of ghost stories - not at the Lit & Phil itself, but in a new venue, the lecture theatre of the adjacent Mining Institute. We gathered in the library of the Lit & Phil, then processed through the equally splendid library of the Mining Institute (fewer books, perhaps, but more Victorian gothic grandeur) downstairs and into the miniature amphitheatre of the lecture theatre. And there in the gloom, surrounded by dark carved wood, with row upon row - decade upon decade - of photographs looking down on us, we were told stories of the dead and gone returning.

Sean O'Brien's Features of the Text (from memory, but something like that) was a tale of love, jealousy and textual criticism, a story hinged about a curious switch of mood: the first half was extremely funny, with a mixture of rude jokes, satirical characterisation and erudite wit, and then a crucial - but comparatively minor action leads to darkness, madness and dissolution. Gail-Nina Anderson's story was so recently completed that it didn't even have a title, but in every other respect was perfectly formed. Two mothers find the cemetery a pleasant place to sit and chat while their young sons amuse themselves: but what do the children find there? There's a genuine chill in the narrator's realisation of how little she knows about the mental world of her son, and I think the story would work well on the page, but Gail's reading made the most of the monologue as performance piece.

Last to read, as usual, was Chaz Brenchley: The Summer House was one of those stories where you reach the end thinking "Oh, I see!", and want to go straight back to the beginning and read it again, to see how all the things that seemed odd or heightened or overstated were simply part of the story you were being told. The perfect young man, the older narrator, the shadow on their perfect summer: what is wrong with this picture is none of the things you think. There's something almost mythic in the narrator with his two houses, the summer house on the hill where the gilded youths splash in the pool, the winter house in the valley, down in the shadow where real daily life happens - or perhaps that's just me, I need to read the words (please,