The Opal of the West

Trina got into a strop the other day because she found my profile on the dating site, which inconveniently reports when you were last on it. A couple of days later we were down the pub, exhausted after the weekend, the disinhibition of drink contesting with our mutual desire not to spoil anything before bed and our forthcoming holiday in Madeira.

"If you met someone else," I said, "I'd be happy for you, and glad, and as far as I'm concerned it wouldn't change anything between us."

But that's an incomprehensible idea to her, so we let the topic die in shrugs and a conciliatory rake of my hand through her hair that I didn't mean. Back came the comedown, comprised of equal parts of nausea, hunger and a revulsion towards food, in the body; and in the mind, a desire for sociability, as I turned and scanned the unpromising fruit of our fellow drinkers; and a physical restlessness which for the previous forty-eight hours had been poured into dancing at a Modern Soul and House weekender in St Annes, in the hotel next to the Conservative Club.

Erica and her uncouth husband came along this year. I was a bit worried about how it would go with them, aware that if Erica or hubby offended anyone it might reflect me. A couple of hours after we'd arrived at the hotel, me and Trina went to fetch something from her car, and found that he'd stuck empty cider cans underneath Trina's windscreen wipers, which I suppose seems funny if you're thick. In 1926, he won a prize for his dancing to Northern Soul, but it's not a Northern do, and he did awkward, slow movements at the edge of the dancefloor.

But nothing bad happened and the weekend flashed past. On Saturday we had a trawl round the chazzers, my prize item from which is a ladies' lime green Laura Ashley overcoat.

Me and Trina took far too much of the Beecham's Powders, which arrived in Lancaster last week in a plenitude of temptation. When we got home I was ill, throwing up horrible black bile, in bed for thirty hours, and not really right until Thursday. On Tuesday night I had this horrific, realistic, nightmare, with sounds, about being forced by the Nazis to play a game to decide whether my children were to be taken into the camps, in which we had to match quotations to their author, by sticking a pole into the correct one of several tubes which floated before us on a little lake. I got the questions wrong, but someone else in the same position told me it was rigged, so off they went for my children, and I was led into a large hall of desperately starving dogs and weeping mothers, whose teeth rotated laterally.

As you know I am under investigation by the police. What for exactly I'm not sure, but it's something to do with drugs.

I received the following misdirected email the other day, sent from my solicitor to the police officer dealing with my case.

Dear [Christian name]
Regrettably looby cannot make the appointment as he is attending a funeral. Can I rearrange it for a later date I will make sure he doesn't duck out next time.

The email then proceeded to discuss another client of his, speculating about whether he could be charged at his local police station. I wrote back.

Dear Mr ---

Thank you for your email, some of which, concerning another client of yours, was clearly not meant for me.

I am most surprised and not a little offended that you think my attendance at a close family member's funeral, together with my responsibilities as the eldest son in looking after my infirm father during a distressing time for my mother, constitutes "ducking out" of what has been described as a "voluntary" interview.

I am on my way to the airport later this morning and will be back in the country next weekend.

Yours

looby

We've been and gone since I wrote this so I'll tell you all about Madeira next time.