Wind-up

I nearly chatted someone up today.

I was in the pub with Vic and recognised a girl we had had a drunken chat with a couple of weeks ago. I asked her over to our table, from which moment the awareness that I was being rude in shunning Vic was insufficient to temper my interest in her. We bantered for a while, during which I gave her my number. "I like sex, and drinking, but I've never had much love," she said. Usual tale of heightened sexual response as a delayed result of maternal deprivation. We left together, but only because she had a doctor's appointment. She kissed me on the lips and said "Don't take it wrong, but I don't go for older blokes." "You cheeky bugger," I said, before realising that 51 minus 27 is 24.

Trina drove us up to Middlesbrough to see my mum for a couple of days. We went in her flash 80s sports car, with its pop-up square headlights and roaring engine. We stopped for something to eat in Bishop Auckland. I had a "Butternut Squash Curry", which was a clever joke dish intended to recreate the self-improving suffering of early British vegetarian cooking, in which you could charge good money for serving Vegetables in Water Sauce With Spice Rack-Aged Chilli Powder.

On the Thursday night my sister took us out to a new cocktail bar. Her boyfriend is adept at keeping her indoors with their toddlers, so it was a rare pleasure for her to get out. She's a very attractive girl and because I see her so rarely there were a few moment when the shadow-self intervened to correct my reactions. Feeling over-manly for my income, I waved aside Trina and Sis's offers to contribute to the bill for two bottles of containerised Malbec. 43 quid. Fuck. In Middlesbrough?

I wanted to broach the subject of debt with Mum. Not that I could do anything to pay them off, but I'm quite experienced at bureaucratically avoiding them. I needn't have worried. "Dad's debts came to about nine thousand pounds, but they've written them all off." I thought it'd be more than that. "He used to buy things and just put them on the credit card. He said to me one day "'Would you like a tumble drier?' And I told him 'No, not really --- we've managed for fifty years without one.' And a couple of days later it was there. This big van from Argos turned up and they installed it. I never use it."

She said that she feels better off than ever now, now that she controls the income, which as far as I can see, consists of a State Pension, since my Dad's pension was rescinded after he had an affair with one of his parishioners.

When we got back me to mine, me and Trina and put some music on and we danced about a bit and threw a few pints down our necks, and then had sex. I wish I could stop doing this. It's the wrong form of desire, and it gives her encouragement.

A righter form of desire would present itself in the shape of Wendy, who has recently split up from Slightly Controlling Husband. Me and Kitty wound up back at hers at the weekend. "I'm a lot better off now, now that I have control of the money." I told her about my Mum saying the same thing. He's a part-time Lecturer at the Ribble Valley University of Working so what the fuck he was doing taking the Tax Credits into his own bank account, when she does almost all of the childcare whilst doing a job that hardly gets into even the first tax band, I don't know.

She had on the same tight, secondhand green dress she was wearing at my NYE party. She was limitlessly generous with the wine, never too pissed or speeding to fail to notice an empty glass. It's so important to do that. Always have enough in and never make anyone have to go to the offy. Her and Kitty are model hostesses. I spread the love in a more desiccated form.

Another couple, whom I've met once before turned up. She's one of these raggle-haired witch-like women who want to be bohemian but lack the dress sense and the intelligence to become so. She started talking about children. Yes, we're all parents, but we're away from them for one precious day, so can we talk about something else? In that lazy, intolerant way that is the privilege of men, I left her to witter on about schools and so on, to Kitty.

Her boyfriend was more interesting. His knee's fucked from a failed suicide attempt, but he was quite other-directed for a suicider -- a group with whom I have little sympathy, given that they are apt to making an aggressive gesture designed to fuck up the people who have loved them. Do it on the quiet with some fentanyl. Don't make a fucking song and dance of it.

Wendy texted me today. "You forgot the Murakami." She is pressing The Wind-up Bird Chronicles on me and she'd given me a copy at the do and I'd left it there. "I'll drop it round sometime." "Oh please do, but only when we could be detained with a glass or two of something effervescent."

She went to a book launch the other day where there was a bit of free wine going. She said that at the end, she ended up in a bit of a contest for the last bottle of wine. "The girl was trying it to wrest it out of my hand! I told her 'Yes -- you might look all trendy with your piercings, but you're just a conformist." In revenge for this, she stole a book. I imagine the beleaguered staff member, on 6.50 an hour, but now into her unpaid time, might have turned a blind eye to her theft just to get rid of her.