Meta: I managed to throw my computer to the ground in a leg-meets-wire accident. Alcohol may have been involved. It made a funny buzzing noise and the hard drive appeared to be knackered. I've changed the hard drive now but the keyboard's still a bit moody. The greater problem was having to re-write my style sheet and all the shortcuts again. I've lost hundreds of emails, my address book, my RSS feeds, my...
Yes, I'm getting bored too now. Let's get on with it.
I went, out of a reluctant parent's duty, to watch middle daughter in a professional open-air play in our spectacular park, which is a dreamy, wonky jumble of hillocks and dells colonised from a former quarry. It poured down, and I was ill-prepared. By the end of Act One I was soaked even unto my underpants. No-one wanted to help me with my bottle of Prosecco so I drank the lot. Rain was dripping off my hair into the glass. It was poetic for a while until it got a bit cold. At the interval I said I wasn't enjoying it and was going home; the selfish, alcoholic impulse. I apologised to everyone the following morning and they were charitable about attributing my departure to the rain, when in fact it was because I found it a wearyingly boring play.
Three weddings (but no funeral yet): first was that of two friends of mine who met in the same week as did Trina and I. Laura's well-endowed in two ways, but Richard's fairly poor, and with such a financial mismatch I'm always curious about whether they've made a morganatic marriage. You won't get anything out of Laura though. She observes the middle class taboo on any discussions of money other than by its proxy, house prices.
My first thought was how to avoid all of it, and ended up attending nothing more than half an afternoon at Richard's pre-stag do drinks. It was a pleasant enough couple of hours spent around a table with men I didn't know, trying to look relaxed as I mentally scrabbled around for common interests. I sometimes wonder at the ease with which others seem to respond to situations like that. Perhaps, like me, they're dissembling but being more successful in doing so; or maybe they're happy with having one personality which doesn't change according to circumstances.
I was evasive about whether I might turn up later, whilst knowing that I wasn't ever going to spend a night with a rock guitarist and a load of pissed-up men in a basement.
One night last week, and out of nowhere, I was overwhelmed with a pre-emptive grief about my Mum dying. I texted my brother, telling him that I was in floods of tears thinking about her, "Don't reply, I selfishly said, "it's just me sorting myself out."
The following morning I sent him a card apologising for burdening him with it, and saying that I'm sure he doesn't need me adding to what might be his own worries about what's to come. He sent a generous and couth reply, saying that he recognised that it came from the heart and that he's got big ears and is always willing to listen.
The following weekend it was my sister's. The uncooperative owl carrying the rings was the star of the show, much preferring a perch on the deep windowsill in the C14th castle in which the wedding was held, rather than the best man's forearm.
At the reception I was pleased to be sat opposite my mum's best friend's personable early twenties daughters, who were both dressed in the same sunflower patterned mini-dress. They both liked them when they saw them in Topshop and neither would back down. The prettier one -- the one that has kept her eyebrows -- helped me with a bottle of red, then I got her mum to pinch another one looking forlorn on an adjacent table.
We had canapés and Cava on the lawn, during which middle daughter took a picture of my youngest, who works in a record shop and is into the modern beat music. I think it looks like a future album cover. There's one of me side on with my big conk which makes me look like a well-dressed rake, which I would post here had I not lost my password for my ftp client.
On the same day it was Denise's. She has been my work colleague, sexting partner and confidante; she's none of these any more. In one way I'm pleased I couldn't go: it would only be a goodbye, a long second of wordless recapping of everything we've said.
Afterwards, me and and Trina went to Appleby for a couple of days. There is absolutely nothing to do there, an advantage that in this tourism-saturated age is one possessed by fewer and fewer places. In the old market hall, you can fondle polished stones made into earrings by a local artist, while you are stalked on your way round by someone who thinks a pestering quiz about your stay will make you want to buy a brooch, and that's about it. We ate and drank, mainly, and sat in our room overlooking the town square making snippy and derogatory remarks about the populace.
The main pastime in Appleby is talking about others. In the Hare and Hounds, one of the greatest pubs in the north of England, three burly agricultural types were talking in that way that is ostensibly private but meant for interested others too.
A rotund man was talking about how he reacted when he asked his son, after years of suspicion, whether he was gay. "Dad. Do you have to ask?" "I wasn't keen at first," said Dad, "...if I'm honest, but --- why not? I don't know. As long as he's happy." It was a delight to hear everyone's reactions, which amounted to a Westmorland shoulder shrug. In pure farming territory.
At the bar, the barmaid was talking about wine. "I thought Shiraz was a type of sausage." Another habitué told the assembled company about a time round last Christmas when he got so pissed that he had to be helped to stagger home by one of the barmaids. "Yes, yes, I remember that," she chimed in. "You got to Grant St and then you said 'you'll have to go now, Jean'll see me with you', and I said 'I'm helping you home, I'm not shagging you'. And you stood gripping those railings for so long saying 'I can't go on' that I had to leave you and come back here."
Trina got intercepted by some women as she came back from the loo, who told her that as offcomers they were just a bit wary of how we'd react to the language in there. "But we saw you laughing away so we knew you'd be OK."
Wendy said that her ex had commented on the fact that she looked "dolled-up" when she came to meet me the other day. I looked down at the carpet and at the table, the vast and unbridgeable two feet of distance between us, a Prosecco sadness, knowing that what her estranged husband imagines is going on, is what I wish were happening. I have thrown my last die at Wendy, which means I have reached the height of delusion and folly. Half past two in the morning, from my bed. It took absolutely fucking ages to write, a drunken man on a very old phone.
"I love and fancy Wendy [sic -- missed out the "you"]. I would do everything in my power to make you feel loved and wanted and to be a good co-parent for [her daughter]. I absolutely ache for you at night. I want to be yours. I miss you, I want you, and I love you."
Then, next morning, a clarion banging in my head, saying "Why do you carry on like this when she is not interested?"
The lock is buggered on my front door so we can't get in or out through it. The bit that sticks out has come off its spring in the lock and is stuck hard. This means that I am treating the neighbours to the unseemly spectacle of me climbing in and out of the house by the front window. After some sweatily unsuccessful efforts at sawing it off manually, I am hiring a mains-powered jigsaw and slicing through the fucking thing completely. If that doesn't work I'll drill the whole lock out.
That will happen when I've finished these few days of working doing "exit surveys" for a market research company. "Exit survey" sounds to me like something you do with people at the point of death, which -- seeing as these are being done at a stinky open-air shopping centre in Fleetwood, with its embittered coach parties -- might not be too inaccurate a description.
