Yew tree

Kitty and Melissa were up for the weekend, Mary-Ann was engaged in strenuous diplomacy with her daughters in order to get up to Lancaster for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, and it was my weekend to have the girls, so much of the weekend involved managing some mild child neglect, which started in the Sun Hotel, where a Little Black Dress Wearers' Society meeting was in attractive progress.

Arriving late at the local theatre's Christmas cabaret, I see a woman tied loosely to a tree as part of the act. It's Karen, another survivor of Bloom and Doom. She's as gorgeous as ever, long black hair, dark grey straight-necked dress just beneath the knee, black boots and tights. She's teaching English now in a college in Penrith. Introducing me to her fiancé, I felt that irrational disappointment that you feel when someone you fancied is betrothed to someone else, and surreptitiously compared myself to him.

In the bar afterwards, Kitty hooked in one of the cabaret artists and tried an understated approach of "You must know, that you're every woman's dream" before pushing forward her best features with her hands. "Fuck it," she said. I'm forty-one. If I find a man attractive I'm telling him." "This is going to be our year", we all suggested. Kitty thought for a minute. "Yeah, I said that last year."

A suggestion to Kirsty that I could leave the girls on their own for three hours or so and take Mary-Ann to bed on Sunday went down very badly, and then on the morning of our tryst, my daughter Fiona was quite ill.

I texted Mary-Ann and said that we'll have to meet in the local cafe where women who have jobs getting people who can't spell into Higher Education meet up with their be-jumpered partners who aren't ashamed about papooses to talk in an adult way, but not that adult way, over camomile tea. But it's close enough to allow for occasional checking up on the invalid. I told the girls I was walking up to someone's house to take them a card: about an hour purchased.

Mary-Ann drove us up an unlit, wooded road between the cemetery and a burnt-down animal by-products rendering plant. There were the usual bra clasp difficulties, and the gearstick wanted to join in. When we went to drive back, we were in reverse.

We said goodbye and I went to check on my daughters. Kirsty arrived, and all was well; I was relieved to hear no complaints of abandonment from the girls. A companionably domestic couple of hours with them all. Then I went to the pub and took my Christmas present from Mary-Ann with me. When I came back from the loo the woman at the next table said "Your book looks very interesting. What's it about?"

"It's a collection of C18th erotic literature." "Oh", she said, interested. I was going to show her the dedication of the first piece but thought better of starting a conversation with a stranger by showing her

[A]s you scorn monopolising your Cunt to a single keeper, but have refused no Man a kindness who desired it, having often been heard to say 'twas not in your nature to deny satisfaction to a standing Prick, and that 'twas not barely thrusting a Prick into a Cunt, but the well-managing of a Fuck that makes the Summum Bonum [...]