Do not poke the tart

I sent her a text early one morning. "I wish it were your fingers around my cock now." Oops. It fluttered irretrievably to a friend whose name differs by one letter from Mary-Ann's. But she's a game lass and handled it (the text I mean, not my willy), with good humour.

She asked me if I fancied going to see DJ Shadow at the library (sic). Our local library puts on gigs there on some evenings. The programme tends towards bands featuring introspective girls in secondhand dresses with a plastic dragonfly in their hair, playing glockenspiels and singing about loss, who'll end up doing accountancy for KPMG once they get over their sensitive phase, so I welcomed the chance to see something a bit more dancey.

I lasted an hour before leaving. It felt like a simulacrum (can something be like a simulacrum?) The only person drinking was DJ Shadow, working his way through a bottle of champagne. There were no drugs more powerful than the sugar in some cupcakes which a young woman was selling at the door. Silly looking young bouncers with their council ID cards strapped to their arms stood near the speakers, their weedy legs ready to carry them into action to quash any cupcake-related arguments. The several people histrionically filming and photographing proceedings created a sense that they were hoping to summon a missing sense of involvement at the event itself by posting loads of material on Facebook.

The saddest feeling was looking round and knowing that all these people here, from late teens to fiftysomethings, have nowhere to go to dance in Lancaster. There is one venue here which markets itself as a "house" venue but it's a violent, ugly place which has been closed for a month after one person was kicked unconscious in the toilets and another had his jaw broken. Because the violence is alcohol-related, they get away with a short closure; if the place were full of people peaceably dancing and occasionally powdering their noses, it would be closed permanently in a flurry of pompous outrage fanned by the local media.

My daughter Fiona and I spent Sunday in the kitchen making the most delicious and attractive lemon tart. It's from a Heston Blumenthal recipe which requires fourteen eggs, six lemons, and three quarters of a pint of Jersey cream. We carried it back to her house in triumph to share with her sisters. Knowing the meddling tendencies of my youngest daughter, who, despite her professed intention to become a tramp, should really go into destructive testing, I had to issue the injunction "No poking the tart!"

Amidst an almost entirely enjoyable evening en famille, Kirsty added a little dollop of another form of tartness when she said to me "You haven't really got much to offer anyone have you?" It was said entirely without rancour but I still bridled at the idea.

Financially of course, that's accurate enough. Thinking of how to avoid these sad moneyless periods of filching my housemates' food from the compost bin, which is conduct unbecoming to a man of my refined tastes, I was wondering whether there might be a market for a pornographic novel describing the sexual exploits of Daphne from Scooby Doo. I'm sure I'm not the only middle aged man who used to watch Scooby Doo mainly to see Daphne sashaying around in those lovely dresses she used to wear. She was second only in sexual potency to the bra section in my mum's catalogues.

God how I'd love to undo that scarf