Home disco

My visit to my Mum and Dad's was curtailed by a day as the girls wanted to go to their best friend's birthday party. None of us involved minded our stay being shortened. My Dad is needy, unwilling to let my Mum away from his side even to go to post a letter. He fell over and strained his groin recently and has only just begun walking again. The house looks a bit like an old people's home now, with zimmer frames downstairs and up, a contraption to allow for easier sitting on the toilet, and another to perch on the bath.

Watching two black athletes neck and neck in the 800 metres, Dad said "These darkies are pretty good at running aren't they?", which I suppose is at least a compliment, and an improvement upon the bit of East Asian strategic analysis he came out with last Christmas when he explained the tension between the two Koreas as being the fault of "those Jews and all their money." He means well but finds all social interaction difficult. I don't think he has a single friend whom he sees.

On Wednesday night I got myself a pass to visit Kim, who emailed to check: "Ok then marra, are we still on for tonight?". She walked into the pub looking as tall, confident, sexy and dangerous as she ever was, wearing a red and white check cotton thigh-length dress with little bows on the sleeves and at the back of her waist, bluey-grey tights and black ankle boots. "The Olympics is just a huge case of OCD," she said. A faint look of intimidation crossed the faces of the lone middleaged men when she clonked erectly to the bar to ask the barmaid if she could close the window. We went back to hers, moved up a gear, switched the lights off, and turned the room into Home Disco. Her dancing is sexy and fluid.

Up at 7am to get back to my parents and the girls. As the girls and I we were preparing to leave, Dad got into a huff as Mum said she'd walk us to the station. "Oh, so you're going to leave me by myself?" "Well, for twenty minutes, yes."

"I don't know how you have the patience Mum," I said. "No, I don't either sometimes." On the train back, before spilling half a tumbler of beer over her, I was chatting to the woman sat opposite. "...But this country," she said, "was left in a terrible mess. We've got to sort it out." This insidious Tory propaganda that they are nobly clearing up the consequences of financial mismanagement of the previous administration, by impoverishing the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, appears to be working its way into the national consciousness.

Back in Lancaster, the girls were telling Kirsty about the party. "You know that D's parents are quite modern hippyish?," said Jenny. "Well, when D was in nursery they gave her a book called 'Questions About Sex'." D was proud of her book and took it to nursery and carried it round all day, despite the efforts of the staff to get her to put it in a locker.

I was 12.5% of the audience at the Dukes for a film, Swandown, by Britain's foremost literary Olympiad dissenter, Iain Sinclair, in which he and Andrew Kötting take (it is implied, steals) a pedalo in the shape of a giant swan and pedal it from Hastings to the Olympic site. Even in this respectful setting, The Noisy Crisp Eater was masticating down my ear in the row behind. Finally untensing as his tongue scoped his mouth for any last fragments of bolus, I was irritated newly by his getting up and leaving the cinema. He came back with another packet.

In gloomy news that I am not even going to go into, the D*ck*ns event is back on.