Norwegian Wood

I've been unable to meet the rent for two successive months now, partly because the lodger is fucking me about with the rent, again. I've paid about half of it. A gas and electricity bill for £884 arrives, which I have no way of paying. So just a typical Monday then.

Seriouscrush came round with her daughter yesterday and gave me the depressing materials for what seems to me to be a complicated job of sanding, priming, undercoating, and painting the windows--full of awkward recessed grooves, the windows difficult to reach. I know she won't be pleased with the half-job I will do, and I know she won't say anything about it. The cost to me will be her judgement. We used to lie to arrange last-minute secret rendezvous in the Sun Hotel, sitting in the bar hardly talking, me thinking the ambivalent thought that I will never get enough of her, before going up to Vicarage Field where our unbuttoning and kisses we thought more noble than the chavs' rutting. Now, she's bringing pots of paint round so that I can sand and paint the fucking window frames. For doing this job, I am being let off one month's rent, a dispensation from the rentier.

Helen and Kitty were in Lancaster the other evening. Helen is going out with a Norwegian man we met a few months ago. We gather in the garden of the Sun, outside because smokers are in the majority. Helen has gathered around her some of the reckless-looking women she knows. Generous as ever, she has bought me a pint, ready on the table. She's slimmer and brighter-looking. "You're looking very nice, Helen. Must be all that Norwegian cock."

I get several enquiries about "how things are going" with Trina. The questions irritate me, and I reply more pessimistically than I might have had I been allowed to volunteer the information. As Helen's son announces that he and his compadres are off to McDonald's, Kitty's daughter shouts out a request. Twenty minutes later, they return with a bag of chips for her. We verbally applaud the boys for having remembered, trying to teach Daughter a standard of gratitude. "That'll do," she says, "as a start."

I had my fifteen minutes of fame the other day. I was following the Guardian's over-by-over coverage of the Third Test, when the discussion meandered around to stories from one's first job. I emailed an anecdote from my brief spell in the basement of the legal profession.