Lawnmower Shock

To Southport.

Trina has a couple of days' work there so has booked us into our usual hotel. I am walking tall and feel at ease, the luxury of being able to pay for things myself, having received the rent arrears, and the deposit from the new girl who will arrive next week. Trina snores, an ugly throated roar. Next day, I am at pains to be pleasant to her, but I am sleep-deprived and irritable with everything she says.

In the sushi restuarant, tables are a little too close, and we are herded into Southport's strange social mix of the perfumed retired inching forward on three legs, and moneyed youngish people in conventionally flashy clothes. The food is delicious and reviving. We have eel, crab, tuna, octopus and bass, seaweed and rice; the wasabi makes hot canals of our noses. The all-purpose supermarket wine suffocates the food, and I start saying that "if it were my place, I'd offer an oude gueuze instead, or a grassy Madiran." Trina joins in with my usual self-aggrandizing about "how you and me could make this place a lot better," which, if put into practice, would send us both bankrupt.

A large TV screen showing an idiotic programme about antiques barges fusspot tat and its calculating owners into the hotel's foyer and bar. I get talking to two women who have moved to Spain. I am surprised we don't get on to how global warming is a matter of belief, nor use the word "swamped". Trina arrives back from work and hurries me into the car; she wants to show me a peculiar little museum before it closes.

A man who looks like a bus spotter takes our £2 and turns on the audio tour. Three tiny rooms on the first floor of what was someone's house, are crowded with lawnmowers and paraphernalia. It's interesting, with social and engineering history combined, larded with some fanciful misinformation when he strays from his subject (the origin of the term "slips" to describe the close offside fielding positions in cricket, can't have anything to do with lawns or their mowing, cricket pre-dating both).

I buy a postcard. "I bet I know who that's going to," says Trina, prickling. "Yes--Kim," I say, trying to close the subject. "Are you interested in a pictorial history of lawnmowers?" asks the curator. "I think that would be stretching my interest too far," I say. "It's more the rather racy woman in the yellow dress that caught my eye."

Two young female Vietnamese knock at my door. Conversation is not easy. They are envoys for a postgraduate who is interested in the room. I show them into the kitchen. The place is suffused with sufficient a wash of sunlight to soft-focus the patches of mucky wallpaper and flaking paint.

Upstairs, they seem to think the room is "big". At the end of the tour, they say "Can we discuss now?" I gesture to them to sit down. To my complete surprise, she fetches the deposit from her purse in Lesser-spotted £50 Notes, and asks for an electronic version of both the contract and the receipt. I'm nervous that I have agreed to rent a room to someone I haven't met, although I have checked with my spy in the Department of Flipcharts and she is registered there.

They leave, all head-knodding. Ned comes into the room. "You know you're never going to get any trouble from people like that, don't you? It'll be us that'll have to be quiet at night."

It's enjoyable having Ned and Tess here. Having sociable, other-directed people in the house makes me realise how odd the absconder was, with his clumping, door-banging, piss-torrenting visits to the loo between three and five in the morning; his excessive politeness a gloss for dishonesty; his friends in black T-shirts paralysed with embarrassment if I walked in on them as they discussed computer wargames and search engine optimisation.