Skating

Someone I know asked me if I knew of any local supplies of a common but illegal plant. I couldn't help him: I have no desire to return to the dull, boring nights, tense and uncomfortable, surrounded by people happy to sit down for hours on end, reverentially quiet before agonised rock guitar solos and its associated doggerel pop poetry; and their trailing, inconsequential sub-philosophical utterences which passed for conversation, an 80s version of today's Facebook statuses about fate, destiny, caring, and true friends. I want to dance, flirt, talk volubly but dialectically, to move, skate like Huysmans across the cat-ice of my life and those of my friends. In these, weed is of no help.

But he has discovered that the local scrap man who drives slowly down our back alleys looking for discarded washing machines and the like, is a distributor as well as a collector, his old-fashioned weekly shouted announcement from his lorry--"Iron! Any old iron!" having a hidden meaning to those who appreciate such a stupefecant.

Half past four and it's almost dark; I'm wearing a scarf and a Santa hat and my thick cable-knit jumper, as the house settles into its gelid winter state, chilled by silent draughts running unapologetically through all the warps and chinks of windows and doors. Thankfully, Ned and Tess have a similar idea of the insupportable profligacy of turning the heating on as I. There's a coal fire, and plenty of quilts.

Last night though--well, I looked good. Kitty and Melissa are over for the weekend, well-dressed girls the two of them, so I spent an hour putting my ensemble together: beige Aquascutum mac (Help The Aged, Southport, £10), dusky blue double breasted Linea jacket (Tatty Bon, Glasgow, £15), an 80s German brown and white shirt (from a defunct secondhand clothes shop in Lancaster, £5), black cotton trousers by Relay from its own shop, also now closed, in Old Compton St., Soho, £70, from the days when I had money), brown Pierre Cardin slip-on shoes (The Samaritans, Lancaster, £3.99), and the orange and brown scarf that Kim knitted for me.

Kitty and I were off our heads on catnip. "I am bollocksed, but in a nice way," she announced, more than once. In the J--, the lead guitarist, in the last song, started walking into the audience. He took off his guitar, draped it around the shoulders of the man standing in front of me, and shouted into his ear "A minor." The man wandered slowly up to the front of the pub to join the band, playing an unplanned solo, which finished the night with a dash of showmanship.

In the hotel Kitty and Melissa got ready for bed. Catnip makes me feel aesthetically sensitive but not sexually so; when I got back to mine it was very difficult even to get to a weak orgasm, even whilst imagining telling Chris what to do.

Someone posted a reply to a comment I left on her blog after she'd inadvertently created a picturesque neologism through a slip of the finger: "You're welcome to my typo's looby." Coursing on catnip, it sounded the sexiest remark.

Part Two begins in a couple of hours.