Smoke

I am at Kirsty's, where, having provided a buffet tea of hydrogenated vegetable fat and refined carbohydrates, I have beaten a tactical retreat to the kitchen: the living room has been taken over by underage girls, my daughters' friends, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One of them hasn't seen it yet, as her parents won't let her watch it as it's classified as a 15 and she's only fourteen. They've got the gas fire on and the room smells of sweat and aerosols.

I am twenty-three days into the forty in which I am not drinking. However, I pre-planned for one non-fasting day, because someone was coming up all the way from London to our wine club with some of the South African wines he imports. I love his wine, and am aware of the need to suppress a teenagerish admiration of him when I conflate what he does for a living with assumptions about his character.

It was an important event in the social calendar, and it behoved Trina and me to present ourselves with an appropriate decorum. Well, good intentions are easy to have.

We started on the booze in Wetherspoons at half past twelve. Trina had one-and-a-half bottles of Chardonnay, while I got through an unknown number of pints of Kirkby Lonsdale's porter. After an interlude in the loos where we snorted amphetamine off the toilet cistern lid, we were compelled to tarry with my pals Davina and her boyfriend Richard, who walked in, during which I wagged my finger at Davina and said "You're a fitbit, you are."

Tess came down at midday today. Trina and I had been down to Wilko to buy a file to try to sort out my front door. I was hoping it would be sold in a packet describing it as a rasp, which has so much more a satisfying, vulgar feel in the mouth than the word "file." I'd been filing, not rasping, the front door jamb and the metal sill thing at its bottom, to try to stop my front door making such a fucking racket, a massive bang, when it closes. It was exhausting work.

"You were funny last night, Trina," said Tess. When people are "funny", that usually means they were a pain in the arse. "You kept falling up the stairs. Looby was just saying "Come on dear, come on dear," which made me sound very Radio 4-ish.

I emailed the wine club's coordinator apologising for walking off with four bottles of wine without paying for them. He said that I had in fact paid for it. I checked my bank account online and there was a withdrawal from an ATM last night for sixty quid. I have no recollection of getting sixty quid out last night.

I miss days like this. Long afternoons of unrealisable sexual desire, and the locals with their chat, as irritating as it is entertaining and local. Unplanned meetings with friends, and half-hearted, well-meaning sex with lots of kissing. Sobriety has nothing to recommend it. Saving money, I suppose. But what are the bailiffs going to do when I'm dead?