Soft

The Muslim women are chatting about on the doorstep opposite in their black pillarbox get-ups. I don't like living in a mainly Muslim street. The men say hello as a routine, and the women--you're simply shunned.

The house four doors up from Kirsty's is up for sale. How I wish I could buy it. In that street, where my daughters have lived for all but one of their fifteen years, Maureen cat-sits for us when we're off to France; Doreen looks in on the girls when I sneak a night off dancing, and Rather Sexy 70-y-o Next Door puts our bins out for us. My neighbours here will never do any of those things. They're separatists, preserving a culture. As Sergei Korovin said about non-drinkers, "they are not my comrades."

Closer to home, Tom, the lodger, continues to leave a pebble of shitdash round the loo every morning, which I clean off, every morning, before he pumps his bowels on his bike seat on his fibrous journey to work. I went out with Tess yesterday, and she said that Tom had said to her "So are you nocturnal then?" and that when she comes in late, it disturbs him and he can't get back to sleep. I would say he's anally retentive were it not for the daily evidence to the contrary.

The bailiffs have been round again, with a hand-delivered letter. The next stage is that they'll leave an official-looking notice "seizeing" the car parked outside my house. I haven't got a car; I've never driven in my life. it only worries me to the extent that Tess and Tom might have to indirectly get involved in the labour that my state of pinched hedonism entails. I wish we could just hurry up and cut out the middleman and I could go to prison for a month and get the whole fucking thing over and done with. I've been in prison before and a couple of weeks in jail is nothing to worry about for someone so class-crossingly adroit as I am.

Trina and I are back "together". After a few days of silence she got in touch and I told her that, yes, just as much as she's had enough of my insensitivity, I am finished with all the discussion and arguments after we have the good times. I wanted it to come across as an unnegotiable condition of any "future" we might have.

She had to work in Southport early on Monday so she asked me if I'd like to stay at her hotel on Sunday night. She picked me up from my house. We were both careful not to apologise too much. In Southport, the hotel owner, a pied noir, detained us a bit at the desk with his now familiar comparison of French bureaucracy versus English spontaneity. I was speeding and too chatty; I became aware that it was boring Trina, who was twitching.

We found our room, unpacked, and went to our usual place, where she worked through two bottles of Chardonnay, and I through an untallied number of pints. We sat in the window, criticising other people's hairstyles and clothes.

My phone rang. I looked at the display and put it back in my pocket. "Who's that?" "No, it's OK, doesn't matter." "Who is it!" "She Who Cannot Be Mentioned."

It rang again--Kim again. "Answer it, no, answer it--she obviously wants to talk to you." So I did. Trina went away to the bar and got talking to a plumber and came back and started talking at me, about her chat with the plumber, an attempt at invoking jealousy, perhaps, on and on, oblivious to my raised, delaying finger, indicating that I'd be with her in a minute. I found her ignorance of me objectionable, before I recognised my own selfishness reflected back to me.

We got back to our conversation soon enough and it turned garrulous and enjoyable and why I like being with her again. She's into rare cars and lit up to see two old classic British cars cruising along Lord Street in Southport, because Lord Street is the Venice Beach of Lancashire. I said that I love grey shift dresses on fiftysomething women and she was bemused. "But they're so plain." "Yes, that's the point." We went back to the hotel where sex was more frottage than penetration.

A woman talking about cars and a man talking about shift dresses, followed by bendy-cocked half-sex. Should stay with her really.