Bra straps

It's bra strap central down Wetherspoons tonight. Lovely. No complaints whatsoever.

Catweazel, who is not wearing a bra, is standing at the bar, which is unusual, both for the hour, and his positioning; normally he passes his afternoons on a table nearer the door, cursing to himself, punctuating his interior invective with a twitching tic of the head.

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The new girl, Deb, moved in yesterday. She's in her mid-twenties and has a tough, night-time job in town. She burns these scented candles which gives a thick, dominating scent to the house. Seems pleasant enough though, as they all are at the beginning.

I'm always surprised and inwardly apologetic that anyone has chosen to live here. There's the gaping bit of wallpaper in her room and the ineradicable brown stains on the radiator, the lack of a shower, the ugly water-sodden bit of greyed wallpaper at the back of the kitchen sink... but I suppose she's chosen this over other places, and the rent's cheap for this area.

Goaded into activity partly by this feeling, and while listening to Warwickshire v Lancashire on the radio, I cleaned the bath, bleached and cleaned the shelves in the kitchen, did the shopping for the beetroot and feta soup I'm making for when Trina comes round tomorrow, then made a minestrone, for whatever meal it is you have at twenty past three, to go with the bread I'd made earier. Lancashire are 48 runs ahead with 8 wickets remaining.

I've got to warn Deb about, and invite her to, a party here on Saturday. I don't want to give her an implied licence to use the house like Party Central, despite a houseful of house music and people who are bright and chatty at 8am.

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I'm getting quite to like these Sunday nights when Kirsty and boyf come back from their weekends away. There's always alcohol involved and occasionally it's quite comical to see Kirsty, especially, twitching with whatever's still in her system. All of us sit around and talk and drink for a couple of hours, me, my former girlfriend and our children, and her boyfriend, who's played a fucking blinder in how he's dealt with it. The girls really like him, which gives me a sense of calm and togetherness, for which I am grateful.

Boyf was upstairs and I asked Fiona, eldest, how the weekend went. They'd spent it at Boggle Hole Youth Hostel near Whitby.

"...It was very middle class though. Boyf was in the kitchen one evening and told Mum 'get doing that washing up, bitch', and a man said 'Oh, that's rather... harsh'."

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Last Sunday morning, me and Donna were in bed in Glasgow. I was prodding my teeth, trying to find the source of a droning, blood-pulsing toothache. The potentially awkward subject of how we wrap this up turned out to be surprisingly easy to sort out.

"Donna, it's been a great weekend -- and it's not over yet -- but just to be honest, I've already got a girlfriend, to whom I should stop acting like an utterly selfish twat it's too far for a relationship. That doesn't mean we can't have nice times at things of shared interest. And also," I added, faking a bit of selflessness, "I wouldn't want to stop you meeting anyone else."

"That's OK. That'd work." I kept stroking the inner bit of her upper arm because I've worked out she loves that (don't we all?) "So, a non-exclusive -- whatever -- where we just meet up for things we'd like to do? And perhaps stay overnight, you know, given the distance?" "That'd be great." I said, and we did some more of that humpy bum-cock non sex, given the no sex rule we'd agreed on.

Now, or rather, at some plausible interval, I can introduce Trina and gradually remove the layers of duplicity.