Yea though I walk in the valley of disco

I was down the pub -- back to sobriety after a one day leave to meet Sally -- and bumped into someone I know who had a heart attack last week. He's much better to talk to now that he's been close to death, but his improved conversation wasn't enough to varnish over the boredom of being in a pub and not drinking, so I wandered off after an hour.

Back home, Trina sent me a text which irritated me. Intended to sympathise with what she sees as the lack of success in my date, she "commiserated", hoping that I was not too "down about things."

"Of course not. What's there to be disappointed about? Oooh you do take such a negative view of everything. I met a nice girl in a cracking pub in a great city. What does it matter if we don't get hopelessly in love in ten minutes? It's the experience that matters, not the outcome. Anyway, get your knickers ironed for Friday!" (We're going out dancing tonight.)

Back home, my sister rings. She sniffly and hesitant. "It's about Dad." The hospital rang my mum at 7pm saying that he'd taken a turn for the worse and he was dead by the time she got there twenty minutes later.

My gut instinct was to get on the train to Middlesbrough, but speaking to my Mum this morning, she said that it's OK -- people can come up for the funeral. She's quite resilient and she's got her God Squad around her who will help her with the practical things. I hope that after a while, it might lead to a new lease of life for her.

My brother has asked me, as the eldest, to do a short oration at the funeral. I will have to put some work into that. My Dad was a difficult person to get to know, one of the most boring people I've ever met, with hardly any friends or social life, someone who didn't talk about himself; but generous and well-meaning despite his social handicaps, wanting to be included without offering much that would make people interested in doing that. I won't say that at the funeral though.

I rang Kirsty this morning to tell her. "I wasn't that close to my Dad," I said. "No. Everyone says that."

Dancing on in the valley of death, tonight's do in Morecambe is in aid of a recently deceased DJ who played disco and jazz-funk when it wasn't that common. It was originally going to be just me and a former work colleague from Bloom and Doom, who has gorgeous T-shirted tits and a hard, tattooed husband, but Trina invited herself along too.

I was annoyed at the imposition at first, but after some reflection, I realised that it might be a good idea to put them two together. They'll occupy each other with a limitlessly detailed recitation of their recent lives, a conversation (without the "con" element), of iterated half-sentences of one-word changes to comma'd accounts of what is happening in the lives of their children. This will take so long that I should free to get on and dance and chat with the other people I'll know who'll be there. They're the female equivalent of the men that Jeanette Winterson describes in Sexing The Cherry. (From memory) "All you have to do with men, is set them down, get them going with drink, and let them unravel their energy."