Go big, or go home

I spent a night in prison on Saturday -- that is, the former prison in Lancaster Castle -- which nearly turned into a spell in the loony bin. Ye DJs of yore from Ye Olde Haçienda were playing. Unfortunately I didn't experience much of it, due to a slight dosage miscalculation beforehand with the peppermint tea.

I don't want to discourage Trina's ventures into the deeper end of dance music but she was irritating me, constantly touching me to assuage her anxiety about everything. The prison is just as it was left when it closed, and you can dance on the upper floor walkways or down in the main assembly area. The kaleidoscopic light show was as synaesthetically heady as the music, which was much more driving and techno-y than I'd guessed it would be.

How long I lasted I don't know, but there is a gap in my memory between dancing and talking to someone I know, then standing outside for a long time and boring the very patient security staff to tears with an hours-long monologue, loosely based around the theme of death, and my important and solipsistically described role in the carbon cycle. In the meantime I'd lost Trina.

All of a sudden, an ambulance turned up and took me to A & E, where I sat for half an hour next to a man with dried blood all over his head, before discharging myself. I went back to mine, and got into bed with Trina. She said she'd got lost and had taken a long time to get home. We had sex, the selfish sort that I enjoy the most, where I do the talking; we both came.

As a responsible father, I then went back to Kirsty's, because I "look after", in an increasingly loose sense, my girls at the weekends. I was still a few hours from feeling normal, but I passed it off as lack of sleep and too much drink, thereby sustaining the open secret that the close adults in their lives are fond of peppermint tea and similar refreshments.

I handed the girls back at 7ish when Kirsty and boyf turned up. "Oh no," said boyf. "You'd have been better off down the loony bin. Take it from someone who knows!"

Around midday on Monday, Erica rang. "So then, are you OK?" A friend of hers had been trying to help me and had told her about this "crazy guy" at the rave, and Erica worked out who it was. She told me that the door staff had told the police that they thought I ought to be sectioned, advice which the police didn't follow.

I found the girl who had tried to help me on Erica's snoopbook page.

"So anyway," continued Erica. "Do you fancy a quickie down the pub?" They walked in; sympathetic laughing and generous handshakes and kisses. Slightly Coarse Husband said not to worry. "Go big, or go home." "Yeah well, I'm not doing that again." "You will."

Donna's birthday tomorrow. I sent her a card which I found months ago, a stylised bird with wire-like limbs, its body coloured in kitschy artificial colours similar to those in a print in her house. "...And by the way, your friend in the north still thinks you are witty, intelligent, stylish, and very, very sexy." It's getting too late to say it really, but what the fuck.