Put your hands up my skirt

To London, where middle daughter had an audition for some small parts at the National Youth Theatre.

Her teenage enthusiasm for the city was a vicarious pleasure. We walked along Southbank, the Thames spangling, coloured lightbulbs necklaced around food stalls. I saw her off to Covent Garden, where her friend's dad has a pied-à-terre, then went to buy a few bottles of beer to drink on the platform, to preempt the teetotalism that is decreed at my brother's house in St Albans.

The stifling moneyed Southern life that is St Albans is not congenial. Men wear those pointy brown leather shoes that curl up like a jester's and drink in "bars" with shiny curved electronic dispensers, black aprons, canned music, and no real ale.

I went early into London next morning with my brother's wife on her commute. I stayed on the tube until we got to the nearest suburb to central London in which there's a chance of meeting my own, and settled in to the Wetherspoons in Elephant and Castle. The emollient calm of morning drinkers; the spasmodic restless leg of pneumatic drills. I thought of a line from Leroi Jones's poem: "cars stall and rise."

I texted Trina. "These Southerners are soft. 9am and not a single person drinking." Immediately I'd sent it, two Irish blokes were served their Guinness. I got talking to one of them. "She told me that I'd have to wait seven seconds, as it wasn't nine o'clock yet."

He was a ticket tout, travelling the world at vastly over face value. "There is not a single sold-out event I can't get you into. Black market prices you know, but I can get you into anything." I was torn between my curiosity about such an interesting job, and the omertà that is its condition.

"Well, for example, a group of six lads buy tickets to Forumla One, and only five turn up. I buy the spare ticket off them, then add a couple of hundred onto it. Once you have one customer, you get more. I give them my number and it soon gets round. Would you like a drink?" He scrabbled around in his pockets and pulled out a crumple of fifty pound notes.

I left to meet my brother's wife for "lunch", as it's known down there, at the glassy HQ of the large international charity for which she works as a Disaster Relief Co-ordinator ("OK, so are we sure that the Philippines flood, the Japanese earthquake, and the Danish bombing will all happen at the same time?") Six-foot-high posters of black African children looking happy because of water. We chatted easily, but there's something slightly uncomfortable about being in the company of someone who spends her days reifying a sincere, unaffected desire to help others.

She showed me some anonymous art on the nearby Millennium Bridge. Someone comes and paints the bits of discarded chewing gum trod into its surface. They are periodically cleaned away, then he or she does it all over again. In the evening they took me to a Bangladeshi place, and we had one of those over-mannered meals to which nights in South Asian restaurants can veer.

---

On the train down, we stopped at Milton Keynes, a place charged with memories of Donna. I couldn't resist texting her, calling up the filthy nickname she has in my phone. "Donna, I don't know if this is intrusive and I apologise if it is, but I've just gone through Milton Keynes on the train and will be in London for a couple of days. I don't suppose for any moment you might be free for a drink? If not, I just wanted to thank you again for the lovely indelible memories you gave me."

To my surprise, she replied. "Ha ha! I'd join you for a drink tonight but I've got a committee meeting." She said she'd ring me the following day. "It's all going great looby. It couldn't be better, and we're moving in together in a couple of weeks." "Oh! That's great Donna, I'm so pleased to hear it. You're a lovely woman and you thoroughly deserve it."

It was an effort to control my voice, one which failed. I was swallowing, and my eyes were glossing over. "Don't get all emotional on me, will you?" "No, I'm just pleased for you!" and I redoubled my efforts to be cheery. "Thank you. I went through deleting a lot of numbers recently but kept yours. Let me know when you're next down and we'll definitely go for that drink." No we won't Donna. You were my lover; I'm not interested in your job and boyfriend. I want to fuck you on the stairs again.

I bade her goodbye, got another pint, and watched the roadworks outside through an eye-film of dejection.

---

Time to go home, and there was more inadvertent street art outside Euston station, where colourful daubs had a prettiness incongruent with their practical purpose.

Me and middle daughter got pleasantly pissed on the train back, her giddy and voluble, pronouncing out loud the outlines of another life opening up for her.

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Back in Lancaster, straight to Kitty's birthday do. Just me, Wendy and Kitty, getting through everything that could be drank, smoked, or snorted. Wendy suggested we turn the rest of my weed into flapjacks. She had to stand on a chair to fetch the flour, and it was all I could do to keep my hands off her arse. We left together a couple of hours later. At the end of the street, she stopped suddenly, turned to me, and put her hands out to stop me walking. "Put your hands up my skirt," she said.

The next morning, I made and took her Valentine's Card round. I crouched down so as to remain hidden and quietly glided the envelope into the letterbox. The "card" was the size of a postage stamp. On the front, I wrote "I like you". Inside -- "Someone not a million miles away thinks you are clever, witty, well-dressed, and very sexy x." An hour later, I got a text from her. "I like you Xx."