Heroin might not be for everyone

You might remember the episode during which Loveable But Uncool Friend and me were in a loo cubicle together, sharing the desiccated love, when, with his foghorn of a voice and lack of social awareness, he gave away what we were up to. A paranoid lunatic, a flotsam of maternal deprivation, barged into the cubicle -- fortunately, just as I was on my own, making a public sound of re-buckling my belt.

The loony was in the pub again this evening. He came over, stood over us without talking, trying to intimidate us. "You right fella, how you doing?" I said. He stood there, said nothing but pointed to his eyes whilst looking at me and Vic, before sitting down.

The whole pub noticed, but I resolutely carried on as though nothing untoward had happened. It was bothering Uncool Friend, who, becoming more uncool, stared at them and looked uneasy and twitchy, before leaving. I sympathise, but it would have been better to blank them.

My barman friend told me that one of the lunatic's company was a smackhead and had beaten up someone very badly outside the pub in which he had worked. "He's a fucking psychopath. He should have been banned from every pub round here."

Because I can drink most people under the table, I knew that all I had to do was to sit there and carry on drinking, until he slumps with the drunkard's mixture of self-pity and flaccid aggression, but it was his more sober-seeming psychopath friend I was more worried about. I also wished I hadn't inadvertently dragged my friends into this situation.

Cometh the hour, and they depart. I pretend I haven't noticed and don't join in the quiet relieved sigh of the rest of the pub. You never know who's watching.

As much as I like the pub in question, neither a principled complaint to management nor my cajoling cross-class verbal competence are going to be effective against a smackhead with a dangerous mate. I have decided therefore that I am not going to be in the same place as them again, and I'm going to tell my friends this.

If he walks in, I am going to finish my drink at my leisure, and give them the code phrase "oh well, peeps, I must be getting my train," which will be a signal for us all to meet up in ten minutes' time in a nearby pub which is posh enough for him to reject it by its invocation of his sense of class inferiority.

Never mind; I turned my thoughts to something much lovelier and slid into the sexiness of the text I got from Wendy this morning, who was wondering if I was free on Wednesday for a drink. "Of course I am Wendy, I'd love that, although you'd also be more than welcome round at mine and you could warm your cockles in front of my coal fire with a bottle of Prosecco."

"That sounds lovely. I'll bring a bottle. See you at 1?"

I clicked back and forth on my primitive phone, looking repeatedly at her message and my reply, leavening two simple texts with sex; and her command the other night: "Put your hands up my skirt", over and over again in my head.