ACAB redux

Me, my mum and my eldest are in her still, bright living room in Middlesbrough. Wide streets, houses with front and back gardens and lots of sky, built for working class people before they became landlords' villeins again. But mum is getting worried.

Fiona is asking me how to get on the other web, and how one installs the browser. We mischievously provoke mum's curiosity about this novelty with hints of rugs, weapons and fraud.

"So why would you be interested in that?" she asks Fiona. "Hang on, I don't want to know." We then compound her unease by discussing our plan to go to North Korea after Fiona's graduation. A woman who has never been abroad and doesn't want to, whose last two votes have been for the BNP and Brexit, suddenly becomes knowledgeable about life in the DPRK.

One shouldn't, but there is sport to be had with the uninformed elderly.

To Manchester, where I'm to meet Kirsty and the girls in Manchester Art Gallery. It was Kirsty's birthday, and she (we all) wanted to see the Martin Parr exhibition. Walking slightly behind them all at one point, I smiled inwardly and out at my bohemian, arty brood in their secondhand chic, bandying conversation about.

We were accommodated without a reservation at a lovely tapas bar. We'd left all our cases in the Art Gallery and a delegation was sent off from the restaurant to fetch them. We ran, advert-fast, through the city centre. I was very pleased at being able to keep up with two twenty-year-olds without feeling as though I were courting a heart attack, and without needing much recovery time. I was hoping they'd comment, but no-one said anything.

The food was delicious, and by the time I'd paid for three glasses of Manzanilla, I wish I'd ordered the whole bottle. I was supposed to be getting the last train to Bristol, but Kirsty wondered if I'd like to stay at hers and go back the following day. The rejuventation of our relationship has been an unforeseen pleasure of the past few months.

There is an unpleasant episode on the train back. Two young Asian men get on the little suburban train, and start jauntily moving up and down the carriage, the noisier one half-singing, half-shouting Allahu Akbar. He then stands and leans over a teenage girl sitting down; she looked at me imploringly.

Coming to a boil of anger at this point, I told him "shift your arm," intending to knock it off the stanchion, but he moved it before I could get him. I stood facing him and with my back to the girl, looking him up and down with as concentrated a look of contempt as I could manage. I looked back at her, and she mouthed "thank you."

After a few minutes I had to tell her that I was getting off at the next stop. The Devotee is still standing a foot away from me. As I moved past him, I spat a "fuck off" at him, then spent a good half hour wishing I'd made my parting shot much stronger. Later, I berated myself for not having had the presence of mind to ring the BTP; and later still, realised that it hadn't crossed my mind that he might have been equipped with the fanatic's current weapon of choice.

There's an old brewery near an older quay, on the roof of which someone has painted in large letters "ACAB". In case you're not quite au courant with the acronyms employed by British left-wing groupuscules c. 1990, it stood for "all coppers are bastards."

Underneath it, someone has appended a new translation: "All clitoris are [sic] beautiful." They were mean-spiritedly jetting it off yesterday.