Finally got a couple of hours in my own house. I've been kipping overnight at work, after kipping overnight at Trina's, after we went out a-bopping in Glasgow. A friend of mine knows his house music backwards and has the knack of attracting a good crowd to his events, so it's worth the effort.
I'm doing a split shift today. Karen, my boss, said that I could stay around in the big house. I declined, saying I had to do a couple of things at home. The real reason was that both my pairs of socks I took to Glasgow stink.
To Glasgow then. At Cheltenham, these expensively dressed ladies of a certain age got on, looking for their seats. I had one of a table and I invited them to sit at mine and the one opposite. "You're going to be crowded by women," one of them said. "Oh, I can think of worse ways to be crowded."
It was Fiona Bruce and her mates going to see Giselle in Birmingham. They had loads of scoff with them, which they shared with me generously, so I had a brunch of pigs in blankets, prawn and smoked salmon blinis, and Lindt chocolates. She couldn't finish everything she had brought so she gave it all to me at the end, and me and Trina scoffed it in the Euro Hostel later.
As she handed her food to me, she said "I bet your friends won't believe this later," which introduced a false step. They will. And don't get ideas above yourself just because you're someone on the telly. But you don't bite the hand that feeds you.
The bop was in Stereo, a bearded venue behind Central Station with good memories for me. It was where I persisted in nodding insouciantly one night to a woman who said she liked the performance art I'd just done in a venue opposite, until she had to insist, in several emails and examples of her own work, that she wanted to work with me, and we ended up getting paid to cavort in Brussels a few weeks later. The night sold out and got reviewed in a New York art magazine, before I resumed my career as a drunkard.
Me, Hayley (black denim-ish jacket, black scooped neck top, black zipped shorts, black tights, flatties, fucking sexy, the shorts especially, drawing my attention to her lovely cunt area), and a man from Rochdale I'd picked up five minutes earlier, are walking to the sex shop in Old Market.
We'd met up in Wethers but I wanted to get some poppers to take to Glasgow. Hayley dressed like that, magnetic, me in my shameful ensemble of thin polyester purple Primark jumper and black work trousers, the hanger-on at the end of the reel. It's not like that. I'm her friend.
We left our new pal absorbed in reverse cowgirls in the sex shop, and for all I know he's still in there. Me and Hayley walked back to the cider house and met a couple of Hungarians who gave us a small bottle of some sort of alcoholic hazelnut and chocolate drink they had, after I'd expressed my genuine like of pálinka.
"I get loads of sex. My boyfriend rapes me every day. 'Do this, do that'," said Hayley merrily.
And Kim's on-off thing with a man she met down the pub bloomed succulently into action a couple of weeks ago. They've established an enviable arrangement, of him staying over once or twice and week, but also turning up for, in Kim's phrase, "a fuck and go." "It feels so fucking fabulous!" The unintended power of others' happiness to make one feel the opposite.
