'Tis pity she's a smoker

Cath's in the garden, and suggests a smoke inside. Obvious sexual tension, about which I do nothing. As I was stroking the cat, she said out loud, in a curious dope-induced muddle of persons, "he's only stroking her because he wants to get me into bed."

She runs out of patience with my inaction, and takes herself off to bed.

The following evening, we are watching something on the telly, both sat on the settee, when she gets up to sit on the armchair. "What's up Cath?" She tells me that I smell of drink. I currently have a fifty-minute cycle ride to and from work. I tell her that I'll never be teetotal and I think I deserve a pint of cider after my arduous journey home on a hot day. She gets up in a huff and goes to her room, all the pleasure and promise of the previous evening screwed up and thrown away. I take it as a translation of her irritation over my passivity of the previous evening.

With Mel, however, it ends more happily.

I met Mel during my brief time working at Parks and Carks.

I am lugging a copy of the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which I purchased on the way there from a curio shop, and my burdensome jacket, which repeatedly ejects my cards onto the pavement.

I'm early in the pub, and a man wearing a T-shirt with some regimental badge on it can't open his packet of peanuts. I was going to make a comment about not relying on the British military in a crisis, but ex-Army people are sensitive souls.

We went to the garden, where the SOED became a conversation piece. We joined tables with these window fitters and their boss ("no, I own the company, I just watch them work"). We started a game where we had to give the meanings of words picked out randomly from my volumes. Peart: clever, sharp, intelligent.

They shared their joints round, which got me and Mel gigglingly stoned. At the bus stop I said "go on, give us a snog," and we did.

Yesterday in the same pub, we were adopted by three women and a bloke from the Dictionary Game. It was good, raucous, sexualised banter. I told one of the women "you've got fucking lovely tits you have." She said I looked a bit like Dirty Den -- a murderer in real life.

The author yesterday

The light was fading. Mel draped herself across me and took my hand. Her soft fingers stroking a small thrill into my palm, my arm around her shoulders close to her breasts.

At the bus stop, we start kissing. She unbuttons her shirt, takes my hands and put them on her tits. But she wants an unmediated touch, and pushes her bra up over them.

The bus arrives suddenly, and I withdraw, leaving a disarranged sixty-year-old woman on a high street.

My youngest texts. "I'm reading a book about cults, and I'm more and more glad that we had an effeminate ninny for a father rather than some mad patriarch. Love you x"