We wuz robbed

The rain is doing a Bristolian hammering, viz., a child bashing wooden pegs into a board.

Fourteen hours today in the works canteen. It's undemanding, but the sheer length of it dispirits me, and whenever someone walks to the counter I think "oh fucking hell, what do they want?"

Me and Mel watched the Croatia match in a pub where we had to pay ten pounds to sit on a bench. I had said that afterwards Hayley would meet us in the park. It's a ménage which has had its uneasy moments when I've legoed them together in the past. But they're my only friends in Bristol.

Before Hayley was to arrive, I suggested I scooter off to Marks and Sparks to get us some rubbish to eat. At the entrance to M&S I was told by an employee that I wasn't allowed to wheel my scooter round the store. She suggested I park it behind some gigantic blown photograph of a cake. As my idiocy has no limits, I parked it as she suggested, just at the same time that a white young couple came in and parked their bikes in the same place.

I went quickly round, gathering crisps, olives and cider, returning to find my scooter had gone. I looked at the space where Bert should have been, disbelieving, as if the visual illusion would vanish at any moment. I walked back to the park, resenting the slowness of a pedestrianism I had escaped for a month, wobbling my sadness inside with the stupid imperative to not make an outward meal of it.

I got back to Mel's bench and told her. She was full of the practical suggestions that no-one wants when being upset would be better met by sympathy rather than solutions. I rang Hayley and told her. She turned up with a clashing liveliness which gave me the unconcern which I wanted. And sex too, pulling her shawl over her tits, but repeatedly, consciously. I drank quickly, getting on a high of suppressed upset. Mel retreated to her phone.

Hayley went to have a piss behind a tree. "Why don't you get with Hayley?" Mel said. Here we go again, my next task of the day. "Oh no that would never work," I said, truthfully, worrying whether I'd made her sound like the rock of ages and reinforced Hayley's more glamorous status in Mel's eyes. I want them both.

I was sad about losing Bert. No-one will take as much care of him as I did. But tomorrow I'm on the 7am coach to London, to collect a replacement scooter from someone in Camden. He is anxious that I am not late, as his mother "hates being held up" for her dinner date. He's told me this three times now. You can hear the cat-gut of the apron strings straining at his throat.

I'm bringing Bert's replacement back on the train. Then, in an Indian run by someone me and Mel met when we were working in Parks and Carks, we're meeting my brother's clan. They're down here for the National League play-off final, Hartlepool v Torquay, moved to Bristol City's ground because of the Euros. It doesn't serve alcohol.