What a bummer!

To Middlesbrough, for my brother's fiftieth. He's in a home that has housed, through time, lunatics, imbeciles, spastics, people with learning disabilities, and now, clients. "Differently abled" doesn't seem to have caught on.

Trina was supposed to come up, but emailed me with a couple of days to go with a Carry On accident tale. She'd spilt some coffee, slipped on it, dropped the mug, which broke into shards, then landed on it, causing a deep cut which will require a skin graft, and in the meantime, daily changes of big antiseptic nappies in hospital.

"Oh thanks for reacting in that way," she said, after I'd expressed sympathies and regrets. "I was worried about what you'd say, and I've been putting off telling you." I don't know why she would worry like that. Strange isn't it, how people you think you know well surprise you.

At my mum's house, (she doesn't own it), it was a bit of a gender-bender fest. One of my nieces came out as gay a couple of years ago; her and her girlfriend slept in a tent in the garden. I'm glad my mum doesn't give a toss about anyone being gay. A nephew has decided he wants to be considered as having a non-binary gender. We've got to call him a female name, which I don't mind doing, but it's difficult to remember in the moment. Playing a game one evening, I pointed to me, my brother and him, to mime the word "man". Backtracking, I tried to erase his inclusion with my hands.

I go along with it all, but what a privilege it is, fannying about with gender definition, a leisure activity of middle class self-absorption for those who aren't daily affected by lack of money, sexism, violence, racism.

I spent Monday turning red on the beach with Kim. Kim was a wee bit boring, complaining about things, going on and on about her possible diagnosis for ADD, or ADHD, I don't know the difference, and how she gives so much to needy people whilst listening to them in her job... I wanted to say "I know exactly how you feel Kim."

A group of young people were waist deep in the sea, taking photographs of each on their phones. After we comforted ourselves in our old folks' criticism of the modern addiction for photographing and recording everything one does, and how memory is considered an invalid repository of events, she jumped up to photograph a dolphin curving its way in front of the wind farm.

All day long, thick black smoke bulked up from what we later found out was a timber yard. It's not a proper holiday in County Durham without an industrial accident.

At my brother's care home, they'd decked the garden with balloons and happy birthday banners; yards of food in the summerhouse. One of the carers asked my niece's girlfriend when she was due. I turned round to where one of the carers had been sitting a minute previously and said "have you got any recycling? For the bottles?" It was just the loonies clients sitting there and the only one that responded did so with an indecipherable staccato syllable.

The Northeast is different though. Everyone is considered an extended family in the pub, and as long as you understand the social boundaries, people include you, in a way that doesn't happen down here. I went to the rough pub a couple of times. Met the bloke who put me in his phone as "Fucking Lunatic" when I stayed up there for three months with my mum. "I've got cancer of the spine, but I'm a fucking ex-Royal Engineer so I'm going to stick a finger up its arse and it can swivel on it".

On the train I met two lads who lived in Hartlepool. I gave them a can of my Old Speckled Hen. They'd been in Halifax demolishing something and we had an interesting chat about how you demolish a building. I was a bit nervous about the masked girl sitting opposite me, worrying whether they'd say something sexist or intimidating in her direction, but they didn't.