She's like me, but without the hassle

Last weekend's edict from the Department for Anxiety scuppered my plans for my European Tour.

I was going to Lancaster. The cheapest way was to fly to Manchester via Venice on the way out and Riga on the way back, which was £22 return, plus £12 to get from Manchester airport to Lancaster and back. Had I gone on the train, it'd have cost me £120. Instead, I hardly paid, mostly bunked the train.

The best blag was the Birmingham to Bristol bit on the way back, which saved me £60, by saying to the guard that I'd been seeing my daughter in her student digs "and I distinctly remember putting my cards -- and my train ticket -- on the windowsill in her room. I've got my booking reference, and I..."

"It's OK. Just sit down and ignore me when I come through. It'll get me through the carriage quicker."

Before then, on Friday, me and Mel flew to Newcastle to see my mum in Middlesbrough and to go to a house do a friend of mine runs in Glasgow. Cider in the airport at 8am.

Storm Arwen roughed my mum's house up a bit. Roof tiles clattered to the front garden, and her fence, erected by my late father, whose ability at using tools was as poor as mine, was wrenched off in two long sections. The fourteen-foot-wide trampoline in the back garden went AWOL, and, at the time of writing, has not been found.

We couldn't get to Glasgow. We turned up at the station for the first leg of the journey and everything was cancelled in both directions. Instead, we had a pleasantly drunken couple of days in my mum's house and Wetherspoons.

I felt for my mum, in her eighties, stuffing cotton wool balls in the gaps in her windows and old birthday cards folded up in the front door. Heating turned up, expensively but necessarily. I took several photographs of the gappy frames, to use against a rich landlord who needs the prod of litigation before he'll do any repairs.

Mel was a bit irritated that I couldn't fuck her. "You haven't asked me to keep my bra on all the time we've been here."

I took her down The Astronaut, a pub which refuses anything internetty. As I thought she would, Mel settled into a proper working class pub, complete with shouty but harmless men, to whom Mel endeared herself by choosing an old Hawkwind track on the jukebox; and fifty- and sixtysomething women chewing over various disgruntlements, laughing. People talk in a collective way, which I encounter less often in Bristol.

The storm abated on the Monday and we flew back to Bristol. I got the train to London to meet up with Trina, who several weeks ago had secured my agreement to accompanying her to a gig by MOR jazz-lite crooner Myles Sanko at Ronnie Scott's. His neediness made me cringe a bit, as he repeatedly asked "is there love in the house?" Love for him, it meant. £37 for a bottle of the house red.

We slept in the same bed, her in her red slinky nightie. With her head on my chest and my arm round her shoulder, she said, "no, I'm getting a bit turned on," and went to sleep a few inches away.

This morning, she sent a text saying that she wanted to cancel our week at a house music event in Tenerife next February. She loves me; I can't reciprocate it. "Mel's like me, but without the hassle."