The bride and I

In the Registry Office, a large laugh went round the room when the Registrar asked if anyone knew of any lawful impediments to the marriage. Led by a fiddler, we moved on to the garden at the Sun, clapping along the road.

Someone asked me if I wanted to go halves on a bottle of Pepsi. Its familiar anaesthetic in my lips, the cold, voluptuous nature of swallowing. It made me demonstrative and swear a great deal, but several of us were in the same state. I like the pleasure it gives you in your limbs and how you become aware of your clothes touching your skin. I had a bit of a laddish conversation with the best man about whether granite or slate is best for racking hifi separates, telling him about my hybrid valve-transistor amp that you have to turn on forty-five minutes before you want to play a record.

Out of control middle aged people

The dancing started and I was somewhat preoccupied with Vicky, the girl who was very flirty, sitting on my lap to snog me, at the Northern Soul do in April. She looked gorgeous, in a tight-fitting red and white, slightly Chinese-y, thigh length dress, and brown cork wedges. "Hello! What a lovely dress, Vicky," I said. And we didn't talk much afterwards. She's not interested in me and I'm spoken for now, but I enjoyed the flirting, and who doesn't like being liked?

I bet you look good on the dancefloor

I danced for hours. There was only one decent male dancer (and a couple of triers), so plenty of women. Vicky's a good dancer, which just makes her sexier. It's striking how accurately you can feel different types of like and desire being expressed in dancing. Reflecting upon this in a mature and articulate way, with the subtle tools of expression with which one is equipped after a night of red wine, cider, coke and speed, I wrote on Erica's Facebook page: "Vicky Ryan is fucking fit." One could refine the sentiment's expression but its substance is surely incontrovertible.

My visit to my Mum and Dad's was curtailed by a day as the girls wanted to go to their best friend's birthday party. None of us involved minded our stay being shortened. My Dad is needy, unwilling to let my Mum away from his side even to go to post a letter. He fell over and strained his groin recently and has only just begun walking again. The house looks a bit like an old people's home now, with zimmer frames downstairs and up, a contraption to allow for easier sitting on the toilet, and another to perch on the bath.

Watching two black athletes neck and neck in the 800 metres, Dad said "These darkies are pretty good at running aren't they?", which I suppose is at least a compliment, and an improvement upon the bit of East Asian strategic analysis he came out with last Christmas when he explained the tension between the two Koreas as being the fault of "those Jews and all their money." He means well but finds all social interaction difficult. I don't think he has a single friend whom he sees.

On Wednesday night I got myself a pass to visit Kim, who emailed to check: "Ok then marra, are we still on for tonight?". She walked into the pub looking as tall, confident, sexy and dangerous as she ever was, wearing a red and white check cotton thigh-length dress with little bows on the sleeves and at the back of her waist, bluey-grey tights and black ankle boots. "The Olympics is just a huge case of OCD," she said. A faint look of intimidation crossed the faces of the lone middleaged men when she clonked erectly to the bar to ask the barmaid if she could close the window. We went back to hers, moved up a gear, switched the lights off, and turned the room into Home Disco. Her dancing is sexy and fluid.

Up at 7am to get back to my parents and the girls. As the girls and I we were preparing to leave, Dad got into a huff as Mum said she'd walk us to the station. "Oh, so you're going to leave me by myself?" "Well, for twenty minutes, yes."

"I don't know how you have the patience Mum," I said. "No, I don't either sometimes." On the train back, before spilling half a tumbler of beer over her, I was chatting to the woman sat opposite. "...But this country," she said, "was left in a terrible mess. We've got to sort it out." This insidious Tory propaganda that they are nobly clearing up the consequences of financial mismanagement of the previous administration, by impoverishing the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, appears to be working its way into the national consciousness.

Back in Lancaster, the girls were telling Kirsty about the party. "You know that D's parents are quite modern hippyish?," said Jenny. "Well, when D was in nursery they gave her a book called 'Questions About Sex'." D was proud of her book and took it to nursery and carried it round all day, despite the efforts of the staff to get her to put it in a locker.

I was 12.5% of the audience at the Dukes for a film, Swandown, by Britain's foremost literary Olympiad dissenter, Iain Sinclair, in which he and Andrew Kötting take (it is implied, steals) a pedalo in the shape of a giant swan and pedal it from Hastings to the Olympic site. Even in this respectful setting, The Noisy Crisp Eater was masticating down my ear in the row behind. Finally untensing as his tongue scoped his mouth for any last fragments of bolus, I was irritated newly by his getting up and leaving the cinema. He came back with another packet.

In gloomy news that I am not even going to go into, the D*ck*ns event is back on.

This morning, just as I'm going round to the girls' house, I get a phone call from the D*ck*ns event organiser. I let it ring; I hadn't the energy to pretend and be lively and responsive. To my relief, it has been postponed. The whole thing, from its inception to its postponement, has been a reification of N's self-absorption, the cost of which has been a constant inattention to the practical details of its presentation, which has now proved fatal.

The piece still isn't completely written, even at rehearsal stage, neither have we secured anything like the funding we need. Instead, N delightedly, repeatedly announced "I've found another young man!" (for the cast), wasted endless days and weeks on meandering around the text, and rehearsals were largely a vanity project rather than a planned programme of concentrated work. Even before this announcement, I'd made up my mind not to work with him again.

The lovely, out-of-time, weekend with Kitty and Melissa ended with some drinks under the grinding kitchen extractor fan in the Borough's beer garden on Sunday afternoon. The previous night they'd gone to the Yorkshire House for a long-running gothy night called Dark Side of the Lune (the Lune being the river that runs through Lancaster). The night bore up to its name.

Melissa warned Kitty about the toilets. "There's a smell in there. Of fetid vag", before she got talking to an enormously fat girl who was sitting with a bucket of popcorn (in a pub?) wedged between her splayed legs, feeding herself and then licking her palm. At the end of the conversation she proffered her saliva and sugar coated hand to Melissa. Meantime, someone was vomiting all over the bar.

I said goodbye to K and M, and the chemically postponed sleep won over for a couple of hours, defeating my attempts to see how Dorothea was dealing with Casaubon in Middlemarch. At the girls' house, we watched Usain Bolt win the 100m, and Oscar Pistorius come last in his heat. I was glad about both. How is Pistorius allowed to compete with able-bodied athletes? The man has artifical legs, which gives him a ground on which to compete denied to others.

Meta: if you'd like to comment on this blog using a .pl or .ru address, you'll have to contact me first. The spam from those countries is getting out of hand so I've blocked them.

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. I'm taking inches when yesterday centimetres would do. But fuck it, Kitty and Melissa are up and it's the weekend, and I've got a righteous desert of sobriety coming up at my Mum and Dad's next week, the highlight of which will be bunking off on Wednesday evening to see Kim in Durham. It's been a long time since me and Kim exited ourselves from normal life for a few days, as we used to do, and although that won't happen, since I have to present it as a sober visit to a friend, I'm looking forward to seeing her.

We went to the Northern Soul night at the Bowerham. Bit of a funny moment when Kitty said I was being arsey, which caught me up short because I honestly didn't think I was behaving unreasonably, but then I thought that when one's been caning the phet a bit one can underestimate the arsiness of one's actions. Lack of sleep, unacknowledged tetchiness. "Do you want to go and have a dance?" she said, and then finally, I understood that they wanted to have a chat by themselves. I think. I think that's what it was, but I wasn't sure.

It didn't matter. We were all chatting again after a while, but with Kitty still urging me onto the dancefloor. "I can't do it as an exhibition," I said. Northern Soul isn't really my cup of tea, but it's the nearest available relative in Lancaster to my first love, Modern Soul, but no-one outside of the subculture knows what Modern Soul is.

I got talking to the people at our table. The bloke was telling me about his thirty-five year marriage to his wife, who was to my left, and about the transience of contemporary relationships. I told him about Trina, and how I have no idea how long it will last.

Kitty and Melissa left to go down the Yorkshire House, which will be all heavy rock and serious music. I've got a bottle of Ch. de Londis and am rather tempted by what's on the table over there.

I feel a bit odd, as though I'm not quite in the world. I had a bottle of Riesling before I went out and the drinks and other refreshments flowed liberally yesterday, since Kitty and Melissa are in town.

In their hotel room, Kitty asks my opinion about a dress. It's a lovely, flattering black and red dress to below the knee. Selfishly, my only slight disappointment was that she wore a vest underneath it to reduce the depth of the neckline, but it's close-fitting and it shows her off well, especially her narrow waist. Kitty's being chatted up by her plumber at the moment. Her nine-year-old daughter, intending a compliment, said "You should go out with him mummy. He shows that he doesn't care about looks."

We powder our noses and go out for a drink to wait for Melissa. There's a big mirror in the place, and so, facing away from them, we watch a little drama where a man is being unpleasant and trying to force himself on a woman at the bar, something he stops when a miniskirted girl with a torso like a stack of tyres reappears; on a sofa, a badly dressed man is wasting an attractive blonde woman, more interested in his mobile phone. The place is trying hard but feels a little bleak and I'm glad when Kitty says that we could move to the Stonewell. Of what we talked about, I have no recollection.

Melissa walks in, a picture of monochrome sophistication and understated sexiness. Her beautiful long hair, neither brown nor ginger, is falling over the wide straps of a knee length dress in a fairy thick grey fabric, with a three inch glossy black border at its bottom. Off to one side round her waist she's tied a long, black belt. I can't help an unexpressed, boastful thought, thinking of being seen with them.

In the morning, I find an abandoned message to Trina on my phone, detailing the ways in which she wouldn't have got much sleep last night if she'd been here, before trailing off, unsent.

I thought I was going to be doing my first session at Really Late by myself on Wednesday but there was a Venezualan woman sitting in with me. We talked about cultural dislocation and the different ways in which male-female relationships are played out in our respective countries, but I prefer working with 70s Pop Magazine Pinup Woman, with her chatter and long hair and tight jeans. I've got to go on a domestic violence awareness course, just a basic one, for receptionists like me. I like working at Really Late: it tries to induce goodwill into the world. I just hope my rather varied criminal past, once it emerges, will not mean a premature retirement.

My Belgian Beer Tasting is all booked now, so if you're in the area on Tuesday 23rd October at 7.00, come along to the Pizza Margherita and I will share what I know about Belgian beer, with examples.