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.

Our holiday in Tenby, in a flat with a wide view of the harbour and the pastel-coloured crescent of houses facing it, was characterised by hot weather and an effortless harmony amongst our family and its now naturalised superaddition.

Looking for hats to ward off the Pembrokeshire sun, we wandered into a shop with an incongruous concatenation of displays: sunglasses and keyrings abutted a large glass cupboard full of murderous knives; in the back, next to the hats, were penis sunglasses and boob beach balls. We named it The Sex Shop.

We took the boat over to Caldey Island. There's a very continental looking 1930s monastery there now, a revival of a much older one. Its first abbot came to an unseemly end by falling first into a drunken stupor and then a well. They were Trappists, and he was wobbling to his dormitory after a night on their homebrew.

I had a dish of crab claws, white wine sauce and samphire, to eat which I was given a pair of pliers and a narrow shovel-like instrument. The meat was delicious, and it was good sport to crack and gouge into the very hard claws, my fingers getting greased and flecked.

But it ended badly. Almost home, on a packed train with masks and social distancing equally ditched. I was surrounded at my table by girls going for a weekend in Bristol -- "I've booked the table for six o'clock, because we've booked tables for eight in the past and by then everyone's absolutely plastered" -- and behind me, rugby club lads going to a stag do in Cardiff. One was in a complete gimp suit, a retortion to emasculate the demand for a mere face covering; another, bull-necked in a floral dress.

I chanced my outdated rail pass at the station where I was to change, in the search for more alcohol. At the ticket barrier, the guard noticed its expired status. "I'll let you out, but I'm taking this off you."

Cardiff had an airy, liberating feel. I sat girl-watching on the terrace in Wetherspoons, and texted Wendy and Kitty. "Kin ell, Cardiff girls. It's all minidresses and play suits here. I'm so appalled that I am watching them carefully in case there is any untoward behaviour."

In a way I'm relieved. The inevitable end came quietly. But up to last Saturday, I've had thousands of pounds worth of travel out of it.

I am in the northeast for a few days from Thursday, as it's my brother's fiftieth. The care home owners, frustrated now, see no legal way of preventing him meeting up with his family. I'll also be able to see Kim, who lives near Middlesbrough. A month ago, she warned me that my plan to invite Trina was "a disaster."

As Kim is a woman who talks sense, I rang to sound my worries out on Wendy. She suggested the radical option which I rarely consider -- being honest with all parties. "Ring Trina now. Go on, do it now."

I'd had a couple of pints of cider at this point so felt more able to cope with the call. We chatted on the periphery for a couple of minutes before I jumped in. "Just to put you in the know Trina, I'm going out with someone now, someone I met at Parks and Carks."

She surprised me by how she took it in her stride. A minute or so later, she moved onto another topic and carried on talking. I know she can't dissemble, so I breathed more easily after that phone call.

Since coming back from Tenby, I've been sleeping even more badly than I normally do, hardly a mysterious state of affairs for someone who pours liquid sugar down his neck before every bedtime. Yesterday at work, I served a cheeseburger "with salad please" containing just the salad.

I've got some diazepam put away for a rainy day, and took my first ever dose of it last night. It was like being pushed gently into a soft bed of ease. No worries, no guilt-dreams. And I woke up this morning with my pecker all bushy-tailed.

I am boyishly pleased with my new scooter, a more powerful one to get me up and down a hilly city like Bristol. On my way home last night I passed a thirtysomething couple. "She's a belligerent old cunt anyway," he said.

Going at less than walking pace thorough one of the large parks that decorate Bristol, I am behind an untrammelled child. His dad intervenes. "Elijah! Elijah! Move out of the way for the man."

One mustn't mock middle class children's names because that will only lead us to a useless discord.

It was meant to be the little seaside town in Brittany, the eleventh year with Kirsty and me girl gang, but Tenby is stepping up to the plate. See you in a week or so.

Ken, a mobility scooter-bound man who is retired but has found a new full-time occupation as a smoker, tells me with his authoritative sententiousness that there has been a hit and run incident involving an electric scooter. Violence, theft, blood.

"Life's risky, then you die, Ken," but his miserable monologue was not to be interrupted. Fines, no helmets, dangers, police. I forwarded no further comments. Fucking miserable cunt. But then, he enjoys the the resentful, nostalgic life of the OAP, and who am I to argue against anyone else's pleasure?

Sitting in the communal lounge to watch the end of Spain v Poland, he surprised and tensed me by coming to sit next to me. The football has been boring so far, apparently. "Ah but you should have seen Belgium v Denmark. Second fastest goal in Euro history, one minute forty-two seconds. End to end stuff." He was having none of it, all this involvement in anything. It's all over for you Ken, isn't it, apart from smoking and gossiping.

He sat there panting, up, and shallowly down, air fighting through the tar. I made regular comments on the play to shut him up.

I got the 7am coach to London to pick up the new scooter. I went up the stairs to a cramped first floor flat in Camden. There was a massive keyboard shuttered at either side by computers, and a framed gold disc on the wall. He'd had a hand in writing one of the hits for Firenze e la Macchina. I was impressed.

I scootered round Hampstead Heath to Paddington, where someone had understandably responded to living in Slough by throwing themselves under a train, so there were no trains for some hours. "Depression," said Julie Birchall once, "is the highest form of vanity." I'd substitute "suicides". Your life being shit doesn't give you a right to fuck others' up, not to gift nightmares to the train driver, who has possibly driven his last journey.

An elderly hardline mask wearer tucked fingerfuls of her sandwich under her covering to chew it. I ventured a comment on her Guardian cryptic crossword and she asked me where I was from. "Lancashire," I said. They were too. I put my hand out and she took my fingers only. "Oooh, we're not supposed to do that are we!"

The trains started running again after a couple of hours. The conductor made a fuss about my scooter and unplugged it from the socket when I was sat down and couldn't see him doing it.

No time, as I had hoped, to shower and change, so scootered straight over to where Mel and me were meeting my brother and his family for an Indian. The waiter kept saying "amazing" all the time. "Chicken korma?" "Amazing". "Six poppadums? Amazing." He pointed out a place for my scooter at the end of a long banquette seat and watched me struggle with lifting a twenty kilo scooter into its place.

My brother was on a high (in as far as teetotal Christians get high), having come from seeing his team win by penalties to get re-elected into the old fourth division. The food was bland Anglo-Indian, the waiter was amazing, but my chemist nephew told us about a project he's working on about how to reduce the use of fertiliser by crafting phenomerones to attract pests to what they think is a honeypot of sex, then killing them. My niece is studying forensic psychology. "Don't tell her too much," said my brother. I was shocked when the bill for me and Mel came in at £81 and asked the amazing waiter to enumerate the amazing items to us. I'm not used to these amazing Bristol prices.

This morning my brother emailed to say that his researcher son had tested positive for covid and was in bed, all weak, so "we've all got to self-isolate." I wasn't sure who was included in that plural, but it certainly won't be me. I rang Mel to tell her. "I wish you hadn't told me in one way." "I can't be arsed be with any of it any more. I'm pretending I didn't get that email, Mel. We've both been jabbed, I'm carrying on as normal."

I rang my brother to commiserate, but he was quite unconcerned about being inside. I forget that not everyone wants to go out as much as me sometimes.

The new scooter is a bone-rattler and is getting sold. It judders so much I've got an ache in my left thigh. Once you've got one though, they're as difficult to give up as I suppose people find cars.

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.