The rhubarb glut continues in its fecundity. I've found a recipe for a rhubarb bread and butter pudding requiring port, which sounds voluptuous enough to be a starter for sex.

To Leeds, to see middle daughter in her play. More in hope than expectation of his being able to come, I invited along The Singing Organ Grinder of this parish, who has recently moved to Leeds. I was pleased to have a male buttress against my familial coterie, who can be a bit self-assuredly female en masse.

First though, a drink, and welcome to Yorkshire: £2.49 for Landlord in the Pack Horse. The man next to me was anxious, waiting for his friend to return from "nipping out". "I'm not really a drinker myself. My dad was an alcoholic and he beat my mother. He didn't beat me but it was psychological. He was a horrible man, and my mother was the sweetest woman."

The Playhouse's long bar and foyer, where, the last time I was there, I asked the pianist to play A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, was bleached beyond necessity, a stark, inhuman rectangle, policed by a mask-enforcing vigilante steward.

Not for the first time, middle daughter had to work hard to breathe life into an unconvincing and inauthentic script. She was well reviewed though, especially in the Guardian: "As wide-eyed new squat resident Loz in Alice Nutter’s ode to dole-funded creativity, looby's middle daughter is an especially captivating stage presence. She brings the right mix of youthful enthusiasm, tender vulnerability and spiky edges to this engaging story of a young woman trying to figure out who she is amid the social and political tumult of the 80s."

We all ducked out of the second half. As we were sitting drinking from our covid-resistant plastic glasses, me and the Organ Grinder were rounded up with the gang, to leave to find a bar. PC Maschera rushed up to split up the gang as the nine of us as we were leaving together, panic rising in her controlling breast, before middle daughter said, catholically, "we're all one family!" Me and OG took our drinks with us, and we lagged behind them, me rather embarrassed about involving OG in street drinking.

The Organ Grinder had to leave, while the rest of us had a pricey pizza. The daughters and friends left for a Eurovision party in Leeds. I got Kirsty through the barriers on my outdated rail pass.

The train to Lancaster at about 6pm on Saturday was full of maskless, tipsy, chatty people, social distancing out the window. Girls on the next table with plastic glasses and bottles of Prosecco. Lads standing around with their tinnies. It was like coming up for air.

Next day, I met Wendy in the park. We sat in one of the shelters that the Victorians built in its many little dells. They might have been designed for snogging, and I still feel a physical pull towards her lovely slim body, ragged hair, and way of talking.

"Well...", she announced. "I've got a fella." "Oh! I'm so jea--- I mean, happy for you!" "Well, we were occasional lovers while I was with T---. Monogamy has never been my forte. He is going to get it."

Stomach pangs. The reach of your promiscuity doesn't extend to me.

"And I found him on farce book, and we started exchanging the odd message and it got a bit flirty, and now it's utterly pornographic. 'You want to do that to me? Oh I don't mind!' It's lovely to be desired."

I don't feel particularly desired by Mel. I feel that I'll do, as she does for me; which is far better than the Wendy-ache from which I suffered for years. I'm very happy with Mel. I have to resist telling her this, because I don't want to start a verbal competition of affection.

A Hare Krsna man collars me and starts talking to me about something. Purification might have been involved, because I remember saying that I'm not looking for progress up the slippery pole of self-realisation.

Impatient to get to the point, he asks me for some money. I tell him I'll give him the cost of the bottle of cider from which I was drinking, so £2.49. In the modern style of soliciting, he gets his wireless card reader out. "Could you make it a tenner?" I tell him he's a cheeky bugger and he types in 2,4,9.

At half past two in the morning, I text Hayley, telling her that the new speed is very nice. She rings immediately and asks me over. I have transport now -- my new electric scooter -- so I'm there twenty minutes later and we have a pleasantly retro night of music, speed and both types of crack. The journey back, on quiet Saturday morning roads at 7am, is sensual, vivid.

The pubs are open inside again. Wethers at Temple Meads was almost full by midday, contrary to the doomsayers' predictions of (read: hope for) permanent social coldness.

Everything quickly settled to type: bits of food on the carpet, middleaged couples who have come out for a good afternoon of silent texting, the gay male couple having an irritatingly considerate conversation, and the ciderheads with their pockmarked, rubicund faces, who sit yards and a world apart from the office workers' striving positivity, before they go back to work for companies which offer Solutions.

In the cider bar, the usual conditional, reluctant welcome from the landlady. A man sits next to me without asking and tells me about his alcoholism, how his stomach started swelling up one day as he was sat in the same pub -- "I was on about twenty pints in those days" -- and how he felt more upset about the death of his cat than that of his estranged wife. I have become fond of several cats in my life so I played my own stories of feline bereavement. Then, his friend -- Cat -- rang. "He's got a scar on his head that looks like a cat's arse, so we call him Cat."

I meet Hayley off the train. She's looking very attractive, with a little bit of blue eye-liner. She's got a large, old teddy bear, but no ticket and I watch her make a gesture with her one free hand to which the gate assistant responds by opening the barrier for her.

"How the fuck did you do that?" "You liked that didn't you?", a sentence which made the thought of her taking my cock out of her mouth flash across my mind. "I said I'd just got out of hospital. Seventy-five quid saved."

We have a pint in Wethers. She surprises me by paying for it. She talks, drifting off when I do. She's waiting for the man, and her eyes are on the phone. The one appointment we always make.

She leaves and I wander over to the first person ever to talk to me socially in Bristol. He used to take a little desk thermometer out with him and place it on the table, along with his own beermats. Neither are allowed now, banned under the hysterical general licence to invent regulations that have no justification attached to them. But there's a glow settling around the end of the day now which can't be sullied.

Hayley rings, the day after her deadline for moving out, asking me for the number of the Man with Van who moved me. A couple of days later, and after some pleading, I walk to hers, my hot feet moaning at the prolongation of their shift after twelve hours at work. In the lift, there is a poster requesting "no spitting".

Her new place is spacious, with a living room showing off views to the rise up to the postcardy bit of Bristol, but has the bleakness of a recently eviscerated flat. She has no sheets on the bed. The lightbulbs stare autistically at the white vinyl flooring, working together to dissuade a woman who wants everything to be done, rather than to do it, from making the flat her home.

We make plans for a decorating party which will never happen. She'll lapse back to her boyfriend's, which is already her de facto home address. We share a bottle of Pieroni. I listen. I give her the couple of grams for which she said she was going to pay me.

Resolutions for henceforth: money from Hayley in my hand first; only then the handover. At times, she's a taker.

Looking at my leaky bank account the other day, I calculated that, in the last thirty days, I have spent eighty-seven pounds on bus fare.

I wrest myself from Mel's arms at 7am to look at an electric scooter on ebay. I trump all bids with four seconds to go, the slowness of Mel's phone's internet connection working excitingly to delay my hurdling over the others. The scooter arrived when I was out, and was taken in by someone in the same block as me.

When I collected it, he wanted to take a picture of me with it as "some people claim it's not been received. Let's have a nice big smile." I felt like some starlet being ogled in a soft porn photoshoot, certainly the first time in my fifty-seven years that I have felt like a starlet in a soft porn photoshoot. "They're actually illegal you know. I know they're everywhere but they're illegal on the public roads."

"It's not a scooter mate, it's full of weed." My joke, intended as a stopper for his hectoring mouth by making him think that he'd been harbouring fifteen kilos of cannabis in his flat overnight, went unnoticed, and he finally released the scooter to my possession.

I "assembled" it, in a manual operation at the limits of my engineering skills involving no fewer than four screws and an Allen key. It looked tall, black, and daunting. But today, under Mel's supervision I took it up and down our close. I think it's going to be jolly good fun.

I told middle daughter about it, saying that I'll feel happier once I've got a helmet. "You'll have to go into a shop for that. You and mum have bequeathed us very small heads. I can't get that sort of thing off the internet."

I can't remember the last time that due to my impatience to get everything off, my trousers, pants and socks ended up in a sort of rolled up sex ball on the floor. I fucking love it, when all the preliminaries are disposed of, and the murmuring collapses into an abandoned, inelegant undressing. Then afterwards we sat there in this sweaty Ready Brek glow of love. I'd made us a rhubarb crumble shortly before this episode. It was quite tart and Mel enjoyed more than one mouthful.

I won't mention this to Trina when I see her though. It's my brother's fiftieth in July and I was going to use the day to present Mel to my clan, but the care home in which my brother resides under benevolent control has changed the date for the barbeque to one which clashes with a family do for her.

So I've invited Trina instead, who is glad to come. I don't know if I'm prolonging her frustration by doing this. I know what it's like to feel corroded by unrequited attraction, and how the friendliness of the desired one can add more hurt. But she gets on well with my mum, and I need a drinker-in-arms to rescue me, once nightfall comes, from my family's teetotalism.

It's half past ten and I've just got in after work. Hayley has been tugging at me -- six missed calls; texts pleading with me to ring her as soon as I've left work. I've done thirty-two hours shoe-horned into three days, in a works canteen where I serve large dollops of unhealthy food to large unhealthy men. I'm low on resources to spend on others.

Upstairs on the bus with aching feet and a bottle of cider, watching Bristol on a determined Saturday night out. Women whose feet will feel worse than mine by midnight; skirts tightening and riding up. How glad I am to see them.

I ring Hayley, who is on track 1 of side A again, Boyfriend Woes. She wants: me to come round, five pounds for a bottle of wine, and for someone to do her move tomorrow; the implication being, me. She's done nothing about it by herself despite several weeks' notice of the date. "Well, I don't know," she says. "There's Wayne over the road... maybe I could ring the police, they're sometimes nice."

I am not giving up my day with Mel tomorrow to rescue you Hayley.

At home, mid-shower, she rings again. I ring her back, saying that I'll put a fiver in now, exaggerating my tiredness and annoyance. I put seven pounds in her bank account. All is silent.

There is rejoicing in the House of looby. Middle daughter, who, at the age of one, almost ruptured her mother's stomach by bouncing on it at 5am, announcing "I, awake!" -- has landed a proper acting job at a big Northern producing theatre. She announced it from Leeds, where she'd been for her "third recall", which I am guessing means fourth audition.

I am radiant like a heater with joy for her, and a fervid hope that this will be the start of her making a living out of what she's always wanted to do. She's a dogged and constantly optimistic Lancashire lass who's had no advantages at all in a world in which working class candidates are filtered out by endless train fares, unpaid work, and assumptions of money available to pay for every bit of candidacy, which neither me nor her mum can provide.

I don't know how much more inspection my out of date rail pass can withstand, but I want to join the whole looby clan, who will cancel everything to see her when it's put on -- before we're shunted into the pub after the show while she goes off to glitter.

I've got a few days in a works canteen. I'm on my own most of the time and the shifts are up to twelve hours long. I had got to the age of fifty-seven without flipping a burger or cooking bacon.

The pricing seems to be determined by the closeness of the manager's friendships with the individuals, and several people bridled at me charging them the published prices, so I've had to draw up a long list of concessions. I was told this morning that the manager likes me, unfortunately.

In Castle Park after work, the hot sun lit a model of social inclusion so inclusive it could have been staged.

It was great to see some of the familiar denizens again: the man who looks a bit like Jamiroquai was perched on his bit of wall and got talking to the peripatetic habitué of Wethers; the man who's overdone the henna a bit and who is left alone to sleep in between intervals of talking to himself and swinging a small bottle of vodka like a pendulum.

Two Muslim women sat on a bench next to an East European couple who were parking an over-stuffed pushchair, with a baby lost somewhere amongst the Wilko bags. We just lacked the sixtysomething who rides around on an Elvised-up bike with a large speaker belting out stadium rock classics.

Someone saw me struggling to get my cider open on a wee jut of stone, and hailed me. "I'll do it with my lighter," he said, before failing to find his lighter. From another group, a lighter was thrown to him and he took my cider and popped it like champagne. A man in a tight vest swaggered past and... asked to borrow a lighter.

Someone sat down with our shapely protagonist, who said he'd just got out of prison after five years. One or the other was trying to angle it towards drugs. "No, I don't really do that any more, well only you know, occasionally," almost apologising. An irritant -- "I don't really find exams difficult. I've never had an exam in which I've got less than 80%" - buzzed off once his time was up, to fret with Excel in an office.

Once the workers bees return to prison, the atmosphere loosens a bit. There was drum and bass from one quarter, house from another, and there was something else which I couldn't identify. Unfortunately it also loosens the bladder.

Hayley and boyf turned up and started snogging on the grass, because I like being tested for jealousy on a hot afternoon, so to escape the erotic tension I went to have a piss behind the old Bank of England building and laughingly, in cahoots with them, I had to wait for two girls to finish.

Yesterday, the pubs -- outdoor areas only -- were allowed to re-open in England, and with it the chance to dive down to my socio-economic level after a year of pretending I find walking interesting, and half-heartedly trying to identify trees. The weather made it a keen pleasure, but I stayed for three pints.

Every table was taken by half eleven. Couple on the table next to me had been there since half nine. How I've missed earwigging on other people's conversation, and the peculiar pleasure of being on your own with other people.

Man on table 1 to man on table 2: "Fucking 'ell mate, been a year when we can't go out and now you're sat there with your fucking headphones on. Why you doing that?" Another man from table 1: "Cos he"s a cunt."