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.

The idea was to see Morecambe in their promotion play-off final against Newport County. I would meet the girls in London. Where and when exactly, I didn't know. But we've all got phones nowadays. My eldest had my ticket on hers.

On the bus to the station, I realised I'd left my normal phone, a reliable old Nokia with Snake on it, at my house. However, I had brought my other phone. It's the cheapest possible "smartphone" I could find when I was failing to teach Kazakh children anything. My head of department told me that everyone communicates by WhatsApp so I'd need one.

I rarely use it, so bought a SIM card for it at the station, but it wouldn't register, so on a sludgey train internet connection, I was forcing emails out to my eldest, each short text taking a disconnection and reconnection to send, trying to arrange a rendezvous.

In the meantime, friendly Newport County fans were as deprecating of their team as I was about Morecambe. We shared our drink and shook hands.

The day before, I had suggested to the girls that we meet in the Wetherspoons at St Pancras. In there, a barmaid came up to me, and said "Lubin?" "Well, looby. Why?" "Have you got three daughters going to Wembley this afternoon?" "Yes" "They'll meet you at Wembley Central."

"Thank you, thank you, that's very lovely of you!" I disconnected and reconnected again. "Barmaid's just told me where you are. Fab initiative Eldest! I'm just having some machos. I'll see you there!"

I followed it up. "Yes, I'm having some machos. They're called Rupert and Richard. I'll see you once I've finished with them."

Delighted at my eldest's initiative, I headed to Wembley Park instead. At a different station to where she said they'd be, I was frustrated and sad that I couldn't see them. At the portals of Wembley stadium, homely accents all around me, I turned away at three o'clock and walked back down the concrete avenue back to the Underground station. There was a crappy sports bar place showing the match, but the bouncer wouldn't let me in because "you have to register on the app." I pitched for sympathy, showing him my phone, aiming to stimulate a pleasure at indulging the incompetence of 50somethings, but he was unmoved.

On the train home I met Sexy Ex Boss and her husband on the train, which postponed my disconsolate feelings until I got home. They had a spare ticket to Bristol, which was a relief. I don't like risking my expired train pass on the trains of the company from which I was dismissed. I told them my tale of incompetence and disappointment. They got me my second free pint of the day.

In my flat, I found my phone, all innocent and grey, which had sat the drama out on the settee. It was showing a text from Mel saying that she supposed that I was celebrating somewhere.

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.