I'm grateful to Mr Mags for his enquiries about updates, and I apologise here for failing to meet my own deadline. Thanks for asking Mr Mags, I really appreciate it.

Kirsty, our girls and I went to our usual place in Brittany for our hols. Two-and-a-half weeks, which rushed by, like a few days. The eldest had to fly to France from Japan, via Hanoi. She'd been there for ten months with her girlfriend, half-working, doing campsite work were they put you up in exchange for a few hours' work a day. She arrived earlier than any of us and walked into the village and back (none of us drive) to get us pasta, a sauce and some wine, after a three-day journey and several time zones, wearing all her clothes and lugging a huge rucksack and a case.

At the beginning we stayed in a sort of half-caravan, half-tent, called by the campsite, a "'tit home" a small home, yes I know, makes perfect sense, colloquial French, but still, the phrase is amusing to us; in fact it makes us titter.

We were watching the England game against Ghana and at 11pm the German man in the motorhome next door came over and asked us to be quiet. I didn't think we were being noisy but it was enough to upset him so we were like church mice after that.

Then on Saturday we moved into a proper "mobil-home", one we've stayed in several years, with its garden with the trees and the birds who come pecking hopefully on your table after meals. It was very hot, and one night my eldest took some cushions out and slept outdoors.

There's a Dutch-French couple who for several years have stayed on the site near us. This year, we finally started chatting. The woman is very attractive, circa 60 maybe, wears above-the-knee skirts showing her lovely legs, and simple, buttoned tops, and she has the most gorgeous hair, dark blonde in a rough growing-out bob. She is the belle of the campsite, chatty, friendly -- as is he. They always have a little vase of flowers on their table outside. At the end of our holiday we had some little beers left over, so I went round to their caravan saying would mind if I snogged your wife like the rest of these beers and some olive oil? He insisted on saying that they would keep them until we turned up next year, same time, same place.

On the morning we left I left them a note in my best French, which isn't great but it'll do, saying that I'd perfectly understand if one night they wanted to drink them and how it was a pleasure to talk to them. I then put a kiss at the end of it which I regret a bit, too American, but never mind, we've made a nice relationship there. She said that when we all walk up the the village, we look "rayonnante."

I live in a housing association flat and you can put in for a transfer if you like. I've been waiting eighteen months after I requested to go back home, to Lancaster, and on Friday I got a phone call offering me a flat there. I went to see it. It's tiny and in a bit of an arse-end of Lancaster; I haven't got a job there, and it's £778 a month -- more than I'm paying at the moment. "Social housing", yeah right.

I'd be giving up a good job here -- 37.5 hours but all in three days, so lots of free time -- a decent flat in central Bristol and above all, Mel, who is struggling with what amounts to her abandonment. I can't say much really, apart from reiterating that nothing trumps my desire to spend my last few years working, and my retirement, in my home town. Not her, not the job, not the flat. I'll be diving into the jobless void but I'm not fussy about what I do just to this massive rent. We're going to attempt to maintain the relationship at a distance, but four hours on the train is different to a half hour cycle ride, and she doesn't think it's sustainable.

It makes me sad too. But we've arranged to go to see a DJ that I like who's coming to Lancaster in September, when she gets back from the island in Greece where she spent most of her adult life. Kirsty's coming as well -- the girls' mum -- so a bit of Tolstoyan social easing will be called for, but we'll be on this and that, which might make it easier, or turn it into a scene, one of the two.

Off to Brittany for three weeks with the gals. See you next month!

Me and Mel went to Weymouth for a couple of days. It's an old-fashioned family seaside resort, with proper cafes serving enormous breakfasts that come with chips. There was a civility about it that is unknown in many English seaside towns.

My Housing Association has a network of guest flats you can stay in for £15 a night. One day was hot and sunny -- ice creams on the beach; the next was freezing, and my hands went a pre-death blotch of dark blue and creme. We went to Chesil Beach, which is impressive if you like miles of pebbles. I was relieved when Mel called the expedition off. We sat in an old pub which had had its history scoured out of it, where they remove the cutlery and napkins before you have a pint.

Back in Weymouth I used my pubdar, which unfailingly locates the best pub in any town within half an hour. I had to do some gentle persuading to get Mel into the Looks A Bit Rough Inn.

We met a couple who used to drink in my local in Bristol, before it was ruined by the new landlord. He's already got a pub up the road, all rainbow flags and inclusivity, and took down the Irish flag over the bar, removed all the Celtic and Hibernian memorabilia and the Guinness, and replaced the Bass at £3.80 with Ponytail and Bun Craft Lager at £5.25. It's dead now. I've just looked in, Friday evening of a Bank Holiday, and there's one person in.

We bumped into them a couple of times later on. When we parted I went to shake his hand, which I don't think he was expecting. It was only a momentary awkwardness but it preyed on me a bit that I'd misperformed our parting. I don't like saying farewell by doing some sort of airy waving away, especially as we'd been sharing a couple of tales over a few pints. They've got a severely disabled son and they'd managed to get a precious three days away from all the saliva.

The following day we went there again, a couple of hours before the train left. There was a party of (white English) women there with balloons and cards, when a distinguished looking Indian man walked in carrying a tureen of something. They started laying out a buffet, and I wondered whether we should leave. The "Indian" man, who sounded like he came from Hampshire, said "it's my wife's 60th, and if you'd like to stay, please help yourself to the buffet." Alas, we had to get our train.

I had a leak coming through from the flat above me the other week. For several days I thought it was the fridge, but I couldn't find anything wrong with it. Eventually I traced the source to a hole around a pipe entering the airing cupboard -- which is where I store my flour. I have a breadmaker and buy 25kg sacks of it, for economy, and the leak had wetted the bottom of the sack.

Once it was all sorted the scheme manager sent me an apology, and said she'd ordered me another 25kg of flour. Later, she popped in with a £50 Tesco voucher. To be honest I'd exaggerated the extent of the spoilage and probably only a couple of kilos is unfit to be used; so now I have almost 50kg of flour in my flat. If you'd like an organic wholemeal loaf, just let me know. There's some rhubarb wine as well.

A day off. It's just gone seven a.m. and I've given up trying to sleep. Mel is laying in the bed over there. She's rehearsing some of her repertoire of grunts, honks, whistles and snorts, all modulated through a strangulated viscous phlegm.

I am taking my repose under the beautiful old trees in Victoria Square in Clifton. I forgot my bottle opener, so I approach a group of four girls and one lad, who were popping open the midday prosecco. We have a little chat. They'd all just qualified as actuaries and are celebrating the end of their exams.

A woman comes and sits on the bench next to me. It's pleasant at first, talking about dogs and the weather. Then the group light up a barbecue. The woman starts tutting and saying "dear me", and looking towards me for support. Which she is not going to get.

She was really getting on my nerves and spoiling the atmosphere. At the back end of a couple of pints, I said "why don't you go and have a word with them if it's pissing you off so much? They've just qualified as actuaries -- they deserve to let their hair down a bit."

She decided to leave, but not without making a big thing of leaning on her stick and gripping the bench and said "I hope I don't fall." I kept my thoughts to myself this time.

For the first time, something from here has appeared in an actual printed book, painstakingly compiled and edited by The Singing Organ Grinder, who as well as being one of the longest-suffering readers of this unwieldy wordpile, has now turned his versatile hands to The Yorkshire Almanack.

One marvels at the discipline and patience needed to produce such a widely-sourced, 350-page book. Clergymen getting weak at the knees, factory owners objecting to even a slight amelioration of the conditions for the children doing exhausting work for them, fugitives, ghosts, botanists and stink-removers, and a long queue of drunkards and thieves, fraudsters and magistrates, are only some of the colourful Yorkshire folk summoned from Saxon times onwards to illustrate the days. A shoplifter and blogger peeks in during October, too.

Each month is prefaced by a chapter of the saga of Odin and Silica, supported by bus and train itineraries, interviews with chefs, farmers and quotations from Honourable Foreigners (e.g. Jacques Brel), underpinned with generous dollops of an imagination which skips across the centuries.

The ensemble is a miscellany of the most entertaining kind, with a variegated cast of characters performing their pieces. No prior knowledge of Yorkshire is required, thanks to the notes, which will help you out should you end up stroking your wawks, (1) confused by, say, the entry that assumes a good knowledge of Linnean botanical taxonomy. I'm pleasantly surprised that the author is putting himself through it all again for 2027, and if you get in before the end of June there's a £2 discount on an already very reasonable price. I ought not to raise the issue in May, but it would make an excellent Christmas present.

[1] wawks: the tips of a moustache

It was Mardi Gras at the hospital the other day. We had a couple of bariatric patients in.

"Bariatric" (ancient Greek βάρος "weight", first OED citation 1966) is the polite medical term for "absolutely fucking enormous". It took six people to roll one of them over so that her cratering leg ulcers could be looked at.

To London, where I was meeting Trina for a gig. It was meant to be Dexter Wansel, himself but he had to sit this one out in hospital, so it was his long time collaborators and an excellent small orchestra.

In our hotel, we met up with a couple of people I sort of know, a DJ and his friend's desirable wife, who'd flown down from Aberdeen. Mr DJ introduced me to his friends. "This is looby, he comes to Aberdeen and Glasgow sometimes for Downstairs @ 108." Handshakes, conviviality, and I'm cast in a favourable light. It was a pleasing moment of dextrous civilised behaviour on my friend's part.

The gig though -- how flat and disappointing. The southern crowd were rooted to their seats, and even when one of the acts finally got us up by asking us if we were attached to our seats by superglue, we were herded out of the aisles by an officious young woman, the fun policewoman for the evening. I went down the steps as far as the rail (we were in the circle), and started dancing in a position which could not possibly impede an ambulance; but she came after me again. Later I saw her doing the same thing to the people at the front of the stalls. I wish I'd just ignored her now, but you're always an individualist cocking a snook at petty authority in your head the day afterwards.

Our twin room was more a one-child-family room. At the point of getting into the single bed, Trina said "you're not going to sleep there are you?", and so I slid gratefully into the larger bed alongside her. She had on her slinky short red top which, when sex was part of it, I used ask her to keep on, the better to go a-slithering.

My rhubarb wine is at an early stage in the plastic bucket behind me. For several days now the must has been has been making a quiet but penetrating sound, like someone scrunching up a sheet of cellophane. It's stopped now, so tomorrow's job is to strain it and rack the juice into a demijohn, and then see if the sweetened, yeasted, rhubarb could be used in a farty pie.