Saturday 5 July

Rosa makes a rare appearance in Manchester, bringing with her a calm and graceful Nordic logic that is immediately put to good use. For not without prompting will Bateman construct the furniture required to replace that looted last weekend by disgruntled, unpaid dwarfs. I make myself a cuppa in the mug shaped like a Cheshire cat (awarded to Bateman for being the biggest cheese in his school) and by doing so remind myself that while I may smile at his floor-based efforts, it is my multi-fractal brackets, sprockets and goggins that will be numbered if I can’t pay off our Russian friends. Yet when I’m not living in the moment (an ambition it took some time to fulfill) I’m looking to the past (to the eternal regret of my careers advisor, now retired) so for tonight, with our guest amongst us, it isn’t hard to put aside my future worries by eating Chinese and dancing like an Egyptian at the Mummified Kitten, a strip club on alternate nights (if I tell you Cam and Tam were shaking their stuff on the dancefloor, you’ll know the type of night it was tonight). Larry’s out late, smoothly pressganging us into the Paper Club, by which time I’m almost speechless, despite the best efforts of the regional boys to resuscitate me for a quote or two.