Drunk with David Hockney.

I spent the morning trying to recollect the night I spent drinking with Hockney and remembering the slowly dawning shame at seeing how, as we quaffed our thirty year brandy, the artist, stubborn when sober, yes, perhaps truculent, how quickly he became an incredible bore. I even remember noting a certain retardation in his character. The shame then revisits me now like a pain in my lungs. It was a letter from a Dr. R. L, requesting she read the letters Hockney sent me in the early 1990's, that prompted the memory. I was heartened to observe that the subsequent letters we exchanged has not sweetened the memory of that first meeting and so, my mental health thereby confirmed, I turned to the question of whether to an accept Axel Von Raffenstein's invite to his party after the Erotica exhibition at the Barbican. The exotic creatures he gathers would certainly be a rare tonic to the somewhat homespun, laundry girls I currently desire. I decided to attend and, at the moment of decision, emboldened with a daring, a vanity, a peripheral awareness of my charm as I crossed the lounge, I also decided I really would make a pass at Thom's mother.

Yesterday, my aim was to ascertain if a man had entered her and therefore Thom's life. This afternoon, my intention had warped, or perhaps consolidated into one of sheer prowess. And so I went to see them at four, the idling hour, and arrived with the sense this would only work if my confidence were at the hilt, as hard and tight as mineral. In fact, psychotic. I stood on the doorstep, figured a statement, not a question, was more effective. She opened the door.

I would like to have...

I paused a few seconds, suggestive of unending personal, cultural pursuits, but then, as if veering into a sudden, impulsive understanding of core family values:

Like to have sex with you.

Ok, she said. And then, to cover herself, You'd better come in, I mean. And so, with the hint of mental illness, as if allowing me in were making the community a safer place, I entered the family home for the first time in five years.