Jan Nieupjur, Gloaming, marshmallow dreams and a bonfire of Tory vanities.

Rudely awakened from my, post liquid luncheon snooze, by an helicopter chattering overhead like an Inuit naturist's teeth, I peered, in an old fashioned fashion, from the front door only to notice old friend Jan Nieupjur, standing on the corner, looking nonplussed, in a myopically challenged kind of way, at a discarded tailors dummy.

'What ho! Jan'. I cried in greeting. 'What ails thee?'

He limped, his Zimmer frame rattling like a pox doctors clerk, over the cobbles to the six foot perimeter barbed wire.

'Just taking my post Covid libido out on a test run. Judging by my groin's response to that charming young thing on the corner and her reaction to my Seventh Avenue come on, I am fucked... Or not fucked. If you get my drift'.

I handed him a glass of the funeral sherry I keep to ward the barflies off my good stuff and pointed out that she was, in fact, a dummy.

'You bet'. Ejaculated Jan. 'I have three florins in my pocket itching to be spent. Enough to get her back to Estonia and still have change'.

I gave him the address of a wonderful sex therapist in Barnard Castle I had once had the pleasure to consult.

We talked on into the burgeoning gloaming of our lives. Toasting marshmallow dreams on a bonfire of Tory vanities.