My mum spent most of her teenage life in Pip's

...it was a sort of Mod, late 70s club in Manchester. She used to sit in the rafters of The Roxy Room there, drinking Vodka cran and requesting they play the acoustic version of Bowie's 'Width of a Circle' repeatedly. She was a sort of pseudo-football-hooligan and she once snuck into Paul Simon's hotel as a drunken dare on the premise that she was his cousin, and she met Steve Perregrin Took at a sufragette rally in Southampton. She was a seamstress and a poet and she first fell pregnant at 26 and went into labour in a registry office.

Now she's a nostalgic single waitress. I wish we were chums when she was a kid. I think I fail her as a daughter. I often think that, if she could have seen me when she was that age, she would be disappointed that I was the kind of child she would one day have.

She was dead pretty. I, desperately, am not.

Over and out.