I'm on one of my spasmodic purification phases (they never last long), but there's no reward for virtue.

My friend, with whom I went to Kyiv for Eurovision in 2005, was down from Manchester. We started in Wetherspoons, before going on to somewhere with less food on the carpet. I asked for a Heineken Zero, which was £2.68 for 33cl (so £4.61 a pint); my friend's pint of ale was £3.48. He says he manages to save £800 a month from his minimum wage job: he has no housing costs. He works on the phones in customer service. When someone says their house number is one, he says "oooh, is that the posh end of the street?"

We talked about our Ukraine trip, which has a barely believable quality about it now. We spent the week drinking their version of champagne, staying in this magnificent flat belonging to a lawyer, high up in one of several high-rise Soviet concrete slabs dotted amongst unmade roads and a tiny children's playground. We knocked about with a German-Latvian couple and a couple of Glaswegian lads who were at one of the semi-finals and obtained our tickets by meeting up with a young couple in an underground station. It was all blogged at the time, but 2005 is one of the many years that I lost when I couldn't afford to renew the hosting one year and I hadn't backed anything up.

On Saturday me and Mel met up in one of the few pubs in her suburb where the pub garden has grass in it rather than paving slabs. A fence came round and we bought a load of cheese off him for a fiver. The young barmaid, collecting our glasses at the time, looked disdainfully at us and the people at the next table, who were also in the market for his goods, without having the authority to do anything about it.

There was a little shack selling what was advertised as Thai food. I ordered the kimchi bowl (everything's in a bowl nowadays). "It comes with a bun," said my cockney host. "A bun? No it's alright," I replied, "you have the bun." Afterwards a woman came over to ask me how I'd enjoyed my dish of onion and pickled red cabbage in syrup. "Well... it was just a tad on the sweet side for me," I said. "Ah well, normally it comes with a bun."

After ruining my meal by insisting on it being bun-less, we sat and drank, hatless under a radiant sun, then carried on at Mel's, where we played some increasingly drunken games of écarté, a game I learned after reading about it in Vanity Fair. We went to bed, where there was an unsuccessful mounting.

The following day, the sun and the ale withdrew their favours. I lurched from toilet to bed, spending hours trapped in a cycles of nausea, vomiting, and sleep. I finally stopped throwing up at 8pm, then went to sleep for thirteen hours. On Monday, I cycled home, and went to sleep again. It's because I didn't have it with a bun.

Gazing along the beach on our last evening at La Trinité was almost painful. Those annual partings never lose their poignancy, the scene illustrated by a sky that I imagine always saves its most delicate compositions for our departure.

Back in Bristol, and the noise. The ugly grey din of pointlessly urgent cars and their unnecessarily loud horns; drills, hammers, angle grinders and the unplaceable drone of mystery machinery at a volume quiet enough to become more and more irritating as it moves from the periphery to the centre of one's attention; I am very hungry God bless in București serif stationed throughout the city centre while the more ambulant beggars approach you with the jerky walk of the homeless; and the way that the bus company has thrown in the towel over people using mobile phones as broadcasting stations.

I was pleased then, when my eldest rang asking me if I was free to meet her in London on Friday after her visa appointment at an embassy. She had a lot of needless running about in the heat to to get various documents printed off (because embassies don't have printers) -- and then again because the official had told her to get the wrong stuff printed. I waited for her in a pub in a street where a three-bed mews house was sold three years ago for £4.85 million.

In the printers, the man serving asked if she was an artist. "Yes!" she lied. "Oh in what medium?" "Sculpture." "Oh right, what do you work in? "Clay." "Well, for a fellow artist, I'll do it for free." We had a good natter, so much that she changed her train, at some expense, to stay longer. I had some "Thai fish cakes" that were the size of draughts pieces and had the texture of a mattress.

My niece, whom I hardly know, gets married to her girlfriend in a pretty Bedfordshire village.

The train was full of Oasis fans going to Wembley. I asked some lads if they were able to open my bottle of beer, and one of them deftly clipped it off using the edge of a tin of cider. "Hey, look at that," I said, to anyone in general. "He's done that before." I smiled at the 50ish woman in the next seat, who smiled back, causing a jolt to go through me. Fuck, you're good-looking. She wore a beautiful white broderie anglaise blouse. I can't think of many other fabrics that can be as understated as they are sexy on women around that age.

Given my brother's family's somewhat austere diet, I was a bit concerned that we'd be served some sort of yogic tea made from grass and bits of twig; instead we were welcomed with Pimm's, and, as is often the case with events one's not looking forward to, I enjoyed myself. They wrote the vows themselves, and my nephew did a witty speech that had the additional merit of brevity. As I circulated in the room, I was trying to model myself on Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair -- an impossible intensity of shimmer for me, but something worth aiming at in social occasions.

Appropriately enough, I have arrived at chapter 36.

I wrote you a letter whilst I was on holiday in Brittany. I hope you can read it OK.

I have two main problems in my life.

1) working out how to cope with a loving girlfriend when I want to be with Trina. Mel has accepted that I don't feel sexually attracted to her any more, but is gamely going along with it, accepting what she's given. She throws her arms around me on the settee and when we're out. We have good times. We laugh and go out on day trips and we both like food and cooking. We never quarrel.

2) My job. It coats me with gloom. However, there may be progress. I had an online meeting on Thursday with my supervisor and some bloke from HR, about my application to go down to two days a week.

He asked me to set out my case. Well... I'm too old for all this. I'm creaking. I can't stand up for seven hours a day. (I often come home knackered and pissed off, muttering complaints against my employer); my aged mother lives in Middlesbrough and all the work looking after her is falling on my sister's overwrought shoulders; I can't cope with the roster being issued ten days or a fortnight in advance, not being able to plan anything.

I didn't mention wanting to spend more time with Trina, with Kitty and Wendy, and Kirsty and our girls, my ain folk, the Lancaster gang, where I'm from. You should be able to say that you just want to fuck work off and spend time with the people who are part of you.

Me and Mel went for a day out in Gloucester.

In a pub, it was bugging me that the man a few yards away looked familiar. As we were leaving, I went over to him. "Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, but could I just ask -- have you got any connection with Lancashire?" "Yes." "Lancaster?" "Yes." Did you used to go down the John O'Gaunt?" "Yes. Do I owe you any money?"

The cathedral was overrun with children and their reasonable parents, all crayons and the considered argumentation of middle-class parenting. We gave five pounds to get in, but you had to pay another fiver for a guide, so we walked round having a gormlessly impressionistic visit; it was a bit shallow.

The Pelican pub afterwards was the best part of the day. We had to shift up as people snuggled into places near to us. You had to talk, not that I need any encouragement to do that. They had Dunkerton's organic cider on, which they had to fetch from downstairs. I would like to tell you about some of the conversations we had, but I can't recall them. It's a cracking pub.

About a month ago, my friend Helen, who had lived in Norway for many years, succumbed to the pancreatic cancer with which she was diagnosed last year. I went to Lancaster to see Kitty and Wendy, who knew her before I did, to raise a glass or two in Helen's memory.

Memory: they recalled adventures we'd had together in much greater detail than I could remember, or could remember at all. I was shown a photograph of me and Helen in a strangely contorted drunken pose in a London hotel room, the circumstances of which I recall nothing.

Wendy surprised me by referring to the years when she imposed belittling conditions on meeting me. It had to be done secretly, and I had to leave her house before her estranged boyfriend, who lived with his parents, arrived to do something connected with the childcare. I was made to leave by the back door, in case he turned up early and saw me. Quite why I was subject to such draconian invisibility is still a mystery to me.

"I should have stood up for you a bit more," she said. I said nothing, but was thinking "you fucking well should have! Making me skirt round another man's insecurity? Thanks!" It was a relief, years later, to have her recognise how unfair that was on me.

From Lancaster, I went an hour or so on the train to where Trina lives. We went out dancing at an annual soul and house music do which has finally re-emerged after The Interruption. After the first, rather irritating rounds of being herded together for other people's social media, it developed into a good night. Quite flirty. By doing nothing at all, just dancing, I attracted the attention of a good-looking woman in a purple thigh-length dress, who inched closer tune by tune, at least during the times Trina wasn't on the dancefloor.

But the real attraction was Trina. I have two central difficulties with her. One is, I find her attractive, both in an everyday way, but also in a way that can slide into a physical attraction given the right amount to drink circumstances. Second, she's witty, without any of the strained, intellectual taint that often comes with people who are good with words. She makes me laugh, and we all know what that can lead to.

So how do I handle this, given that I've a girlfriend down here? I lie. I told Trina that Mel and I have drifted into friendship, that it's been mutually accepted and that we're being sensible adults about it.

Although there are signs that that state of affairs might be the case in the future, and it's true that I've lost interest in our sporadic sex, we still carry on like boyfriend and girlfriend. It's a selfish way of managing two women, but recognising that I'm doing something morally wrong is rarely enough to make me stop doing it.

Work grinds relentlessly on, like a white noise you can't switch off. I'm in the middle of eight days straight now. It's been five weeks now since I applied to go down to two days a week. On Thursday I was promised a meeting to discuss it "shortly." What's there to discuss? Either they agree to it or they don't.