To the university to see Maelstrom Dance, in the company of two beautifully dressed women. Karen, PhDer and former lodger, who has decided never to buy any new clothes again, and who has the figure to fit tightly but sexily into her repertoire of beautiful old dresses; and Marianna, my former pupil, now also a PhDer. I had two jobs at Lancaster Girls' Grammar School: teaching music and controlling my eyes.

Marianna wears quiet blacks, greys and whites, colours with which an attractive middle aged woman can hardly go wrong. On the bus with her, I say "Have I told you about this woman in Leicester I'm seeing?" "Well, sort of, yes - you keep sending me texts meant for her."

They sat either side of me in the theatre's frigid bar. I like being seen out with them both. This is the kind of woman I know. Over-sexualised female undergraduates held handbags on the crook of their arm. Too-short acrylic miniskirts required constant tugging at the back.

Marianna and I went down Grad Bar afterwards. Beautiful well-kept beer from a bar that has achieved ten straight years in the Good Beer Guide. A cheerful but predictable band played the Led Zeppeling and Mötorhead covers for which the English have an endless appetite.

Marianna was talking about the Megaupload prosecution and the SOPA bill in the US. She was more informed about the arguments that I am. I just think the owner of Megaupload is ugly. I met a old uni pal who is doing a fascinating sounding PhD about the ethics of public surveillance, starting from Kierkegaard and Levinas. I like how, when drunk, he always forgets that he's told me several times to read Either/Or. "You must read Either/Or," he said. A little bit tipsy now myself, I smiled broadly, conveying the wrong meaning.

---

She doesn't like me being quiet for even a day or two. I sent her a brief email this morning with the subject "Silence Worry Avoidance Email" to reassure her about not reacting quickly enough to her email. An email that is so sexual and articulate, that I'll read it over and over again. But sometimes she makes me feel pressured into a quick reply. She wrote back saying that she hopes she's not starting to "feel a bit high maintenence."

"You are, a bit", I didn't say. "To the extent of having to remember to contact you at night and in the morning." When I'm turned on, I like it. It's more direct then. Sometimes though, I do it out of form, which is a shame because like all relationships, you start off by thinking "this is the one in which I will be honest."

I go to the doctor's ready to receive a well-meant homily about my drinking, and more worryingly, the results of a liver test.

My attractive doctor crosses her legs in the same skirt she was wearing last time I saw her. A picture of Denise crossing her legs in her mauve miniskirt fetches up unbidden in my mind, before I snap back into a serious patient-professional pose with my fingers crossed attentively on my thighs. I have been highly satisfied recently with the Skirt Hem-Thigh Interface Standards attained within my local NHS and I have written to the Head of Boxes, suggesting that it should be added as a Key Performance Indicator.

We leave the topic in an amicable truce. My concessions are that yes, I do have a psychological dependence on alcohol and that I will "think about" what she's said.

We then turn to the substance of the matter: my liver test. She breezes through the results. She shows me some figures and compares them to the expected ranges in the next column. I'm about median for everything, save on one parameter in which I am one unit above the expected range. "But I've seen that in people who don't drink at all, so there's nothing to worry about there."

"I hope you don't think I was lecturing you," she says. "Not at all. I appreciate it's something that a responsible health professional would want to discuss," then wondered whether that sounded patronising.

In the afternoon, I take my youngest, Melanie, to Kendal to have her eyes checked. The opthalmist is wearing a black knee-length skirt with three buttons at the waist, below which it splays into a vent or a very wide pleat. It's a good idea but the material is wrong, too thick, possibly too much wool, and it isn't sharp enough to hold the boxiness of the skirt. It wavered slightly at the hem and revealed a centimetre of black underskirt. A straight pleat would have been better.

Afterwards, me and Melanie walk into Kendal and have a late dinner in Wetherspoons. Usual Wetherspoons stunt of advertising beer which is isn't for sale. Both Sporran Warmer and Red McGregor (it was Burns Night yesterday) were off. "You could turn the pump clips round" I suggest. "They're stuck on with sellotape", she replies. An hour later, the clips are still on display, yet neither beer is on. Melanie is good company, drawing and luxuriating in her free time, as was her dad.

A huge blob of a waitress comes up to take our plates away. "You did well with that," she says to Melanie. I jump tactlessly in. "I don't know where she puts it that one. She must have hollow legs." Blob thinks. "You don't know where she puts it." Oops. I've drawn attention to her size.

The train pulls up at Lancaster and we witness commuters red in tooth and claw, end-of-day robots programmed for a competition for seating. "Can we get off?" I exclaim, adding "for fuck's sake," casting my moral advantage onto the ballast.

---

I've had to put the captcha back on for commenting I'm afraid. It took a spammer from Brazil all of fifteen minutes to start graffitying.

Kitty came over on Friday. A few drinks in the Sun, then we went to see a play. We bailed out after a one hour forty first half. It was a student production, the lines were gabbled. Theatre-sleep made me nod and jerk my head.

In the interval the front of house manager chased us up. "No, we're not going back in thanks." We had a much more interesting chat in the bar with a couple we bumped into; like me and Kitty, close friends but not lovers. He was retraining to be a midwife. We compared notes, about how especially younger people, find it difficult to understand friendship between a heterosexual man and woman, wanting to shoehorn sex into it.

Kitty and I went back to mine and we ordered an Indian. At 11pm, on a Friday night, with no music playing, just two friends chatting in the kitchen, Stefan came down to shush us. "Can you please shut the door. I want to sleep."

The following morning I was up at 6.45 for the train to Leicester. I was anxious about leaving Kitty in the spare room, hoping Stefan wasn't going to be arsey with her.

"I'll show you the reservoir," Mary-Ann said. We got out of the car along a narrow road leading nowhere. The touch of her fingers on mine narrowed everything. Snogging as much as we could, given a birdwatcher with a long lens, occasional cars, and a young man on a motorbike.

We tried once or twice to get out during the weekend, but her youngest accepted both of Mary-Ann's suggestions of "a walk". A couple of pubs, but they're not Mary-Ann's natural habitat. In the second, "Earley reservations are reccomended" for Valentine's Day. I asked if there was anything "on draught" and the woman looked at at me as if I were stupid not to notice the Beck's or San Miguel. Mary-Ann's daughter dug about in her mobile phone for something more interesting than her mother and her lover's conversation.

We left and me and Mary-Ann got back into the car. Daughter was still outside. Mary-Ann said "We're going to be thwarted in getting some time in the afternoons" an instant before daughter appeared on the back seat. I felt watched. Any reasonable daughter would watch a new lover. Back at Mary-Ann's, I had a glass of wine from the bottle I'd bought from the local wine merchant, thinking it would be respectable to drink it over two days rather than the two hours it normally takes.

Whilst in town, we had a look at the most ridiculous piece of public sculpture in the whole of the Midlands. Called "Sock Man" in commemoration of the now extinct local hosiery industry, it was unveiled to much scoffing twelve years ago but has now won the locals over to the extent of it being an object of veneration.

On Saturday evening the girls at last retired, provisionally. With a cocked ear to potential interruption, we went from lust to sudden respectablity, according to Mary Ann's responses to her sonar. Kingly cats wandered about unconcerned. In my bed of propriety downstairs afterwards I felt luxuriously warm and fucked.

I lay down to a thwarted sleep. In the garden, and in my head, the jangle of wind chimes drove its pestering clang of timeless harmony and Tibetan sexlessness into my head, until I unlocked the door and fetched them in, stopping them onto the kitchen table like a shot cockerel.

The following evening we played rock paper scissors, and poker, me occasionally worried about whether I was performing as an acceptable lover in front of her children; far more, enjoying the game and Mary-Ann's pisstaking, head-cocking commentary on my failure in games of both chance and skill. We sat on the sofa with a cushion concealing our cunt- and cock-seeking hands, she marking her students' essays, me fluctuatingly attentive to a review of Jeanette Winterson's recent book.

This morning, all dead; I heard a creak of staircase padding and clicked awake, thinking one of her daughters was coming downstairs. Studiously asleep, I tried to control the flicker of my eyelids registering the standard lamp going on. A hand brushed through my hair. "Hello." It was Mary-Ann, poorly wrapped in a towel, hair soaking. We made an awkward arrangement of pillows for five minutes. "Next time," she said, "I think I'm just going to have to bite the 'sleeping in the same bed' bullet."

---

On the train back I was in First Class. I met a couple of former colleagues. The married Glaswegian woman who deliberately didn't notice my flirting with her five years ago, calculated correctly the age of my children. A train driver shook my hand and said he hadn't seen me for a while. "Where have you been [today]?" I asked. "On the simulator at Crewe," he said. "Is that it?" I said, "Well, I've never been a workoholic." We both smiled. "No, the job doesn't attract that sort." He said he was going to Fleetwood Beer Festival on Friday next. I wrote it on my hand. I want to keep in touch with this culture.

I approached my front door, hoping that no-one would be in, knowing that the indication that someone is in, will be the wave of hot air. The whole house, at 2pm on a mild day, is heated to fugging, profligate intensity. Stefan says "Hello, how was your weekend?" This bill you're running up is going to be about 700 pounds. You can afford it. I can't.

My doctor called me in to have my dropsy knee drained. I followed her down the corridor. A skirt with a fine checked grey and black pattern to her knees, black tights, black boots just below her knee. Black woolen V-neck top with elbow-length sleeves. I felt better already as my eyes fixed on her tightly-skirted arse. Bit thin, if we're going to get fussy.

She washed my knee with iodine, put a needle in, and drained some brown liquid of a colour that I thought ought not to exist in the body. Afterwards she sat next to me on the examination bed at a distance which I thought was too close to be professional and married and pretty. She said that she'll send the liquid off for analysis.

"There are some other matters we might like to discuss," she said, with a show of politeness, alluding to my alcohol intake and the fact that the nurse adjunct was in the room. I don't care who knows about my drinking, and would have been nonplussed about discussing it there and there, but she was keen to arrange another appointment to signify the importance of the information she is to convey.

---

There is something I need to tell you. I've told Kim and Denise, and now it's your turn. I've abandoned my PhD.

I liked the social side of the Phd, and I've had many enjoyable drunken evenings, often with Lancaster's Management School through the introductions of Linda, who has wandered off with an attractive Swedish Economics professor she fancies rather than an impoverished pisshead from Lancaster she doesn't. I liked the way that we drank Leeds University's stock of welcoming wine dry on our introductory day, whilst all the time I was glancing at the gorgeous Departmental Secretary, with her black hair and her oatmeal coloured below the knee skirt and black tights and flat black shoes, and a manner that perfectly stopped just short of familiarity.

But why do it? I liked my supervisions. I liked the feeling of being an apprentice. My supervisor picked me up on the differences between em and en dashes and whether the phrase "post hoc" was sufficiently naturalised to not require italics. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met and he pushed me to my feeble intellectual limits. I developed an occasionally sexual attraction to him, glancing at the outline of his trousered cock while he picked up on every scatterbrain thought I had and made me blink with the effort of meeting his intellect. I dissembled my failure to do this through the deployment of a large vocabulary, which I often use to conceal my lack of a single original thought. Every time I left him I felt joyous. I used to then meet Kim in The Angel, gabbling on a high of not having to think, my tumbling talk meeting its pisstaking equal in her.

But I'm having a good life now and I don't need to do it. I am aware of my own mortality and I lack ambition and the work ethic. I live on advantageous terms in my house through the kindness of a good friend, and have a few hours of well paid editing work in which I have to pretend I speak good French. I understand my daughter Melanie's desire to be a tramp. I am differentiated from beggars by a minute sliver of circumstances, luck, and choice.

I sent her a text early one morning. "I wish it were your fingers around my cock now." Oops. It fluttered irretrievably to a friend whose name differs by one letter from Mary-Ann's. But she's a game lass and handled it (the text I mean, not my willy), with good humour.

She asked me if I fancied going to see DJ Shadow at the library (sic). Our local library puts on gigs there on some evenings. The programme tends towards bands featuring introspective girls in secondhand dresses playing glockenspiels and singing about loss, who'll end up doing accountancy for KPMG once they get over their sensitive phase, so I welcomed the chance to see something a bit more dancey.

I lasted an hour before leaving. It felt like a simulacrum (can something be like a simulacrum?) The only person drinking was DJ Shadow, working his way through a bottle of champagne. There were no drugs more powerful than the sugar in some cupcakes which a young woman was selling at the door. Silly looking young bouncers with their council ID cards strapped to their arms stood near the speakers, their weedy legs ready to carry them into action to quash any cupcake-related arguments. The several people histrionically filming and photographing proceedings created a sense that they were hoping to summon a missing sense of involvement at the event itself by posting loads of material on Facebook.

The saddest feeling was looking round and knowing that all these people here, from late teens to fiftysomethings, have nowhere to go to dance in Lancaster. There is one venue here which markets itself as a "house" venue but it's a violent, ugly place which has been closed for a month after one person was kicked unconscious in the toilets and another had his jaw broken. Because the violence is alcohol-related, they get away with a short closure; if the place were full of people peaceably dancing and occasionally powdering their noses, it would be closed permanently in a flurry of pompous outrage fanned by the local media.

---

My daughter Fiona and I spent Sunday in the kitchen making the most delicious and attractive lemon tart. It's from a Heston Blumenthal recipe which requires fourteen eggs, six lemons, and three quarters of a pint of Jersey cream. We carried it back to her house in triumph to share with her sisters. Knowing the meddling tendencies of my youngest daughter, who, despite her professed intention to become a tramp, should really go into destructive testing, I had to issue the injunction "No poking the tart!"

Amidst an almost entirely enjoyable evening en famille, Kirsty added a little dollop of another form of tartness when she said to me "You haven't really got much to offer anyone have you?" It was said entirely without rancour but I still bridled at the idea.

Financially of course, that's accurate enough. Thinking of how to avoid these sad moneyless periods of filching my housemates' food from the compost bin, which is conduct unbecoming to a man of my refined tastes, I was wondering whether there might be a market for a pornographic novel describing the sexual exploits of Daphne from Scooby Doo. I'm sure I'm not the only middle aged man who used to watch Scooby Doo mainly to see Daphne sashaying around in those lovely dresses she used to wear. She was second only in sexual potency to the bra section in my mum's catalogues.

God how I'd love to undo that scarf