2779/5 = 558.8, 558.8/12 = 46, 46 + 47 = 93

If this rake's present progress continues thus, I will be slapping a servant girl on the arse on Thursday week saying "Another stoup of port, wench! And for my friend!" In the space of a week, a second creditor relents.

Dear Sir,

We have accepted your offer to make Monthly payments of £5 towards your outstanding balance of £2,779.25, starting on 30/11/11.

Should this agreement fall into arrears then the entire balance will be due for immediate payment.

I will keep to that; you will get your five pounds a month. But even if I don't, you can forget demanding the principal, because I have no assets, having, five years ago, alienated a c.70K interest in a property to Kirsty.

Lord Chesterton's Advice to His Son is overdue for a re-write.

---

And with that worry dismissed until I am ninety-three, my mind turns eastward. Several years ago, in the Moscow Times's English-language arts section, I read a review of a book with which I immediately identified. Pavel Krusanov's The Blue Book of the Alcoholic is a record of his St Petersburg coterie's drinking, conversations and events he suggests had to be recorded before many of those involved died.

I've read the review countless times, wishing so much I could translate this and bring it to an English audience, especially my friends in Lancaster, for whom the fact mentioned in the review, that you don't know someone until you've drank with them, will ring self-evidently true. Teetotallers are a breed apart, a separate culture. Joining them beyond the pale in Krusanov's book, are the moderate drinkers to whom Sergei Korovin refers dismissively in the quotation on the right hand side of this blog.

A blogfriend with some knowledge of Russian, has obtained for me a pirated version of the book. Then, Lo! Immediately after telling Mary-Ann where my cock should be in relation to her cunt this morning, I turn from matters erotic to intellectual (they are indivisibly linked for me) and I open the London Review of Books to find an advert from a private Russian foundation, the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund, which is soliciting manuscripts in Russian for consideration for translation into English. From wank-exhausted sexting to demotic, drink-sodden St Petersburg, in one minute. Both imagined, let's caution.

Ideal outcomes:

She's incredibly pretty and I just want to kiss her straight away.

"If you don't have to get back tonight looby..."

"Dear Mr Laine, We are delighted to inform you that the manuscript of Pavel Krusanov that you submitted..."

My adaptation of the translated The Blue Book of the Alcoholic has them crying with identification and laughter in the bibulous capitals of Europe, from Galway, Dublin and Glasgow, to Budapest, Kyiv and Vorkuta.