Tilt. Game Over.

I have spent the last couple of days in an affronted flurry of political activity. Firstly because the monumentally ruinous shale gas extraction process called fracking has been given the go-ahead in the UK, and uncomfortably close to home, on the Fylde. Despite the evidence presented so well in the film Gasland, which was shown in Lancaster last year, of flammable water, radioactive elements being released into rivers, earthquakes, and the use of a secret list of hundreds of poisonous chemicals in the process, money speaks louder.

So I've joined the local anti-fracking group and I can see a bit of direct action coming on. The last time the Conservatives were in power, I used occasionally to get up at 5am to join a merry coach trip to Burnley colliery where we threw half bricks and bits of pipe at the vans carrying scabs into the mine. Now, having erased the mines, they're after the water table.

Next, almost on my doorstep, a developer has started cutting down an area of woodland that has been used for decades by local people, and had been left to flourish in the ramshackle way that an untouched wood will. The trees are subject to a Tree Preservation Order and so their actions are blatantly illegal, but with the pussy-footing around big corporations that Local Councils are forced into, the Council now has to go through an appeals process. Therefore, along with several dozen other people, I'm attending the appeal against the TPO at the Town Hall on Monday.

There are some sad pictures of the damage that has already been done on our excellent independent media site, Virtual Lancaster and an eloquent post about it on a highly recommended new local blog discovery, Unicycle Emptiness.

A friend--an acquaintance really, since I would never seek her out for any kind of intercourse--asked me to help her pack up to move to her new house. Someone else rang me an hour or so earlier to say that he could give me some money back I'd lent him, so naturally we went down the pub and spent it all.

As we were drinking Removal Lady texted asking asking me if I was vegetarian. "Oh fuck me," I said to him. "We're going to have bloody pasta. I don't want that; I want a couple of pints." I texted her back thanking her for the kind offer and lied, saying I'd already arranged to have tea with the girls.

I found myself teetering on the edge of impatience as I stood around in her loft. It seemed a wasted and impractical two hours of undoing box after box of old files, magazines, kitchen equipment and so on; then re-sellotaping them and sticking labels on the boxes which in most cases duplicated the inscriptions in felt tip which were already on them.

Soon, the penny dropped about why I was up there in her loft. It is with not the slightest attempt at self-aggrandizement that I say that she fancies me. She asked me round for dinner a couple of years ago and for a few long seconds, blocked my way out of the door, tilting her face with a supplicating look that I recognise; I do it occasionally when in Denise's company. It says, please kiss me.

Unfortunately I cannot find a morsel of desire for her. She's in her early 60s--which isn't a problem in the slightest; if anything, an advantage. But her mud-coloured, tired clothes are from that era that falls unattractively between the sufficiently old to be deservedly revived, and the contemporary. But never mind, we could sort out her wardrobe, and her "natural" hair.

The fatal blow is that she's a practicing Christian, and toddles off on Sunday mornings to some local temple of voodoo. I was a fraction sharp with her recently when she wished me a "Happy Christian Easter." "I'll take the Happy bit, Terri, but I'm an atheist so I'll skip the Christian bit if you don't mind."

As I left (with no tilting of faces this time), I saw the pan of pasta and sauce on the cooker and felt a bit sorry for her; banished that feeling, and went home.