I wish you could hit them

Gillian said she'd move out on Wednesday, but I don't trust a word she says. I get back home, knock on her door. No answer, so I go in. The room is empty, apart from a couple of bags of rubbish and a polysytrene tray containing a half-eaten burger and some flaccid chips. What a relief.

Yesterday, a garrulous late afternoon down the pub, a comic spectacle of everyone walking in drenched by the torrential rain we've had. A man came to sit at our table. Asked permission. "No no, go on," me and Keith said. He's from Bury and is in hiding in Lancaster for a few days because he's fucked some bloke's wife and the jealous violent hubby is looking for him. "She's a dirty bitch," he said. "I'm fed up of women just laying there. I said, 'move your leg like this and go like this.' 'I know what I'm fucking doing,' she said. I thought my cock was going to snap off."

For money, he's using a criminally manufactured set of credit references for which he said he paid 100 pounds, on the basis of which he can obtain loans which he'll never repay. He showed us a credit reference purportedly from a well known Spanish owned bank which looked completely convincing. If it's been provided by the two people recently rumbled for doing this, he'll be wanted by the police and well as a cuckold.

The barmaid came round asking us for 50p for a raffle for some charity involved in death postponement. "You've got to think of a name for that teddy. Anything," she prompted, as my mind was blank. "Hairy Cunt," I said. She looked silently to the floor with distaste. Stan shook his head and tapped his wife on the shoulder. "Hey, Rach... he's just called it 'Hairy Cliff'. That cracked me up that did."

I snapped myself to sobriety and came home to show a young man around Gillian's room. He's about to start teacher training. We chatted easily, and it is agreed, with a handshake at least, that he'll move in at the end of next week. A small unfortunate detail is that he wants to keep the double bed in there as he's got a girlfriend. I was hoping to purloin that for the possibility that there might be a Welsh in it shortly. But as he left, I felt a wave of physical relief that I'll now be able to pay the money I owe Seriouscrush for May.

Trina emails, wondering if I'd be free for a day out in London with her next month. Kitty rings and we have a good chat, partly about her new job in a dog-rough school in a Lancashire seaside resort. Bill Bryson visited it and wrote "The Council have spent half a million pounds cleaning up [the town]. Now the turds sparkle." Talking about the pupils, she said "I wish you could hit them."