Le Difese

I had my first drink for a week this evening. This may well be the longest I've gone without a drink since a friend and I from the railway gave it up for Lent in 2006. 2006 was a leap year and so I did forty-one days, better than Jesus.

I was under the impression I had to abstain from drink because of the antibiotics. I resigned myself to ten days of abstinence, and started hitting the suspiciously-named Sainsbury's Grapefruit High Juice Drink - a pleasant slurry of water, aspartame, preservatives and flavourings of the type you're forced into when you're on the wagon. Then one of my dancing/blog pals pointed out that there's only one type of antibiotic you need to be careful of when drinking, and mine isn't it.

Delighted with the news (I wouldn't remain sober from choice for longer than I have to), I eyed up the sexy-looking Italian in my kitchen - the 2010 Le Difese IGT Tenuta San Guido from the village where we holidayed last year, which we had at the wine club recently when it had a look round Tuscany. Very little of the wines of the Bolgheri DOC ever make it to the UK. You'd be lucky to find any in Turin, let alone Lancashire. But that's typical of Adam's assiduous, educated sourcing. Someone managed to get a few cases to Byrne's in Clitheroe, and Adam spotted them. It was a fine way to end a fast.

I'd like to find out from a fluent speaker what "Le Difese" means. "Defences" it says in my little dictionary, but there must be something else: the label depicts a boar being chased by dogs, a romanticised version of the caccia which is the subject of innumerable little warning plaques dotted on gates and posts in the hills around Castagneto Carducci, now more often conducted with rifles.

Wilma then rang, asking if I was going down the pub with a couple of mutual friends; one, a previous boyfriend, who shows a patience towards her of which I would be incapable. The ale tasted like nectar and I held up the glass and wondered aloud at its loveliness.

"He's fucking useless," she said. Roger shrugged his shoulders, indicating all the years of tolerating this sort of return for his friendship. "No hang on, you can't say he's 'useless'. He's been alright to you over the years." While she was on her first bottle of wine, Wilma was great company. By the end of the second, her needle got stuck in the place we've come to expect: her Irish boyfriend who treated her badly, from whom she can't divorce herself, her aggressive yet needy relationship with her daughter, her blaming alcohol for problems. She thinks she's an alcoholic. Aren't we all? "This is not the drug for you, Wilma," I said. "You need to try something else, speed, or--I don't know. Just not alcohol. You're a crap drunk."

I know I am better because I've been sexting Trina. We're going to Cumbernauld on Tuesday. It's an early train so she's staying here the night before, when she is going to get fucked.

Any successful relationship, especially a sexual one, is a question of finding a compatible power relation. I spent many sexless years being a "nice man", and thinking that women might chat me up if I sit here with my glass of real ale and the Guardian long enough. First off, it's not me, because I now know that as carefully liberal and considerate as I am by day, in the bedroom, I like to fuck a woman and to do sex to her.

Second, the women I have been involved with sexually, since my Renaissance, like getting fucked. Women love sex but most of them would, at least initially, prefer it if the man took the lead. It's very exciting when a woman starts feeling comfortable enough with you to introduce their own volition, but that takes time.

Woman are sexual creatures who have a sexual drive at least equal to that of men. The idea that men are possessed of an uncontrollable sex drive refused by women is a man's way of explaining a relationship that is sexless for other reasons. An acquaintance of mine sends me "jokes", sometimes accompanied by sterotypical porn pics of the kind of shaved, surgeoned, Americanised woman men are supposed to fancy. "You could try fucking your wife," I feel like saying sometimes