The annexation of The Crimea

Apologies for the editing errors in the original version of this that you will have seen if you came here before 0600 British time on 16th May. This was due to an inebriated sub-editor, who has now been dismissed. It's not the first time.

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Kitty rang me with a warning. "Looby, you are going to come in your pants when you see Wendy. She's bought this new dress and she looks absolutely stunning."

I was nervous as I went through to the pub garden. The dress was indeed beautiful, green, with a lovely neckline. I got her a bottle of Prosecco; a strange polished little pebble I found in a junk shop in Morecambe with a single word inscription, "Pray", to which I attached a label to its wrapping, "Because this is the only thing I can think of in the short term"; and a book, "Lost Words" by Philip Howard, because she is never lost for them.

Kitty texted from the bar. "Come and help me carry drinks!" "Fucking hell," I said. "You were right. For God's sake, I can't stop staring at her." At which point the girl herself turned up, and I could say the same thing in a more refined way. Her aunt had also given her a bottle of Prosecco, which was still cold, so after ordering one from the bar she opened the other under the table.

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Then it was to the girls' house for our annual Eurovision party. Me and five teenage girls, including an American friend of theirs from school watching ESC for the first time, complete with scorecards, flags and a sweepstake. The preparations for all this were undertaken in something short of complete sobriety.

Ukraine won with a song about Stalin's deportation of the Crimean Tartars in 1944 used as a metaphor for that territory's more recent annexation. It is an artistically godawful song, and drags needling cross-border politics into a song contest which was originally intended to bring countries together, not to divide them. You can only do that in a shared community, and it made me wish we could go back to only admitting members of the European Coal and Steel Community.

We gave six votes to Spain, their best song for years -- which isn't saying much -- and one for Bulgaria, who sent a dancy number all about the "lav".

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Kitty texted me afterwards. "Oi! Come round. We're dancing." Me, Kitty, Wendy. Kitty was pissed and was making an right pig's ear of putting the music on. She's not really into music and was giving us this stop-start disco from the first result from typing in "hard house" and turning it off after twenty seconds because she didn't like it.

"Don't get arsey," she said, after I gave up and sat down. "What would you like then? she said, faintly aggressively. "Just type in 'Reelow live'," I said. She couldn't manage that, and went to bed. Wendy put her phone in a mug and put the Chemical Brothers on and at last we had a proper dance. She was sexy as fuck in the green dress, abandoned, waggling her arse and her swishing green dress in front of me and, I know, enjoying it without the sexual overtones that it had for me.

Wendy laid down on the floor. "I need to get Ingrid and Veronica home." This is her six-year-old daughter and her aunt who were jointly asleep with the dog on the sofa in Kitty's front room. I laid down next to her and kissed her neck. "I love you Wendy. I love you." I opened my fingers and raked them through her hair. "They've got to take a dog," she slurred, from the floor.

"Hiya, can we have a taxi at 44 Acacia Avenue? Can you take a dog?"

I woke the sleepers up and we all got into the taxi and I delivered everyone home. In bed myself, I got a text from her. "Looby darling, thank you. I love you xxx." No you don't Wendy. Not in the sense in which I want to be loved, anyway.

At four o'clock or something, she rang me, thanking me again. "Where are you sleeping?" "I'm at the girls' house." "Where?" "I'm on the floor, I don't feel right sleeping in Kirsty and boyf's bed." "Well, thanks for tonight. I needed someone to take control and get us all home."

She texted me again a couple of times, the best one of which was "I love my presents, petal."

Why do I constantly become close female friends with women who don't want to fuck me? It's an insult, telling you how "sweet" you are (fucking hate that word) -- but making you feel unattractive and unwantable. It is immensely depressing to me that someone that I have such a lovely time with doesn't fancy me. I am stuck between a needy, emotionally immature woman I don't fancy, and a gorgeous, clever, witty, woman I love who doesn't fancy me. It's fucking shit. Why can't Wendy fancy me? She doesn't though, and it doesn't help knowing that the story of frustrated one-directional attraction is thousands of years old.