I fail to achieve an erection

This really is alcoholism. Buying a bottle of wine at quarter to fucking eight in the morning. I don't care, I am laughing to myself coming back from the shop, drunk already, not been to bed, after a deliriously loved-up day with Wendy, of which more later. I love losing myself in drink. It's such a lovely experience -- and I have many lovely experiences.

I somehow got roped in to helping Chris put a shed up. I have not the slightest interest in DIY nor the merest practical abilities. My education amounts to a shaky, sub-Wikipedia grasp of aesthetic theories of contemporary classical music, but I haven't the foggiest about drills, screwdrivers, and reverse flange lever lug rivets. We sweated about ineffectually in her garden, and got as far as unwrapping the various parts, gathering up all the screws which went flying everywhere, laying two panels on the ground and failing to screw them together. We put it all back in the outhouse and had a much pleasanter hour chatting in her front room. She said that this period of four months is the longest she's ever gone without sex. I told her that there was a time in my twenties and thirties when I didn't have sex for eleven years.

A couple of days later, we went to the bingo in Morecambe. I really enjoyed bingo night when we used to go on holiday in Brittany. The difference being that in Brittany you're surrounded by elegant women in linen shift dresses, walking by as you drink excellent cider and Breton ale, but it being Morecambe I thought I might pull some desperate pissed-up wallop in trackie bottoms after a couple of pints of Fosters and a hot dog instead.

Chris turned up in a tight black dress and a belt collar with a clasp on it round her neck. It said "sex"; Chris carries off that S&M look very well. There were more young people there than I'd expected. It was the one place where mobile phone addicts leave their phones alone for a few minutes at a time.

The caller doesn't use the picturesque bingo argot of old any more. There are no fat ladies, and legs do not come in elevens. Numbers are called rapidly, demanding a degree of concentration and manual dexterity, which nevertheless didn't prevent the woman next to us gobbling down chips and a burger down in between numbers. She was a picture of everything that is wrong with fast food, but helpful as well, inducting me.

Friend of mine asked me if I fancied helping him out at Barefest. Not some nudist festival but basically an excuse for a twelve hour-long piss-up in a suburb of Morecambe with a rather unusual name, Bare. "Play what you like," he said. "I could do a bit of disco going on early house if you liked?" "Whatever, looby." (Vanity playlist here). It went down well, by which I mean that the Brexity, uPvC'd crowd ignored my music. We had to stop for the fucking stupid football but carried on later.

I got ten pounds for "expenses", which nearly covered my taxi back. I got home at half one. Kitty and Wendy texted me asking me to go round but I was absolutely knackered. Five days straight on the sparkledust and I was collapsing, and also theoretically in charge of my daughters. I went to bed and slept for twelve hours straight. I found my youngest raking through my records in the morning and that gave me a thrill. She's really into music, contemporary popular music, and it felt an honour to have her riffling through my records.

I am utterly and stupidly, stupid, stupid, anti-intellectual, wrong, wrong, useless, foolish, stupid, an idiot, in love with Wendy. She called for me yesterday. She turned up in this gorgeous brown dress. "You look lovely. Is that a new dress?" "Yes, brown's not really normally my colour but I liked this one. Can I wash my hands? The dog's ball has gone in some shit." She stood at the sink. We were talking, and it was all I could do to not wrap my arms round her lovely waist and kiss her.

We took a bottle of Prosecco up to the park at 10am and drank it and talked, had a bit of mdma and some yellow haze, which made us laugh. She was talking about Theodore Dreiser and struggling to remember what school of literature that is. I've read Sister Carrie but couldn't really think of the term that she was looking for, but I loved her in that moment (although I love her in every moment in which I am conscious). It was coursing through me, a river of emotion incapable of being expressed physically. We scrabbled around for terms. "What, American Realism?", I ventured. She shook her head.

We went to the pub and had loads of cheese. There was this massive party of solicitors in there, all strangled into ties and high heels. Having lunch with ties on, what the fuck's all that about. There was a tang of sweat. We met this bloke and me and Wendy both gave him our numbers. He was a depressive, intelligent, self-deprecating but not irritatingly so. "Depression is the highest form of vanity," as Julie Birchall once cruelly but accurately said. He assumed we were a couple. Afterwards me and him walked a short way together. "Yes," I said. "I do love her. First of all, every time I see her, I want to fuck her. I want to have sex with her. Then, when you've had a few, her lovely characteristics, her kindness, make me love her more."

I got home and sent Wendy a text. "... and I do love you. I don't quite know what love is but if it means every single time I see you I think I have never seen you looking so lovely and wanting to rake you with my eyes, and a desperately suppressed desire to stroke you and hold you and snuggle you, and if it means being constantly open-eyed at your kindness and generosity to others, and how I can feel so much myself that I never say anything but the truth, well then, I love you."

I thought it was over then but then she rang. "Looby, have you had enough of me?" "What? What are you on about? I could never have enough of you!" "No, it's just that Gerald [husband] has gone off in a huff. Just had a row with him because he accused me of always looking nice when I see you Xx."

I went round to hers, sat in her garden with The Little Dictator (aka her daughter) and her aunt, ate pizza, drank wine, threw the slobber-soaked ball for the dog, and stared at her legs, her dress doing that lovely oblique hem slant that is a consequence of leg-crossing. I am smitten.