You're fucin dumped

I met Trish for the first time in Manchester on Friday. Afterwards I went to Wetherspoons and wrote a postcard to Kim (larger version if you click on it).

It is an absolute joy to be fancied. I have lost count of the times I tensed with frustration and the imperative to be accepting of it, on being told at the end of dates that I am "sweet", "clever", "funny", and the other sickening backhand translations of sexual rejection; then having to force a smile of un-meant thanks. I thought perhaps I had some strange deformation that everyone was afraid of telling me about, and that this was it, the permanent sexless friendzone, just at the time when whoever is controlling my brain in the vat seems to have deliberately turned up my Dionysian drive vexatiously, to see what would happen.

Trish fancies me. A gorgeous, well-dressed, funny, postgrad educated, foul-mouthed, sexy, desirable woman fancies me. At last, at the age of fifty-two, I am having long phone calls round midnight and making reckless suggestions about a future that hasn't started, with a woman I hardly know; talking a mixture of autobiography, comedy filth, softly spoken phone sex, drunken blather (she drinks as much as me and is often to be found abed at odd hours in the afternoon), and easy pauses whilst the sex circulates in my head.

She pays me barely believable compliments, without the off-the-shelf post-date clichés that most women bandy about. These lovely sentences of hers vary in their focus on my personality, my looks, and how I communicate with her. "You write beautifully" (I write postcards to her, photograph them, then email them to her), "but you talk like shit. It's great." I love her texts, and regret that my old phone has the storage capacity of a sheet of A5.

Fuckin sick of waiting for you text me. You're fucin dumped

You just want to Squeeze my nipples, you fucnin perve

I cant chat in drunk

Just seen your message.You shallow bastard!

can you imagine us together? We'd be pissed all the time

I can't speak my mouth is full of your cock

I'm a bit crap really. Like you, funny, intelligent. But lost my way

I've just woken up wishing you were [...]

In some ways it isn't very promising. She smokes, and lives too far away, in a town outside Manchester. She's said all along she wants someone close enough to call in at the drop of a hat, not someone at the end of a two hour train journey which costs £23 return. She seems a bit reluctant to travel, which is a particular pity at the moment as both the lodgers have moved out so we could have the house to ourselves.

I'd prefer someone closer too, but I've been through all the women in Lancaster on the site. Trina has been asking me for four years to take my profile down; I took it down the same evening I met Trish.