Trina gets horny in Yorkshire

It's half past one in the morning and I've just gone to get something from the living room. I turn the light on, to see two yoof asleep on the floor in a sprawl of improvised bedding. Sometimes, just occasionally, I do like living in a shared house. I like it that the lodgers think of it as collective temporary accommodation for their friends.

The woman in the Polski sklep is as tightly-jeaned as ever, bent double over something on the floor as I walk in. She says hello and apologises, her strokable arse pushed towards me. "Oh no, don't worry," I say. "The view's fine from here," I don't add.

Trina, chastened by the fact that I changed my mobile number in order to deracinate her drunken messages informing me that I am selfish and a fuckwit, invited me to Harrogate for a night; it's an unsaid apology. She was there for work and had booked a hotel room.

We spend nine hours in the Harrogate Tap, the splendidly restored bar on the station. Greying, precisely coiffured men sat together in couples in what appeared to be the gay drinkers' venue of choice in a most attractive Victorian spa town. What a beautiful county Yorkshire is. They have better fields than us.

Back at the hotel, in our twin beds, Trina was literally moaning with desire. She climbed into bed with me and then went back after fumbling around and finding only a soft cock. "Sorry love, I'm a bit drunk," I said. "I want Wendy, not you," I didn't add.

Twenty minutes into the drive back, I realised that I'd left a bag with a couple of grammes of speed in it in the room. Nothing has come of it so far, but we might have to chose a different hotel next time.

Thursday. What a day. Wendy said she could come round after walking the dog. I made some aggressively garlicked hummus and put some cheese and mini onions on cocktail sticks. We are both children of the seventies, after all.

We set to on the Prosecco, port, dope and speed. She was urging me to turn this blog into a set of short stories, the proceeds of which she imagines might release her and Kitty from their respective drudgeries. I agree that that would be a worthwhile project for 2017, but I think she has a very optimistic estimate of the likely income. It would involve me having to do some actual work, and you have no idea how gloomy a prospect that is for someone who entirely lacks the work ethic.

We talked and talked, the coal fire spitting and the salivating dog looking dolefully at the forbidden Stilton. She makes me feel giddy and almost out of control; my mouth runs away with itself and my sentences collapse upon themselves, until I turn off the auto-correct and give in to free association. And constant longing, constant desire, watching her hands, wishing they were rested on me. She is desirable and bewitching, heady, a drug in herself. I am completely in love with her. I wish I were not, because nothing but suffering will come of this.

She's anxious about what she dramatises, in our encyclopaedically over-informed period, as Korsakoff's Syndrome, which is an inflated name for a simple occasional loss of memory. I'm insouciant about this. We both drink a great deal -- me more than her -- and I think gaps in memory are to be welcomed. Who wants to remember everything? The gaps give others a chance to appear talented by being able to fill them in. And in the gaps, we have some of our best times, more enjoyable because they are of the moment, invulnerable to recall.

One such erased episode was what exactly led up to what happened at the end, and the preceding moments to such a lovely incident are lost. She's asked me not to mention it to anyone, so I won't, but I did say in my email that I wrote to her afterwards. "...You have got lovely tits though."

Went to bed for an hour or so, hard of cock and Wendyless, before the book group, to discuss Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, which I greatly enjoyed. I always enjoy book club. The conversation tumbles on and on, little of which is about the book. I told them that I was an alcoholic drug addict, something I regret saying. It looks like asking for attention, and besides, I doubt the statement's veracity. I would say I'm an alcoholic, were it not for the fact that publicly declaring oneself as such seems to have to be accompanied by a sense of regret and self-dislike. I have neither. I love drinking, I love taking drugs, and I daily luxuriate in the vistas that they both open for me.