If I say it existed, it existed

I don't ever want to go through that again. Whilst it didn't come to sleeping in the park, I was homeless in a mild way. I didn't know, sometimes into the late afternoon or evening, where I was sleeping that night.

I understand now how stress collapses one's mind onto only the most pressing, immediate concerns, which can sometimes seem so overwhelming that an escapist -- rather than a hedonist -- turn to alcohol or other drugs can become attractive. You don't eat properly because there's nowhere to cook, and the lack of sleep, from having to get up before one's hosts, wears you down. Night after night of sleeping in uncomfortable places is a provocation to private tears of self-pity and despair.

On Monday, I was installed as a "property guardian" -- a late C20th neologism which is design to escape any of the laws surrounding tenancy --in a little two-bed Victorian terrace about fifteen minutes' walk from the city centre. You get to live in a place at a much reduced rent as a substitute for security guards. Trina lent me the money for the deposit -- upped in my case from the usual £150 to a more cautious £600 because of my credit record.

I love knowing that there's no-one behind the front door, but it'd help if they had acted on their promise to turn the gas on. Six days in and no hot water. Can't shower, can't cook a proper meal. I am fucking sick of fruit and salad and sandwiches.

On what turned out to be my last shift at the golf club, I was humiliated to be asked into the kitchen by the manageress, "as there's too many mistakes here." I often input the orders from the bar into the till incorrectly, which are then transmitted to the ktichen. It was a public demotion.

I spent the rest of the shift red-faced, longing for what I thought were two consecutive days off. Then, on Saturday, I woke up in Kirsty's front room at a leisurely half past eight. I checked my diary, and saw that I was mistaken; I should have been in at 8am. I was first alarmed, then unbothered. I resigned in an email thanking them for their kindness and generosity in taking a chance on me and saying that I wish them every success, apologising for leaving a minimum wage job.

With the ambivalent thrill of leaving a job, I went down what's becoming my new favourite pub. I've taken to playing darts there. A very attractive 50ish woman came over to me and asked if her the three blokes who she was with could play together. Shiny dyed reddish, angled bob, and a lovely tightly-buttoned white blouse undone (deliberately?) to slightly below the bra line. When I sat down, and when she was stood next to me, my face was no more than a few inches from her tits, and it was a restraint I didn't want to have to employ, to have to keep my fingers away from that next button.

She and I went to the cashpoint at the same time. "You're a right fittie, you are," I said. "Are you from Blackburn?" "Yes, we've come here for the day. We're out on the lash. Blackburn's a bit shit." The giddiness of starting drinking early, my drinks spiked by the knowledge that I now have no income at all; her un-offered, imprisoned tits. We walked back, and she looked just as desirable from behind.

Last Sunday afternoon, and I am sat at the table opposite my youngest, who is revising, ploughing through Aristotelian virtue ethics and logical criticisms of postmodernism, (if all knowledge is socially constructed, how can the assertion that all knowledge is socially constructed be true?) while I strike a rather ridiculous figure with my bulbous headphones on, listening to Pakistan achieving an unlikely victory over India in the cricket. Radiant last days of my daughters being in Lancaster.

I was walking home in last week's drizzle, and a man fell in with me, saying that he'd dislocated his shoulder. "You want to get yourself to hospital mate," I said. He carried on talking as we went over the canal bridge. It wasn't dislocated -- he wasn't in enough pain.

"I'm off up here," I said, and then with an immediate prelude I can't remember, we ended up snogging each others' mouths off whilst stood in the middle of the street. He got hold of my hand, which was cupped round his jaw to push him onto me more, and pushed it down his trousers. He had a lovely cock, smooth and hard, and I started wanking him slowly, wondering whether this might be a good time to tell him about something I'd love to do, but we won't sully a family blog such as this with my sordid imaginings.

But then a car came -- rather than him. I withdrew my hand and said "we'd better be careful here." We parted without saying anything, and I walked the fifty yards to the girls' house.

I told Kitty and Wendy about it when we went down The Fur Coat and No Knickers Arms yesterday. Wendy said "how would you have explained it had you seen one of your girls?" which was a point I hadn't considered. Does one really consider anything when you're snogging and wanking a man off in the street at 6 o'clock on a rainy Thursday evening? "I'd have told them I was helping him get his money out of his pocket."

On Wednesday, I had an interview at Pax Feel Man, a chain of photography studios that do passport photos and printouts of photos for people who photograph each other having a good time rather than having a good time. I felt sorry for my interviewer. She was overfilled into one of the optimistic dresses that fat girls force themselves into. I was led up the the back of the shop, and up two rickety sets of fire escape steps. She ushered me forward before her, not wanting me to see her bulk clambering up the steps.

We chatted for seventy minutes, and I enjoyed talking to her, truth and lies the warp and weft of my side of the conversation.

My cv is almost entirely made up. My most recent invented employer is the Amalfi Cafe in [...]. "Whereabouts was it? I know [...] a bit." I was prepared for this, having researched retail units for rent there.

"You know when you come out of the main Wetherspoons," I prompted, "and you turn right, then right again, and you come on to a little street..." "Ah, I think I remember the place you mean." No you don't love, because it never existed.

Thirteen other applications currently live. One's for a Trainee Substance Abuse Counsellor. At least I'd be excused the practical module.

We had a power cut in Lancaster for about four hours the other day. No traffic lights; alarms shrilling all over town. In The Dun Cow they'd arrayed a constellation of tea lights. I watched an eyebrowless barmaid using her phone to calculate the change she needed to give me on a 2.75 pint from the 3.00 that I'd given her.