I flirt with women before meeting my girlfriend

I got to work at 7am this morning, to discover the one really unpleasant woman there was already there as ward housekeeper, so I asked if I could take a day's annual leave, which was granted. So I've lugged the heavy old computer down the pub and am in the corner, solipsistically typing away, something which irritates me when I see others doing it.

Me and Mel had a clunky reunion after her Greek holiday. I was tired, having been drinking travelling all day from Trina's. I stayed with her for a couple of days and we went out bopping at an event in "The Opal of the West" (St Annes) that we've been going to for years.

We met at about 6; the music, although not loud, was very irritating. I could hear myself moaning again, complaining about coming back to see all the women in niqabs, and unfavourably comparing Bristol to Lancashire, a theme she is sick of hearing.

Back at mine she presented me with a bottle of tsipouro, a new one on me, a Greek spirit of around 40% abv made from the residue of grapes after they've been pressed, which you drink neat. It is delicious, much less stringent than the combination "Greek" and "spirit" had led me to fear. We parted amicably enough, but it was a mistake to have arranged a get-together immediately after four hours on a train and a dancey late night, with another 5am alarm (for me) casting its doleful shadow over our table.

On the train to Trina's, I fell asleep. I'd got straight on the train on the back of three twelve-hour days at work, and woke up at the terminus, Crewe. It was half past midnight. At the Crewe Arms, opposite the station, I was engaged by three black-clad teenagers doing the semi-dancing of boys who think they're hard. "Won't get in there mate, it's full of fucking immigrants. Go up there, there's a Premier Inn." "Leave him alone," another one said. They tittered as I followed what I am almost certain were deliberately misleading directions, but seeing an old man with his clothes in a bag for life following the wrong path got them off my back. I went back to the hotel. I was told it was full.

It was a quarter to two before the third hotel I tried, on a business park -- roundabouts, slab offices, the foul crescendos of cars, and car showrooms -- had a room. The receptionist was going on about getting unfairly sacked from another hotel, and how Nigel Farage is no friend of the working man, while I could feel the approach of the tears that accompany intolerable tiredness. "Ok," I said, to cut him off. "Where am I?"

The dancey do with Trina was like a big social club. I was surprised how many people I knew, including some from my Morecambe days, which is going back a bit. A friend of Hungarian heritage slipped me a bit of homemade pálinka, and a couple of wee plastic glasses to have it in. Pálinka is a rather rough country fruit brandy, but the generosity was what mattered. And although I say this every time...if you want to meet well-dressed, articulate, attractive women who dance well, force yourself to get into the more soulful end of house music, and dance yourself. I do fuck all at these nights except dance without showing off, and I always get the attention.