On Trina's narrowboat, from which the romance is ebbing as the days get colder, it is freezing; the spiders are hibernating. Our effluvia needs emptying, before our cup runneth over. The fuel tank needs filling with diesel, and we need a new gas bottle. At the garage, someone comes out to help us, unexpectedly. Such "help" sets off a series of difficulties which at this point are unforeseen.

I lug the can of diesel along the towpath to the boat. Trina holds the sawn-off pop bottle that we use as a funnel as I start pouring the fuel in. After a few seconds Trina realises that it's petrol, not diesel, and tells me to stop. I have no idea what either petrol or diesel look like and would have blithely tipped the whole thirty litres in.

Trina rang the boat repair man. I'm glad he can drain the tank without us being there, because in his presence I feel a bit ashamed, lacking Obvious Manly Knowledge.

We attempt to pour the petrol into the car, but it flows all over our hands and onto the road because there's a valve down the hole which remains closed. Whereas other men might produce a screwdriver or a Swiss Army knife to deal with such an emergency, I had something else, equally effective, tucked in my jacket pocket.

My tool of manly manliness

We poke my Rimmel Special Eyes Kohl eyeliner down the petrol hole and hold it there for our second attempt. The fuel gurgles into the tank, and I wipe my trusty eyeliner pencil down and tuck it back into my jacket, ready for any future valve-based action. I lug the new gas bottle back, fit it without blasting half of Garstang into Yorkshire, and put a gas ring on to defrost the place.

She builds up an ineffective fire as I cut the cherry tomatoes and arrange the salami, rocket salad and sourdough bread, wishing it was pie and chips instead, and open the Rioja. My hands are cold, I am cold, and I put on another jumper. She's still sexy though, even if she smells a bit of unleaded petrol. We kiss and kiss and I suggest we go to bed. Not to get warm, because I know the bed will be clammy, cold and damp, but because she's stroking my cock through the thick woolen old ladies' Scottish blanket that I've put over my lap, as I push it up to meet her hand, over and over again. "That's just what I was going to say," she says.

The following day we drive to Southport. I'm parked in a pub while she goes to catch up with a friend, then we're staying in a hotel overnight. The silly constumes of the staff--black tie embossed with the company logo, waistcoat and dark trousers--made them look like characters in a public information film about hygiene from the 1960s. The craic in the pub was excellent, with a political discussion that got just to the right temperature without boiling over. The locals are gently pisstaking towards lager drinkers. Someone comes in, looks at the ales, then orders a San Miguel. The ale drinkers all spontaneously rise in a chorus of mock-disapproval ooohing.

Back in the hotel, she's in the bath, looking gleaming and voluptuously strokable. At night she prowls around on the creaky floors, adjusting the window, cursing a drunk in the street below us. I know she's having a bad night because she only spends an hour or so broadcasting warnings for shipping in Lundy, Irish Sea, Malin.

In the cafe in the garden centre, a bezimmered, Daily Mail-reading clientele gently fork through scones. I am drifting as she tells me stories about her son's childhood, my attention depleted, as I am depleted of sleep. Sleeping together is the one thing we can't do. Otherwise, it's uncomplicated, unreflective, straightforwardly enjoyable. Lots of sex and drink and endless nattering. On Saturday week another essential brick will be added: dancing--assuming the bailiff doesn't show any interest in my going out shoes.

I composed myself into reasonable middle class person slightly surprised at this affront to my dignity, and rang the bailiffs.

He relented only as far as offering me an unaffordable instalment plan of £114 per month, which, even I were able to agree to it, would be prefaced by a Walking Possession order, in which they enter the house and make a list of the things they'll remove if you fall behind on the payments.

"Can you agree to that now?" he said. "I don't know--obviously I'm just talking off the top of my head now..." "Well, I'll put it on hold till Friday and you can ring me then."

Kirsty came back from her weekend away and saw the letter above. I was, to my shame, wondering if she'd put it on her credit card and I could pay her back over a period of time. I didn't even obliquely suggest she could do this, hoping she might offer, but her sympathy, perfectly reasonably, fell short of offering a dissolute former boyfriend several hundred pounds to get himself out of a hole of his own making.

I had a look through the plentiful forums dealing with this issue. Thousands of people have these things hanging over their heads tonight. I've very little of value that they could take. I've no car, TV, or jewellery, and my mobile phone doesn't have a camera on it. I do have several hundred vinyl records, a greater number of books, and a hifi system (Copland hybrid transistor-valve amp, Musical Fidelity X Pre preamp, Systemdek XII turntable and Rega RB300 arm, Cambridge Audio tuner... er, and so on--we're losing the girls now) that cost £3000 when I assembled it bit by bit fifteen years ago. My worry about losing my records and my hifi is only exceeded by the excruciating embarrassment of introducing the bailiff to the lodgers, and asking them to lie that everything in their rooms is theirs. My sangfroid about financial matters is being tested by this.

Nil desperandum. A suggestion on the forums is that you ask the Council to take back the debt and make a proposal for its repayment. Councils are more reasonable than bailiffs, so that's my job for tomorrow morning. And my hope.

Just to dispel any twinges of sympathy my heart-tugging tale might have provoked, I will say that after my persuasive talk down the Town Hall, I will be off to meet Trina on the boat. With Trina's firm Welsh hand on the tiller, we will steer it to the poo station, where we will connect a big sucking machine which will deliver our shit and piss into Morecambe Bay eventually. We also have to fill the diesel tank up almost to the top, because you don't want condensation in your diesel tank, apparently, so I will have to struggle stick insectly with five gallons of diesel.

Then we can settle down to a nice evening of a blazing fire, problems-forgetting, wine drinking, dancing and friskiness.

---

There was high drama on Kirsty's street the other day. You might remember that a month or so ago I was walking to hers with a bottle of wine, in a sunny mood on a sunny day, and simply looked across at the man washing his car who lives to the back of her house. "What the fuck are you looking at?" he said. You don't belong here, I thought. It's not that kind of area.

A friend of my girls said that three police cars drew up the other day, retrieved a gun from his car, and started dusting it down for drugs. Wish I'd made more of an effort with him now.

Trina wants me to meet a significant other, a girl she met in the queue for registration at Uni forty years ago. Trina got talking to her and pointed out that A-D meant your county of origin, not your surname. Trina offered to share her sandwiches and they went for a half of cider in the bar.

They've been close friends ever since. Significant Other got a First in Germs and a PhD in Dirt followed by a post in a central London hospital, where she fell for her future husband as he manhandled computers the size of wardrobes. Trina warned me he was "boring" and "characterless".

Significant Other met us at Euston. I shook her hand and apologised for us being late. Then I remembered an edition of Blind Date when a woman recorded her first impressions of her date as "reserved", saying "he shook my hand"; so I placed a kiss from the Guardian's etiquette manual on her cheek. What is the correct way to greet a new female?

We were to meet Mr Boring at Farringdon. Significant Other proposed the awkward route based on the misleading cartography of the tube map. Feeling as though I were taking over straight away, I suggested we walk to Euston Square instead and get a direct tube. Typical man, I worried she'd be thinking.

The Thai meal posed some difficulties because of my Condition, which obliged me to excuse myself to induce vomiting. Trina noticed; the others didn't. Mr Boring was talking about the difficulties of working within trendy bare brick walls in a piped music and table footballed environment as a sixty-year-old computer programmer for a big supermarket chain. I didn't see how this intelligent, chatty man could be considered dull.

He led us round some of Farringdon and Clerkenwell's finest real ale pubs, glad, I think, to have some company separate from Significant Other and his work colleagues from the Visible Underpant Generation. I was a North Country dilettante, constantly distracted by things of interest on a wondrous tour of beer and architecture combined.

St Peter's Brewery tap, The Jerusalem Tavern

On the train home, all of us tipsy (one get doesn't drunk in Surrey, one gets tipsy), we were loosely doing crosswords. I answered a phone call from N who wanted me in the next D**ke*s production he's organising. From the audience's reaction my response may have lacked a degree of finesse.

"You fake", Trina said. "What a crawler", Significant Other said. "Using your children as an excuse." "It's a small town," I said. "You can't be honest all the time."

Good beer, but I know how Oliver Twist felt now

Next day, we went round Borough Market, and I began to feel uneasy that Trina was paying for almost everything. Lunch was a skimpy affair, a mixed "platter" hardly larger than a tea plate, but redeemed by the bitter they brew feet from your table.

The Tate Modern wasn't a good idea. The South Bank is cold and ugly, her dodgy hip was flaring up, and neither of us were in the mood for wading through panels of artspeak. I was relieved when she suggested going to another pub. We found Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and descended into its cellars to join the belanyarded classes in their post-work socialising, which sometimes seemed to have the air of an extension of work.

On the train back she was composing a text to our hosts. "Erm... 'We had a lovely time and Looby...' Looby what? What shall I put?" "Looby thought your husband wasn't as mind-numbingly boring as Trina had made him out to be."

We started thinking about a possible project for next year--visiting the city now in northwestern Ukraine, from which Trina's grandad fled, avoiding thereby being one of the eighteen thousand Jews of the city murdered by the Nazis in Operation Barbarossa. He ended up initially in Hull, which one could argue is a refuge preferable only when the alternative is being murdered.

Bugger. Set my alarm for 5.30am hoping that I could listen to the closing stages of the Second Test against India, and we've already beaten them.

For my next trick, I had this photomontage ready of a bottle of placcy cider, a canvas bag from some academic conference or other called the Festival of Social Science, a debt collector's letter asking for 2208.75, and one from the bailiffs saying they're coming round to "seize my goods" (what a dramatic phrase) for this six hundred quid I owe the Council. I was going to publish it as an image of the life of drunken intellectual poverty I lead, but the ISP have put us on limited rations for exceeding our 120GB / month allowance, and it won't let me upload photographs. Someone in this house is caning the internet. I've changed the package to one allowing us 250GB. FFS what's he doing? Running a film studio?

Instead, we'll have a picture uploaded before the current restrictions, of one of Britain's top models who practices the heptathlon in her spare time, used here on the flimsy excuse that she's holding the ICC Champions Trophy.

---

In a few hours I am meeting Trina on Lancaster station and we are off to stay with her old uni friend in Epsom for a couple of days. Apparently she has a very boring husband.

...said Unbearable in an email. They can be. Even if one can tiptoe a harmless way through a new and unstable set of protocols about privacy and openness in blogging, one can't deal with the moral-free scrapers of Fcaoboek. I'm not techy enough to know what happened, but I was perturbed to find a link to this site from my Fcaoboek page, which is published under a pseudonym and nowhere mentions this blog. I put a notice up saying that the blog would be moving to a new URL, and set about doing this.

I had a sense of foreboding as soon as I read the online instructions which described the process as "easy". It has been a struggle with "errors", "access denied", and other instances of the bureaucratic language computers use when telling you you've made a mistake. It makes me think that there is a God, one who sent computers into the world to seduce us with their apparent usefulness, before forcing upon us hard lessons in self-restraint and calm in the face of wanting to throw the fucking things across the room.

It's still a bit of a bodge--the permalinks won't work unless the site is tailed with an unattractive "index.php" appendix; the site to which I hoped to emigrate is a wasteland of broken databases. So I'm still here for the time being. I want to avoid passwords for as long as humanely possible. I enjoy the privilege of poking around the blogosphere and reading about people's lives, and I don't want to imply that mine is so significant as to need a bouncer on the door.

---

Right, where were we?

Kitty came over on Saturday night. I froze with alarm mid-curry. "Looby, I know you find me very attractive..." I mentally flicked through my vast catalogue of faux pas, trying to recall the clanger I must have dropped to provoke this. "...but do you think my arse looks big in this?" I don't think she noticed my sigh of relief.

On our way to the pub, trying to clear the lascivious slime of Lower Church St as quickly as possible, we bumped into The Girl Who Only Wears Secondhand Clothes and a PhDer with a strange name that means "shit" in English slang. Four young girls, aimiable enough, dressed in miniskirts and spilling over their tops, asked us to take their photos, pulling Fcaoboek faces. I think mine and Kitty's chatter at with The Girl Who Only Wears Secondhand Clothes and Dr Shit might occasionally have strayed onto the garrulous side of conversational equality.

---

I had two letters the other day, one as lovely as the other was horrible. I wrote to Mary-Ann a few weeks ago, a chatty letter, mentioning Trina and some other news, hoping she might like to keep in touch.

I heard nothing, and thought that was that. Yesterday, three double sided pages of handwritten A4 arrived, Mary-Ann dealing with the rough hand she's been dealt in life with her usual practical, optimistic way. I'm pleased we're back in touch, especially in a handwritten medium.

---

Trina and I have had a good couple of days of banging. The fire on her narrowboat has been seized up for some time, making the boat increasingly chilly and unromantic, with cold, damp sheets making going to bed a more practical activity than I want it to be. With chisels, hammers, wire wool and WD40 we finally got the thing open, cleared it of shovelfuls of ash and coke, built a fire and snuggled back into orange-lit, Muscadet cosiness.

"You were getting a bit defensive about Kim," she said, next morning in bed. "Was I?" "Yes. I was just taking the mick out of someone who is such a wild child and then spends the morning crocheting." I thought I was being told off slightly, before she said "I hope you'd be as protective of me as you are of your other friends."

We went to collect a new washing machine for my house. We got lost took an interesting route to a moribund plastic caravan park which had an air of housing people who've given up and are going quietly. We couldn't move it and the man of the house was confident in saying it wouldn't fit in Trina's little car. I engaged two burly men to collect it for me. They arrived next day with it in their van. "Wait, wait," I said. "Drive it round the back, otherwise you'll have to take it down some stairs." "Oh that doesn't matter," they said. "We can take it down some stairs."

I stood weedily on, watching them take the thing down the uneven, damp cellar steps. I plumbed it in, with only one spurt of water, then went to deal with the other letter, which makes threats about what will happen unless I pay them six hundred pounds "IMMEDIATELY".