"Look at this," said one of the hundred electors (a turnout in our ward of 9.9%) who came into the polling station. "This is what voting has come to in this country. There should be a policeman standing outside all day, we should be in a proper polling station, not a nursery, and you should be in a suit and tie."

I arrived at the polling station at 6.15am with the screens and the boxful of stationery and other paraphernalia, and started to set things up. The poll clerk arrived a little later. I was relieved that we got on and that he didn't seem to mind that as the senior member of staff there I was a good bit younger than him. You're spending sixteen hours with these people, with no breaks other than going to the loo.

It was chilly, with having to keep the door open, and ineffective heating that went off at 5pm. It was a very slow day, but not as slow as in the polling station at Bettws, Newport, where not a single voter turned up. My poll clerk started and finished a novel, and I almost finished Moll Flanders. At 10pm K--- started turning the place back into a nursery, while I did the paperwork. We took everything down to the leisure centre and got away by about 10.45. Wide awake on adrenaline, I had a couple in the Sun Hotel. A group of women were doing that screaming, over-laughing performance of female solidarity.

The hardest bit is always the morning after. Still stunned with the leftovers of curtailed sleep, I got back to the leisure centre for 8.30 where we had a training session on the Single Transferable Vote system.

Despite the fact that they'd only got away the previous night at midnight and had to be back at the leisure centre at 7am, the staff from the Council set high standards: good-natured, friendly and well-dressed, especially the Head of Flipcharts, my Council Crush, with her lovely slightly touseled dark blonde hair, wearing a silkily strokable creme blouse and straight grey trousers which perfectly almost covered her black kitten heels.

Our team made not a single mistake in the entire process, every complicated cross-matched stat coming out right first time. Nothing had to be recounted or opened again, and we were waiting for other less efficient tables to get it right. An excellent spoilt ballot did the rounds: someone had photoshopped the ballot paper, keeping to the same format as a normal one, but changing the pictures and names to Judge Dredd, Robocop, Dirty Harry, and Batman.

Lancashire's result was declared at 4.30 and I went back into town for a pint. Looking at myself in the pub's mirror, I was shocked at the gaunt, haggard face looking back at me.

I thoroughly enjoy working at the elections. It makes me feel involved with and sympathetic towards my Local Council. There's a cameraderie amongst the permanent and temporary staff, the representatives from the political parties. Blokey jokes, the same ones every year, keep spirits up. "Sleep? Don't be so soft!" "It's not hard--you've only got to count to twenty-five. A thousand times."

Raggedly-dressed young volunteers rushed about keenly with clipboards, making sure you're counting the votes correctly. Labour sent its contingent of busty, painted, fortysomething women aiming at glamour and missing. The Green Party and the Conservatives parody themselves. The LibDems were too embarrassed this year to show their faces, so we missed the grey-haired middleaged academic-looking women, all human rights and yoga.

Tonight I went to a training session for my work with the Plice Commshherner Elecshions on Thursday. I'm Presiding Officer at one polling station, working 6am-10.30pm, then I'm back as a counting assistant in our breeze-blocked "leisure" centre at 9am to count what is predicted to be meagre votes. Turnout will be very low so it won't be as exhausting as the General Election, where I was occasionally delerious whilst lick-finger flicking hallucinogenically through the voting papers.

In a Gillow-pannelled room in our beautiful, marble and granite Town Hall, a woman took us through the procedures. I nodded and asked questions and she ended up addressing some of her talk to me. I've always been interested in psephology since reading David Butler's books about the General Elections.

I wondered at her detailed, unscripted knowledge of election procedure, trying to take in every detail and knowing that I've got to appear knowledgeable and confident early on Thursday morning to my poll clerks.

In night-long mental conversations with myself, I am often wracked with worry about whether a slight financial irregularity in my affairs will be discovered. One party worries over the details of my court case appearing in the local paper, while the other urges me to sleep, pointing out that I can't do anything whilst in bed. They argue it out all night in my head. In the morning, I tense with an unfamiliar sound of a car or heels in the street below.

The worry has become a higher cost to me than its financial advantage, and I've decided to stop it, from today. The decision is as liberating as its consequences will be practically difficult to live with.

I went to the jobcentre and found one of the very few jobs that I would actually like to do that crop up round here--part-time car park attendant. Let a few cars in and spend the rest of the time reading.

My call was answered by an inarticulate but well-meaning man who went through some preliminaries. "What attracts you to the job?" Several things actually, although I didn't mention avoiding a shameful court case, and being able to crack on with Moll Flanders. The couple next to me earwigged. I went down the pub and worked out a sheet of figures about what this will all mean financially.

The inescapable conclusion is that I will have to cut back on my drinking. "You're only an alcoholic if you can't afford it," and I can't. From now on it's more placcy cider and the four quid Stowells red from the corner shop than the delicious complexities of twenty quid wine club wine from South Africa and Italy. I spend an insupportable amount on drink.

The horrible militarism of Remembrance Day is over. Men who don't often drink were in the pub, talking at a performance volume. Paranoid, aware that we are simultaneously watching them and ignoring them with silent disdain, they dance round homosocially with international lager.

It stinks, even through the plastic, a bitter smell, a bit like piss. "Be careful with this," he said, "it's fucking strong." I started trying to cut it and it was sticky and wet; all of these should be good signs.

Well, I've had three [Really? Just the three? - Ed.] doses of a centimetre each now. It's nowhere near the best stuff I've ever had, which was made in a university.

"I know you've heard all this before," the student said," but honestly, don't do more than a centimetre." Everything about them came across as genuine, so we reluctantly obeyed. We were soon gasping, our hearts racing with a surfeit of chemical energy. After wasting the best part of the high on an infuriating detour to an ATM for someone who told us after we'd done it that she needed to get some cash out, who wouldn't accept our offers of a loan of a tenner, we danced for hours in a right-on Lancaster community centre where men in jumpers refrained from chatting up girls as that was considered a sin against feminism in the Macrame Belt of Lancaster in the 90s.

The cynic in me thinks he's thinking: "Hmm, I've got a keen customer here. Let's water it down a bit and see if he notices." I'm going to be straight with him. I only want the best stuff and if it's not available, fine. We're not addicts, we're connoisseurs, hedonists. We're not doing this as a paid version of self-harm; we're doing it to heighten our sensual, sexual, and artistic lives.

Round about now Trina will be arriving in Helsinki to spend a few days there with a friend. It's so liberating, not having to think or analyse my feelings about her. This afternoon I popped into the pub where Kitty and I were the other night, for what was necessarily a single pint due to the prohibitive prices: 3.40 for Thornbridge Jaipur.

I bumped into a couple of friends who were asking me where this made-up girlfriend is. I said "She's not going to get into Penthouse any time, but it just works for me." I wish I hadn't said that. Makes her sound like some lumpen over-sexed tart.

Last night was the public opening of a new pub in Lancaster, serving what they call "craft beer"--an Americanism, but a useful one I suppose, in that it covers both real ale and bottled and keg beer. It was rather Generic Modern inside, with cylindrical lampshades made from dark textiled material, recessed lights and parquet flooring. I told the manager that I hope it'll acquire a bit more character in time. Kitty, however, was looking so lovely that I wouldn't have bothered where we were.

A new dress, tight in the right places, showed her off beautifully. Also there was a teacher I know, who like Kitty, has great tits an attractive figure, and the man I snog every few months when I'm drunk. Inadvertently then, rather a sexy evening. When I got back I sexted Denise, for her birthday. And for once, sent it to the right person.

Trina arrived back on Thursday at Heysham Port. Right next to the port are our two nuclear power stations, breathing their invisible death-breath. I've had it justified over and over again in pub conversations. "But what would we do for jobs round here otherwise? We can't all ponce around universities like you."

I was very happy to see her, and as we slithered romantically over each other's anoraks, she smiled prettily and handed over my present.

We lapped each other up on the bleak railway platform. We only had two-and-a-half hours, so went for a pub lunch and a pint, but I told her that as soon as possible I want much longer to enjoy her with fewer clothes on.

I want to do everything I possibly can to prolong this feeling of newness and desire, which is why I'm fencing off her suggestion we live together, to which she has added further detail. She was hoping I'd be pleased; I just feel wary.

Within in the next year or so, it's likely she will come into an amount of money which should be just about enough to buy a small terraced house--something like the one above--in a good area of Lancaster. Naturally one would remove the satellite dish, otherwise one would never be able to invite anyone home. The sum would fetch three bedrooms where the rough boys live, but I'm not living in a CCTV'd Chavland with free drum n' bass concerts every night.

The idea would be that I rent the house from her; then once she comes into a larger sum upon a relative's decease, we sell it and buy something for the two of us. Given current interest rates, it makes sense to put the smaller sum into property.

The problem for me is that it gives an inevitability, a fixed trajectory, to the relationship. I don't like mapping my affective life into the future. Neither do I want financial security to become conflated with our relationship. I don't mean I'd prefer living in righteous poverty under the canal bridge, but I don't want the fact that living with her would greatly reduce my constant financial worries, to be a factor in that decision.

Gerry and I arrived at the pub and I apologised for telling her by text last night that I wanted to ---- my ---- in her ---- while she ---- her ---- ---- ----, something meant for someone else.

It's an unattractive pub, swirly carpets, darkly stained wood, one big room, glaring lights, and a laddish hardness about it with men performing that weird modern handshake involving a thumb grab with your hands at 45 degrees, which I suppose is used to indicate and threaten a physical power underlying the friendship. It's a slight improvement on that offputting fingers-only offer, which instantly makes me mistrust a man.

The comment on the first track set the tone for the night. Issac Hayes's Theme from Shaft had someone wondering if we had "anything different", or "some rock n' roll". Later, the barmaid came up to me and said "Have you got anything you can boogie to?" I was incredulous: I was at that moment playing Heatwave's Boogie Nights.

Gerry rose to the occasion, sending round a sheet of A4 and a pen to ask people to write down two tracks they'd like to hear next time, although we have just found out from the landlady that there won't be a next time.

We got a few dancing though, including Erica and Mr Erica. He said some drunken but very nice things to me which ended in cheek kissing which was honest and heartfelt. Quite surprisingly, Ingrid, looking rather fanciable in a white blouse and dancing straight away, turned up in the company of my old time partner in performance crime.

We were struggling with the equipment a bit--we had knocked this together in a very short time, the amp didn't seem to cope very well with the low output of this computer, and Gerry struggled with the way that Linux sometimes makes simple tasks like playing records difficult. I managed to get away with a couple of my favourite trackss, like Alexander O'Neal's Fake, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' The Love I Lost. I thought we did OK, but I'm relieved we haven't been asked back.

Csilla, Stefan and the Girl Who Only Wears Secondhand Clothes came round for tea. Pudding was apple crumble made from windfall I gathered from the canalside. As I was engaged in the apples' somewhat faffy preparation (they're small, so time you've cut the bad bits out and cored them you don't end up with much fruit), the phone rang. The number started 001. America? On my mobile?

To my delight and surprise, it was the Architect. Our first date ("clever, a good drinker, and fit", I thought) was also our last, as she landed a job in New York and despite a few transatlantic phone calls, we drifted out of touch. She missed Hurricane Sandy (although Glasgow in November isn't much of an improvement).

Assiduous readers of this chronicle might recall that another suitor of hers found out her email password and read our emails to each other. Irked by something in them, he contacted me through the dating site where both of us had met her.

She suggested meeting in Glasgow today but I'm broke and can't get up there. Instead I will wonder anew at the kind of person who asks you if you can play something you can dance to, halfway through this.