"If you start messing about with my wife, I will kill you," said New Business Colleague.

Erica (last Saturday's bride) sends me a message. "What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?" "Getting pissed with you, what else would I do?" We chat for a couple of hours. Her husband of one week comes in. I like his solid handshake, his hand white with plaster. He's a rare and admirable man, totally trusting in Erica; there is love between them. Though he did leave Kirsty's bedroom in a fucking state when he did her ceiling.

New Business Colleague and his wife, my old classmate, whom I fancy a bit walk in. I do the introductions, comfortable that they'll all get on. "So when are we going to get to meet this Trina?" Erica said. "I don't think she exists." NBC went on a riff about her being a blow-up doll and did a good Welsh accent, since he knows Trina's half Welsh. "'Oh dear, have you got a puncture repair kit?'"

Erica's husband has got chattier with me since he saw me snogging Vicky at the Northern Soul do, which perhaps allayed his suspicions over why Erica and I are out so often. While the girls were chatting about something he was being pleasantly laddish about Vicky. Who is, very much, A-list, fuckable, single, Lancaster totty.

NBC's wife was a bit exasperated with him as he necked a bottle of cider. "Why are you drinking so quickly? Do you know, when you're working next week, I'm going to go out with Cl*f*ord (she always calls me by the elongated version of my actual name), and I bet he'll still be sober at the end of the afternoon." He was getting tired, a long week of perilous, technical, physical work behind him. I felt sympathetic towards him whilst looking forward to him leaving me alone with her. "When you're sober," I said, "we need to have a commercial conversation," hoping to remind him that he needs me as much as I need him. "Don't sleep on the big settee. Use the small one. Go to bed," she said, to his back.

She and I exhaled. Her cerise nails, the crease of her tits; black bra. "Do you know how much I was earning when I had my own salon?" I shake my head with a refusal to reply, as you can only disappoint in any answer. "Four thousand a week. I had a tin, full of twenty quid notes. I was minted". "Yeah, well," I say, the only people who say money doesn't matter..." "Are the rich," she enjoined, completing my sentence as I would have.

She got up to leave. The exquisite pleasure of holding her a fraction too long, of kissing her a little too sensually for friendship. Mutual, desired, never to be acted on.

I go to Really Late, where I work as a volunteer receptionist, trying hard to remember to say neither the name of the organisation nor my name when I answer the phone, and wondering why all the counsellors are female, 50something, and with short grey hair. It's like a Quaker meeting. Apart from 70s Pop Magazine Pin-Up Woman, with her tempting tightly jean-seamed arse switching as she walks away from me.

We have to check a folder for messages and there's one for me about my forthcoming course on Domestic Violence. It starts by apologising that although they'll provide lunch, they can't fund my travel to Leeds. "Not a problem at all," I said out loud to myself.

I like Leeds. My aborted but fascinating (for me) PhD, drunken afternoons in The Angel with Kim, staying at her house, her slapping me hard on the arm when I tried to kiss her on platform 14, then becoming a close friend; the admiration coloured with sexual attraction, that I had for my supervisor, never being able to say that it was him I was working for, not the university, or a career, or--least of all--to make "an original contribution to research". I don't think I've ever had an original idea about anything, least of all my dissertation topic. I liked the literature review, but I lost interest when I was expected to say something of my own.

The second page of my invite to Leeds is sobering. It says that counselling is not recommended in twelve instances, the first of which is where there is a possibility of "lethality". My respect for the organisation slipped a little there. Why can't they say "when there's a chance someone's going to murder someone?

"I'm glad we're both pissheads," said Trina, and then told me of some semi-clandestine work she used to do in Liverpool directing Irish girls who wanted abortions to abortion clinics. What a sad job. Abortion should be legal, free, and rare.

I like being with Trina because I don't have to think.

A quiet week in the newsrooms of rural Lancashire

Trina and I took advantage of one of yesterday's few periods without rain to rig up, somewhat ineptly, a tarpaulin, over the rear end--there's probably a correct nautical term--of her narrowboat. The rain is seeping into the engine enclosure below, and the pump which should detect it and pump it out doesn't work.

The one advantage of the task is that one gets justifiably to use the term "bilge pump". The word "bilge" sounds ridiculous, but to succumb to the tittering amusement afforded by repeatedly saying it with an exaggerrated plosive consonant can sometimes, on a narrowboat, end in farce.

Trina told me to move out of the way and hop onto the bank, so that she could do something involving eyes and knots. The boat sometimes drifts a bit from the canalside, as the fastening ropes continually loosen. Forgetting this fact, I stepped back and fell into the canal. I did a panicked doggie paddle for a few moments before realising that my feet had found the bottom of the canal, and that the water was only about three feet deep.

Peeling my trousers off, struggling against their evident desire to remain wetly clamped to my legs, I discovered that my manoeuvres had caused a rip in the left buttock region. Trina found a safety pin and effected a temporary repair. This required a careful gait on my walk home to avoid a public and a private distress: underpant exposure and/or a stabbed buttock.

Someone I know annoys me greatly with this email. The reply required a good deal of self-control to come out as it did rather than "Why don't you shut the fuck up you pompous tosser?"

Naomi McAuliffe -- A pint of beer is every woman's right.

In happier news, Trina rings to discuss what we're going to do for her birthday next month. I say that it'll have to something very cheap as I've spent all my disposable income for September in advance, mainly on a trip with my ex-boss to this most beautiful corner of Nottingham for the final One Day International against South Africa.

I said "I tell you what, as a special treat, come to Lancaster and we'll have butter pie, peas and gravy, and you can have a flapjack for pud. All on me."

"Look," she batted back. "You say you've never been to the Isle of Man. Let's go there, let me pay, just for a couple of days." I start to protest in a way that we both understand isn't serious. "No--when you've got it, you can treat me." Fuck knows when that'll be, I think.

Isn't that kind of her though?

"Listen Bryony, just to get this out of the way first, it'd be easier if we slept in the same room. I'll put that mattress down and you can have that, and I'm sure we could find a decorous way of getting ready for bed. It's just that otherwise one of us has got to sleep downstairs and K gets up quite early." "Yes, that's fine," she said, unconcerned. "Have you eaten?"

Bryony first contacted me about the same time as Trina and we've chatted by email since. Her, detailing her falling out with a quietly aggressive silent type, to whom women with well-paid jobs in marketing, like Bryony, are sometimes attracted.

She wondered whether I could put her up for a night on her way to Scotland for a holiday. "This is your opportunity to get rid of me if you want!" We roamed around Lancaster at 9.15pm, looking for somewhere to eat. "I'm not used to this," she said. "In Manchester..." and then caught an impoliteness. "You're in the sticks now, Bryony." The Pizza Margherita was still serving and she bought pizza for us, a bottle of wine, and then we had a pint in the White Cross on the way home.

Waking up in the middle of the night I wondered where I was, looking over to Bryony asleep a yard away, her red hair spread over the pillow. "'Yes, I would like to see you again', he thought. Preferably with your hair spread all over my pillow'," it says in an American C20th novel the name of which I can't recall now.

Trina snores, so I am very tired in the morning, having spent the night trying to incorporate her massive noises into dreams. I fall deeply asleep as soon as she gets out of bed. After a slumped, black two hours, I woke up to see her back in bed. I kissed her and we woke up properly, with sex, both of us laughing at near or actual orgasm. It's such a silly thing to do.

The next day she came to Lancaster. "Well, Trina, what would you like to do? We could go to mine, or we could have a drink." We walked silently on for a few seconds. "Yeah, well, that's it really." We went for butter pie, peas and gravy, the finest contemporary exemplar of popular Lancaster cooking. In the Sun, one of the young, black-miniskirted, female staff smiled at me pawing Trina, perhaps with pleasure at knowing that I am diverted by a greater attraction than is offered by her practiced coquettish manner and her nervousness about the precise position of her skirt hem. Female staff in pubs have to manage sexiness and propriety, serving drinks, and trying to please.