I meet Trina off the bus. She'd been waiting at the bus stop at the RLI (our hospital) for twenty minutes due to a misunderstanding. I am profusely apologetic and she's gently chiding.

I said "We could replicate our first date by going to the Water Witch again." It's a canalside pub, converted stables, romantic when you want it to be. We are holding hands under the table and I start moving her hand towards my cock, hardened with our kissing. She put her head close to me. "I am not touching your knob in public."

I asked her what size she is, (it's all different of course, according to label) because I now need to move on to the next stage of her corrupution, which will be buying clothes for her which achieve the double objectives of being things that she would like to wear anyway, and which make me want to fuck her. She tends towards rather loose clothes and we need to get her a few shirts which are a bit tighter, to show her tempting, gorgeous tits off a bit more.

"I don't want any more beer," she said. "What shall we do now?" and answered her own question. "Actually, I've still got those earrings I left at your house. Shall we get them?" On my tiny little sofa cushion of a bed, I couldn't really wait very long so I got some almond oil out of the bedside cabinet and smothered it round my cock and poured and fingered it on and inside her cunt. I came, a lovely, grateful coming, my moans turning into laughter at the shared awareness of doing something utterly pleasurable, yet ludicrous. "Ludicrous"; the stem "to play". That's what sex is: playing.

Afterwards, getting dressed, I said "Are you going to be alright with all that almond oil on your cunt?" "No it's alright, just spread a bit of flour and sugar and leave it for a bit and we can have homemade macaroons."

I see her snoggingly off on the bus. Dishevelled and not in the mood, I go to a rehearsal for our Dickens things which goes well. We repair for drinks to Neil and Kev's flat. It's too noisy and I only last an hour. Tanya especially, lacking the slightest sense of turn-taking in conversation. A much more interesting bloke and his girlfriend turn up with two bottles of wine but Tanya and Neil constantly fight with him for what seemed like my attention.

Midnight. As I was walking home my phone rings. Some mobile number I don't recognise. It can't be a debt collector at this time of night, so I answer it. It's someone who's got my number off the couchsurfing site. Someone who was supposed to be staying in Kendal this evening is stranded in Lancaster and looking for somewhere to stay. "Yes, it's fine, give her my number."

At the bus station, a Hungarian girl, late twenties, with an alice band with a yellow rose in it. She's a doctor, starting work on Monday in Liverpool, who has spent a long day hitch-hiking from there and failing to get to Kendal. We walk up to my house and we chat to the lodger, who's making his tea. He's unusually sociable but goes off to have his enormous meal. Me and the Hungarian girl have a good couple of pints, talking about second language acquisition and her escape from a couple of potential rapists in Faro. I've rustled up a bed for her on the short sofa in the living room.

Tomorrow: Trina, all day on the narrowboat. A bit of shopping, then lots of fucking. She is a girl and she is my girlfriend.

A bit of a disjointed this one. A bit of accelerant to make me fit for tonight's soirée at the house of The Girl Who Only Wears Secondhand Clothes. She was a bit cagey on the phone the other day (having an affair with a lecturer in her department?) and I don't get on with people who play their cards close to their chests, so I hope we won't just talk around things. I'll sever our connection if she stops being interesting.

Our men-only book group the other night was a lot more open. I draped the little purple Christmas tree lights over the fireplace and lit the tea lights. R was talking about his girfriend of two years-ish, and comparing her to his ex-wife. "It's like having a sister, but with outbursts of carnal activity." It was my choice for next time so I have set everyone to read The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, a thinly disguised novel about the repression, torture and bonhomie under Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic; like Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, mainly (I thought) a story of how our self-flattering moral view of ourselves depends on the social conditions in which we can publicise it.

---

I took the rent round, just missing Seriouscrush, who was on her way up the street. She's still very attractive, even from several yards away, from behind. No-one wears what she calls "estuary colours" like her. Her greeny-grey (cord?) skirt to just below her knee, her thick fawn coloured tights, and an assymetrically-cut top angling down across her waist.

Kirsty came back from her weekend away with her fellah, in a beautiful dress, which cost five pounds. Inch wide shoulder straps, straight cut above the tits, a summery lilac flowery pattern, slightly in at the waist, straight and tight across her hips, before flaring out with box pleats starting at the top of her thighs. Pure cotton, probably, from the creases.

---

Trina tells me often that she loves me. I don't think I've ever been "in love". I've never had that overwhelming combination of physical, emotional and intellectual connection that the word seems to signify. I don't feel "in love" with Trina, since I wouldn't know what I'm agreeing to in saying that. It's just something that works, in practice. When I'm with her, it's a competition between competing desires: one, for sex--I want to be on her, in her, all over her; another, to talk--we talk and talk and talk, and even mid tit-fondle she sometimes makes me pause; and I also have half an eye on the strewn wine and food: I could never get close to a teetotaller or someone who only drinks infrequently.

---

I am bored with the Olympics. Melanie (youngest daughter) made me laugh today when we were watching some horses prissily prancing their way through a wood in Sussex. Affecting a posh accent, she said "'What do you like about horse riding?' 'That there's no common people in it'." As I left, all three of them were playing cricket in the street, with a coat hanger stuck in a jumper as the wickets.

Warning: it gets a lot less innocent below the cat picture.

Two annoyances, before the main feature: I keep getting emails from my ISP saying I've exceeded my usage allowance. The house has used 110GB this month so far. I know little about internet usage but it sounds like a great deal to me, and that's added £55 pounds onto my internet bill. It's certainly not me. I'm not here half the week and I can't believe my odd hour of youtube runs it up that much. It's him downstairs.

I am constantly postponing asking the owner of a local brewery to be sponsor or a guarantor against loss for our Dickens event. Despite having been asked to deal with this a fortnight ago I haven't done anything about it. I don't like asking people for money. This afternoon, there was a demanding ten minutes of what I hoped was plausible lying today when I bumped into Neil and Kev in the pub whilst trying to luxuriate in the recovery from my time on the boat with Trina.

---

But never mind. Neither of those are going to figure in the filthy text I'm going to send Trina in a bit.

"Where are you going?" asked Jenny, as I made to leave after getting them their lunch yesterday. "To G---," I said. "To see Trina." "Is no-one going to look after us? Are we going to be left here all alone?" she said, self-mockingly, importuningly, tilting her head towards me. "No, it's alright. Mummy will be here in a couple of hours."

Trina met me off the bus and we donned wellies to tramp along the towpath to her narrowboat. We were volubly chatty for a couple of hours, working our way through a couple of the bottles of wine. She suggested we should getting lunch, or whatever meal it is you have at 3pm, ready. She had on the white bra I like, underneath a loose thin blueish top which slanted down towards her tits like an envelope (there must be a more correct term for that cut), and jeans. "You get everything ready and I'll just stand behind you," I said. I didn't think it was that funny a remark but it sent her off into laughter and kisses.

On a narrowboat every movement is considered. We set up a rickety little table and had a carefully poised lunch, including a Garstang Blue cheese which smelt of urine and would give Bleu d'Auvergne a match for delicious intensity. "Well, I think we should go to bed," she said, with a welcome abruptness.

I love our undressing. I like how selfish I can be. I was naked before she was, wanting her to notice my hard cock while I slowly arrange her tits to my visual delight. "Bra on, or off?" she asked. "On," I said.

Afterwards, we dozed into sleep. She got up before me and busied herself with more drinks. I came out of the bedroom in my T-shirt and trousers. She was wearing a dark blue sundress. It was elasticated and ruched across her tits and what should have been an unflatteringly A-line of figure-hiding material below them. I came up behind her and delighted in putting my fingers against her nipples and tits and stroking her underwearless body underneath it. We sat on the sofa with a bottle of rosé on the little table. "Excuse me," I said, unbuttoning my fly and undressing myself and taking my cock at its base. "Could you suck my cock please?"

"Phew," she said, coming up. "It's hot down there." I put her fingers onto it and placed mine on top of hers. But there was an untouched bottle of rosé and there are priorities, and we started talking again. Politics, family, exes. We stood up to go to bed again, kissing, and she said "Can I say this? I know I'm a bit squiffy, but I love you to bits."

We were just laying down, getting into bed and a spider started abseiling towards the pillow. I shrieked "Werrr!" and jumped out of bed. She wasn't that bothered, and flapped at it with her bra. "No, no," I said, "it might drop on us." It had retreated to the ceiling. I took my tissue out of my pocked and scrunched it to death.

It took me a little while to recover, but I did. Her kissing was different. She has this exciting way of kissing, withdrawing, saying "No, looby, not yet." But now she opened her mouth wide and put her hand behind my head, pushing me towards her. It was even more exciting and I pushed her legs wider with my knees and stuck my cock in her with little more preamble.

She snores with stentorian volume, keeping me awake and leaving me utterly tired in the morning. We had cereal and strawberries for breakfast, and then I suggested a little nap, having told her, as diplomatically as I could, that she makes a rasping noise to banish all sleep. She took it well and it was laughed about, and we did have a lovely kissy doze (during which she started snoring again), but I can foresee separate beds for sex and sleep.

I went round to Kirsty's as we had to sort some things out with the girls. Jenny showed me her elaborate rehearsal schedule for Preston Guild and Fiona was angling for a game of football in the street. But I fell asleep on the settee and woke up half an hour or so later to find Kirsty washing up with her banging house soundtrack on. As I went to leave, Kirsty said "Shagged out?" "Yes, a bit." "Come on looby, if we fiftysomethings can do it so can you."

It might sound an obvious thing for a man to say, but in my case it took several years to like being part of a family. It took leaving Kirsty--who is an attractive, witty, clever, well-dressed, pisstaking woman--and a long period of misdirected resentment at my daughters, to come round to my present attitude. I know that saying this is partly a function of Kirsty doing most of the childcare, but I do like being with my girls; and I include Kirsty in that denominator.

On nights like last night, and tonight, when me and Kirsty are getting amiably pissed, when Fiona is taking the mick out of my burbling commentary on the Test Match highlights, Melanie is asking unanswerable questions about quarks, and Jenny is garroulous about her day's rehearsal for Preston Guild, and there's one of her friends in the house, who borrows my phone to ring her mum (fuck, she's pretty, no, don't look at her arse, she's only thirteen)--I like being part of a family. My family, our family. When Kirsty and I were together and I was working full-time I avoided my house and my children, going down the pub with the Guardian after work, sometimes lying about being late. Now I see far more of them, by choice.

I never wanted children. I remember with daylight clarity, sitting on a Modernist concrete slab with Kirsty in the terraced, watered, lush gardens of the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the only place in the city with decent vegetarian food, wondering why she wanted to spoil our lives, this vista, with children. We both got jobs on Madeira and moved to Funchal and over the next two years the topic occasionally came up, with the forceful delicacy which I still like in Kirsty. Kirsty is a picture of the woman I should have fallen in love with, but didn't, which makes me think it's an experience I'll never have.

I reluctantly agreed to have one--only one. A couple of years later, returning to London, three girls turned up. They were almost Portuguese, and Melanie, especially, wishes she were. She wants to be bilingual, but with no effort.

We got the girls to bed and I made to go. We made our arrangements about the next few days, seeing as it's school holidays and Kirsty's working Monday to Wednesday and I'm on Trina's boat overnight on Tuesday. I bent down to kiss her goodnight and accidentally touched her tits. I drew my hand away without apologising. We smiled, an understanding half-second which almost made me want to kiss her again. All our history.

I went to do my volunteer reception work at Really Late, supervised by someone I hadn't met before. She looked like a girl from a 70s pop magazine, with long bobbed hair, a red and white checked shirt and tight jeans. I enjoyed talking to her, telling her all about Trina, and the fact that I was going to meet a former glamour model for a drink afterwards. We parted outside the building, and I looked back at her after I'd gone a few steps, with a big smile on my face. Unfortunately she also picked that time to look back at me and it suddenly seemed a lot more flirty than I'd intended.

I went to the pub to meet Chris. I first met her about twelve years ago in London, when we met at a Usenet group meet. Never saw her for ages, then heard she was teaching not far from here, then, after another interval of a few years, we've bumped into each other a couple of times. She contacted me on the dating site the other day and suggested a drink.

Before meeting her, I popped into the Robert Gillow. My former next door neighbour was there, looking fetching as usual in a mustard yellow blouse with wide lapels, and jeans. She's a good bit older than me but I find her quite attractive; she's a bit of a lush and I sometimes see her wandering somewhat meanderingly home. Last year, on one of those licentious days around Christmas when the whole city feels pissed by 6pm, I ended up stroking her back and arms whilst sitting next to her in the Sun.

I went up behind her as she was sat on a stool and pinched her nice bum. She knows I like her and that I like flirting with her. As we said goodbye I put my hand on her forearm, and had to dismiss the urge to stroke my hand along it.

Chris walked in looking very pretty, in a grey scooped necked dress dotted with black circles, with a big black bow whose tie hung attractively and eye-drawingly down the parting of her lovely tits; the whole of her was beautifully, curvily shown off by the tight greyness of her minidress. Black tights and flatish shoes with little white dabs of plastic. We talked about boyfriend and girlfriend joys and woes, sex, bringing up children, and so on. She came back to mine and we carried on with the sex talk.

To my shame I had nothing at all in the way of drink, so I just had a bit of the other stuff and she had a flapjack. I said how much I like fisting, how intimate and slow it is, how much care and trust it requires; and what positions I like. It's absolutely fucking lovely describing to an attractive, gorgeously titted, well dressed, chatty, hairclipped, unaffected, young woman, what you like doing in sex, what works and doesn't, and hearing her say what she likes back. I'm glad we've re-established contact.

---

An academic contacts me on the dating site. "I know you've said you're spoken for now looby, but I did want to just get in touch, because when you said you want someone with nice tits, a PhD, and an MDMA factory--well I am that woman." I've got a good idea who it is, and if it is her, I bet she'd be fun. I wrote back suggesting we could go out dancing.

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In yesterday's LRB, Terry Eagleton informs us memorably that "Brendan Behan once described himself as a drinker with a writing problem."