A woman who takes you to London deserves a nice tea.

Just at the end of puréeing the frozen fruit for the Summer Pudding my handheld blender thing started making an angry sound and simulating an electric shock up my arm, before throwing in the towel with silence and a burning smell. Top culinary tip of the day: to purée frozen fruit, you need a fuck off blender. Then, in changing the sponges round in the oven I jerked one off the shelf and it slipped out of its tin and broke and fell down onto the flames. I fished it out and shaved it and scrunched it together as the unseen bottom layer.

Struggling metrosexually with a broken blender and a cake half of which was at the back of an oven, giving off a dancing yellow flame, I rang and asked her if she could make her own way from the station. After a delay in which she got lost, she arrived wearing a shirt and bra I like, sweating from our hills and the menopause. I like her sweat and I wanted to lick it off her forehead, but I didn't, because to do that would be to reduce ourselves to the level of animals and that way lies anarchy.

We finished our tea and went upstairs. It was a rare bright, rain-free afternoon. "Do you mind if we keep the curtains open?" I asked. "No, give the Muslims something to get worked up about," she said. I undid one shirt button and reached round to the small of her back and grasped her shirt tight, so that the buttons at the front forced small oval openings over her tits.

We fitted surprisingly well into the narrow sofa cushion which serves as a bed. There was a comic moment where her leg wouldn't quite go where I wanted it to. "Oooh, ow, blimey looby--I'll tell you if it breaks." Everything came apart and we laughed. "Oh God---geriatric sex," she said.

We walked to the station in a clear summer evening. I felt giddy and exhilerated, still for a second wondering why nothing is going wrong, then feeling irritated with the thought. "Next time," she said, "we should just take some champagne to bed. Could have had at least another half an hour there."

I like this thing with Trina. I think about her a great deal. I fancy her. I like her company and I can't stop talking when I'm with her. She's not interested in my pretensions. She makes me feel safe and comfortable, sexually, and in other ways. She makes jokes about the things I'm most worried about and reserves seriousness for the sliver of life that deserves it. She's local and drinks bitter. She's got a smile which is disarming and sexy at the same time. I hope it continues.

On London Euston's bleak concourse, a moment of checking myself to see how much I would really enjoy seeing her, which was erased by unselfconscious pleasure in doing so, and nascent desire, feeling her pressed against me.

We went to the pub outside the station. "Do you fancy a coffee, or a drink?" she asked. "No. I'm paying for today, seeing as I've dragged you down here." We sat looking out over the bus station and she told me about how easy her son's childbirth had been. My 11am pint of Fuller's, from a small distant breakfast, made everything start to drift, a sensuous feeling I recognise and like.

She apologised about her sweating (she's fifty-seven), but I like it. I like the way it lets me slide my fingers around her neck creases, and its wet warmth when I kiss her forehead or behind her ears. The only displeasure is that its indulgence isn't possible in a pub.

It had been decided that we would centre the day around the Barbican's exhibition about the Bauhaus. Before then, we went to Spitalfields Market, which sells dresses at triple the price you can get them in Primark, but has some good food stalls. In a pub in Bishopsgate, we talked about the respective denominations of our Christian upbringings and how much we like the old Wesleyan hymns. Those lucky enough to be in the above pub early yesterday afternoon heard a middleaged couple in the corner breaking off from snogging to sing together

Guide me, O Thou great Redeemer,
Pilgrim through this barren land
Something something something something
La la la la-ah la la la

Then, more confidently

Bread of Heaven
Bread of Heaven
Feed me now for ever more
(Ever more-or)

Before finising as rousingly as we dared

Feed me now for ever more

We resumed our former attitudes. She had turned up in an aquamarine top with a little cord tie above her tits, and jeans. As delicately as I could in the religious atmosphere, I tugged at her top at its waist to make it tighten around her lovely tits and show them off the better. "Right," I said eventually. "You're going to have to take me to an exhibition about the Bauhaus now because you are getting sexier and sexier."

I was astonished at the price to get in: twelve pounds. It was seven pounds for the disabled. "Can you pretend to be special needs?" she said. It's a great exhibition, although mainly I remember deliberately leaning against her as an excuse to feel my upper arm against her--oh dear me this is getting a bit one-dimensional--tits--while we admired something by one of Moholy-Nagy's pupils.

All of a sudden, there was only one hour to go and we found a little pub (she'd researched the pubs) down a lane off Moorgate somewhere. I won't recite any more of the details as I think any reader has got the gist by now, but I will just record two exchanges. One was "You don't realise how sexy you are do you?" "No," she replied with complete simplicity, "I don't mean to be." Another was, "I really fancy you." And she said "I know. And it's nice to feel the same way back. There's two men at the moment who are mooning over me and there's nothing. I feel a bit sorry for them really."

Coming back on the tube to Euston, we passed through Angel. "There's a pub near here," I said, "where we used to go on Sunday afternoons in my ravey period and just sit and recover." I made a gesture of leaning my face on my hand. "'I'm so pissed I don't remember anything about last night'," she replied, not getting the kind of intoxication to which I was referring. It doesn't matter.

Ringing her from the train I was physically aching, the consequence of several hours of being with someone you want to fuck, but can't. In Lancaster I went to the only pub which doesn't have music. "Practicing Christians?" a man at the bar said. "They've only had two thousand years to get it right." At the next table two male academics from Oxford were out with a Dutch female one. "Why is 'Jesus College' funny?" she asked. "It's not really. Well, you know, Jesus College, Satan College."

I am in Kirsty's house, looking out onto a vista ten feet deep, of a hoovered and litter-free red shagpile carpet. A pile of barely acceptably ironed shirts and trousers is on the settee. "M&S Girls No-Iron", it said on the labels, despite them being lined with a pattern like a geodesic dome; I'd left them in the washing machine too long. There's another pile, plucked from the washing line, the majority of which consists of teenage girls' underwear (oh dear--the search terms) and a smaller set of slinky adult underwear of which we cannot speak. In the kitchen, there are two sets of little buns, chocolate and plain.

It's always like this in the hours before she comes back, trying to look like a decent Dad. Although I did manage a sociable pint of Gwent y Draig cider while I was "nipping out to get some butter."

My friends texted me on Friday, saying that they'd got married and were in Edinburgh. I liked how they played it. They told no-one, and avoided a reception. No girls in ill-fitting strapless dresses, no cacophony of family, no ruched curtains in suburban pubs, no bad dancing on the grave of sexual desire as part of a public announcement of resignation. Marriage in my mind is an Institutional State Apparatus in the service of capitalist heteronormative patriarchy; like religion, I am bemused as to why intelligent people get involved in it.

Obviously I kept all that quiet when me, the newly-weds, and a couple of mutual friends went out for a drink yesterday.

---

Ironing is so boring that I decided to play, despite the girls, some of my music--disco, jazz-funk, Modern soul--for a change. I never play music when they're around. It's a Dad-failure that I've never introduced them to things like Madagascar's Rainbow. But for some time after my children were born I was so bitterly regretful that I had had them, that music was my refuge, something for me, not something I wanted to share with them.

Madagascar - Rainbow (1981)

I would say that one of the cards holding up my fragile house of finances has fallen away, and has made me toss, not in the right way, at 3am, but following the implication of the above song, I'd rather only co-opt liberally its metaphor of a rainbow, and say I'm looking forward to meeting Trina at Euston station at 10.30 tomorrow.

Where do you take a new girlfriend for a classy dinner in Lancaster? We had butter pie, peas and gravy in the little pie shop on Penny Street run by chatty overweight women in tabards.

Her clothes were so plain, a black scooped-necked T-shirt and jeans, yet I wanted to be all over her and she knew all afternoon I was after her tits. We went to the Ring O'Bells and its lovely garden of bees and wrens and blackbirds and herbs. I went to get another drink for us, and in the bar, a man said "Are you in the garden?" "Yes." "What are you doing there?" "Courting. I've got a young lady out there." "Oh, oh ,oh," he said, raising his palm apologetically. "It's alright," I said.

Keith arrived and sat down as we were mid-snog. "I'm bet you're glad I turned up," he said, laughing. He talked to her about canal boats for a while and I tried to join in while wishing he'd have the courtesy to fuck off.

We walked round the Castle, past the Priory Church and down onto the sward, me cocking my left foot, for I've a hole in my shoe. We stopped on a path and kissed. "I can't wait till we take each others' clothes off again," she said, which hardened my cock, as I sloped my hands again and again around the tits I wanted to hold and stroke. All the time not wanting to damage one of her most precious traits--the hesitancy of her kissing, which is a gift, a precious resource of sex. The Quay is now lined with flats facing the wrong way, and I felt watched, but I wanted to lift her T-shirt up above her tits to see them pushing out underneath a scrunch of fabric.

We went to the Sun. As we walked into the garden, she said "You're bound to know someone here." And there were Neil and Kev, my Dickens collaborators. Neil was tactlessly obtrusive, introducing me and Trina to the female graphic designer we've employed, but, unlike her and Kev, not picking up on increasingly blunt indications that I wanted to be with Trina. Having eventually extracted ourselves to another table, Trina said "I see what you mean. Poor lass, stuck with them all afternoon."

We were chatting closely, not looking at anyone else, talking about what puddings we both like, since it's been decided that I'm going to make her her tea soon. Sussex Pond Pudding and Steamed Treacle Pudding were mentioned. The pest that was Neil came over, dispelling our intimacy. "I'm sorry to interrupt you," he said fumbling with his mobile phone. "I'd like to show you the picture that Ingrid has done of Dickens. 'Ingrid!'" he shouted, and beckoned her over. "No no no really, it's very good," I said, and gave a thumbs up to Ingrid. "Really. We'll talk about this tomorrow." Kev, more aware, recalled him.

We snogged on the platform and I went off to do my voluntary work at Really Late, which, after a few phone calls, I found had been cancelled. I sent her a text saying how lovely she looked, how she always leaves me feeling half-fucked although soon, I want to be fucked properly, and how much I'm looking forward to seeing her in London on Monday.

It's all so uncomplicated with Trina. No fucking thinking.

I had arranged to meet Trina today. The right depth in, "both of us knowing exactly what it meant", as the Overnight Editor put it so beautifully, (as he always did), at a similar stage.

On the bus, a man a few seats in front of me was flicking endlessly through the Daily Sport. One of the small ads for sex lines had the heading "Jerk Off!"; on the opposite side, a full page picture of a woman's face. Presumably you ring one of the numbers in the adverts and then ejaculate over the picture. It was unpleasant, something you shouldn't look at in public, but I had Middlemarch and was glad to divert myself into the details of Dorothea's mismatch with Casaubon.

It was wet and after parking the car, she gave me her mother's wellies to save a soggy sock. She unlocked a padlock by the side of the road and led us on to what she called the "off" side of the canal. In her narrowboat, I saw the bottle of red and suddenly remembered the bottle of Prosecco I'd left in my fridge. She'd bought cheese and salami and crackers "because I know you like that down the Sun." We sat on the settee, eating and talking, and were a little coy, not touching each other as much as we normally do. I was wondering how we were going to manage to translate ourselves into bed.

We finished the wine and I again silently regretted forgetting the Prosecco. "Would you like to continue this in a horizontal position?" she said, and we moved into the bedroom. We stood up in the tiny space available and started to kiss. She undid my shirt, sloughing it for me to the floor. "It's got buttons, you know" she said, pushing her tits forward. But I wanted to slow the whiteness of her shirt and her bra. "I did promise you fantastic tits," she said.

As I was sliding her knickers to the floor and we both looked down, I was relieved to see my cock was hard. Suddenly, the boat jolted to its side, vanishing the fragility of sex. "Oooh!" I said. "What was that?" "It's a bloody plastic cruiser--they always go too fast." We recovered with good intentions, laughing, and got into bed. Tried the duvet, too hot; and luxuriated, implicitly showing ourselves to each other as the last stage of trialling. This is how I look. I hope you like it. Late afternoon, we fell into a sexed, wined, relieved sleep.

On the bus back I texted Kim and Kitty: "I've just had a right good seeing to. On a canal boat. First of many I hope." In Lancaster, I didn't want to go home. I went to a pub I don't often go to, and had an engaging two hours with an acquaintance, a Recorder and Premiership rugby referee. He's applied to be a judge in the Crown Court. He's being sent to the south coast to sit in a case concerning a solicitor accused of defrauding his chambers, but before then, he's off to sail to Belle Île. "Is it your own boat?" I asked. "Yes, I've got a few. I've got two moored up at H--- and we rent out eighteen at G--- Marina." I enjoyed it and didn't feel the slightest sense of envy for his money. I didn't mention Trina.

Everything is sex--in town, everywhere. The woman in the pub tonight, long orange silky scarf, tight white trousers, with her son and daughter. Me and the Recorder looking indecorously at the tight seam middling her arse, but continuing to talk, only thinking the phwoar. In the pub with Trina, the pretty young girl with artfully scruffy blonde hair and a London accent sitting behind us. "Well, I sort of knew we'd get on because even on our first date, well, I'd already sort of known you and knew you weren't... you know."