I walked down to the pub on the canal towpath to meet Trina, who lives on a houseboat a few miles away. We've only been emailing since Saturday but there's a bit of a running joke developing about Hegel, since the German Idealist girl-magnet makes an appearance on my dating profile. I said she could identify me by my copy of Charles Taylor's 'Hegel and Modern Society'.

She was sitting on a bench outside but didn't require any bookish assistance to spot me. Straight black shoulder length hair, and, as she said herself, "great tits." I sat down next to her and asked her what she was reading. It was The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. "Oh look at us," I said. "What a literary couple." "I wonder how Miller and Hegel would have got on," she said. I told her I'd read his Tropic of Cancer and we started talking about how feminists wouldn't like it.

"Some feminists are very intolerant," she said. "Yes, I know, but although there's lots of individual counterexamples, I still think feminism is something worth clinging on to. So get me a drink, bitch." I stood up and asked her what she'd like.

Three short hours passed, my only anxiety being to protect myself from any disappointment, since her voluble, unserious chat, and the way she looked, meant I was becoming attracted to her. She suggested a walk along the canal and we went a little way out of town then turned back on ourselves, past the pub.

"What shall we do now?" she said. "Well, I suppose you could come and have a cup of tea at my house. It's only ten minutes away." Just as I was to join her on the sofa, Neil phoned, inopportunely, about the Dickens event.

"Where are you?" he said. "At my house." "What are you doing this afternoon?" "I'm entertaining this bird I've just met on the internet." "Come back to bed," she shouted.

I put my arm round her and we began kissing. There wasn't much time before her bus, so we walked slowly to the bus stop, hand in hand, me hoping I wouldn't have to explain her to anyone I might bump into. We stood waiting together and and we kissed again and again as I raked my hands through her lovely black hair and around her ears and down her neck, keeping my hands reluctantly off her tits. "Eeeh... I haven't snogged in a bus shelter for a few years," she said. "Well, youngsters mustn't be allowed to monopolise the best pleasures," I said.

I waved her off and I walked into town to sit by myself with a quiet pint, to drink the afternoon in.

She emailed when she got in, and again before going to bed. A couple of lovely texts this morning. We've arranged to see each other again on Monday.

In the evening our wine club went round Alsace. I wanted to tell Clare and John about her, but managed to exercise a dignified restraint through the entire valley.

At Manchester airport I went to a cashpoint and found 14p in the account into which Gail said she'd deposit the rent. Rain rained at Manchester, hours after we'd been chatting in a wine bar in Pisa in a place which both Kirsty and I had decided was the quiet centre of the oddbods, sexual and otherwise, in the city. Huge glasses of a smoky Chianti served by a knowleagable vinophile, a spikyhaired man-woman.

Back to England to a pelting of problems, a sleet of email, a mound of hectoring letters. I drink to suffocate the worries.

New Business Colleague texts, asking to meet me. I wait in the pub. Girlf, with whom I was at school, turns up first.

Last time me and her were together alone, after NBC had gone home helplessly pissed, she said "Right I'm going to have to leave now otherwise we'll end up sleeping together." She approaches the table and I don't know whether to kiss her or not. I don't. She leans forward in her low cut dress and puts her forearm on the table. As she does so, she pushes her tits up. She's a hairdresser and is into jazz-funk, my sometimes vilified music of choice.

She goes to get the second bottle of Prosecco and it's much more relaxed than it has ever been with them. I'm enjoying it, laughing, the tit-glancing crackle of sex. I'm aware of neglecting both my children, wanting their tea, and the friend sitting next to me who isn't in on it.

NBC says we should have a talk outside. I follow him across the car park, wondering whether to make small talk. He outlines the deal in much more straightforward and trusting terms than I had expected. It was though I'd passed some sort of test of manliness, an inverse manliness where I'm not a braggart.

"Look," he says. "I don't want any skanks." "No no no, don't worry" I say, feeling an unwonted sense of power. "This'll work. You can't talk to middle class people and I haven't got your contacts. Yin and yang." Back in the pub, the Prosecco drips from the ice bucket as she poured out another. The tiniest glance at her, invisible almost to myself, powerful to us both, the lure of the forbidden.

Girlf tells us about her job in a record shop when she left school; he shows me pictures on a phone of the building work he's done. I feel the sense of admiration that someone who can't do anything respectable feels in the face of someone who can do something practical. She presses his abilities upon me as we look at glassy corporate buildings in the Middle East. "He did this". I feel the sexual frisson dissipate, and I'm losing her.

---

Tomorrow dinnertime I'm off for a date at the Water Witch with Trina, a woman who lives on a houseboat on the canal. She apologises for only having an MA, not a PhD, "but I do have great tits".

Mel, the woman I met in Liverpool, replies to an email I sent her yesterday.

Hi looby,
glad you had a good time. I had a good week off with [my son] thanks except it rained...a lot. Back at work now. You were right about Sweden winning the [Eurovision Song] Contest. See you soon M.

What a shame. I liked her, but that's so lukewarm as to almost approach a goodbye.

A really painful, awkward exchange of phone calls and emails with the new girl Gillian, who, a week into her let, has still to pay me a penny. I've told her that this can't happen every month, and said that issued what I hoped sounded a slightly threatening "This isn't working out is it?"

Latest postponement is that she assures me that the money will be transferred to my account today. So now, while I'm on my fucking holiday, trying to get away from everything, I'm going to have to find an internet cafe and check she's paid it. This has got off to a very bad start.

---

Linda texts: [four names] -- any of you likely to be out in the sunshine [today] eve? Say 6.30 White Cross?

I'm repeating myself, but I could fall in love with Linda like that. She's tall (I love the idea of having to slightly tilt my head up to kiss her), gorgeous, Irish, witty, sharp. A German couple stopped us one day in the street and asked the way to the police station. We gave them directions, and after they'd gone, Linda said "Why, are you going to apologise for the Holocaust?"

I rang her ten minutes ago. An idiotic, prepared line, that went wrong. "Hello, girlfriend I'll never have."

"Eh?"

"I said 'girlfriend I'll never have'. It sounds better when it's spontaneous." We laughed and it was alright, me getting drunk on what to me is her sex-dripping Galway accent and the thought of her hair and her tallness and the dismissive tone in her voice.

She's never fancied me, and she's seeing this Swedish Profesor of Economics she met at a conference in Tromsø or Narvik or Turku or somewhere, but it'll be a pleasure to see her (literally, to see her).

Just a quick one because it's a day-stopping night in the English cultural calendar this evening--the Eurovision Song Contest First Semi-Final. Me and the girls are going to have a party with scorecards and crisps and other equally nutritious "food", while Kirsty squirrels herself upstairs and packs for Italy. Dads get all the best jobs.

But Le Havre. Partly because Nursey mentioned it in a comment.

Sixth Form Girl had had her hair cut short, which set the pattern of the evening. Of course I said I liked it--it's her decision and it's not me she's after--but seeing her cropped, rounded hair, I had to compose my face to hide my disappointment at not seeing the untrammelled black hair falling over her shoulders that I have liked about her since she was seventeen.

She went into the cinema first and I clambered over the seat behind her to avoid disturbing the two lesbian people sitting next to us. They looked at me with some surprise. "Yes, I know, she is good-looking isn't she? Up yours."

Always beware of films that reviewers describe as "heartwarming."

The black child protagonist was accorded little agency or roundness of character, positioned instead as a visual source of images of poverty and blackness, and a narrative hook upon which to hang some clichés of film. The film ended with the previously hard-hearted Inspector melting with forgiveness as he looked into the hold of a boat and saw the child's supplicating face, like the opening scenes of charity ads seeking standing orders for Africa, before your £5 a month has an entire village frollicking under a standpipe.

There was the unexplained sudden appearance of an old flame, who rekindled--to doubtful advantage--the singer Little Bob's ability to run through some off-the-shelf rockabilly-lite--with the vocalists managing somehow to be heard over the band without the use of microphones. Then there was the equally filmically lazy sudden recovery from a fatal illness of Marcel's wife Arletty as soon as the refugee saving mission is complete.

The company was intelligent and pretty, but the Ringwood Bitter and the craic in the pub afterwards were the best part of the evening.

---

I intercepted Gillian at the breakfast table this morning and asked her, trembling tinily, ashamed at my lack of fine motor control and resolution, whether she'd be OK to give me the money tomorrow. She said yes casually and I sat with some coffee and we had a pleasant enough chat, marbled with my uneasiness.

---

Montenegro's entry includes the words "analphabetic" "hermetic" and "dialectic", and includes a scene of a man massaging a donkey.

Montenegro 2012: Rambo Amadeus - Euro Neuro

The new girl, Gillian, moved in on Thursday. Mid-twenties, English, long straight black hair. Tight black miniskirt and black tights; has a nice bust and shows it, unbuttoning a dark blue blouse to just beneath her tits. Despite all this, I'm not in the slightest bit attracted to her. She works long hours in a pub, so I can keep the house economically chilly.

A note of awkwardness appeared. I took the rental agreement round to her workplace yesterday, assuming she'd pay me the first month and the deposit, having moved in three days previously. She said she's not allowed to keep any money with her in the pub (not even a cheque?) and that she'd sort it out on Wednesday. I can hear her moving about downstairs and I wish I'd been firmer about taking the money before, or when, she moved in.

A man waiting to buy a flimsy overpriced quayside flat came round to look at the other room. His posh voice and strange, artificial enunciation made me slightly nervous. "May I sit down?" he asked. I adopted an affected RP. I didn't take to him--too mannered--but as he only wants it for a few weeks it might be worth mincing through the politeness for a while.

---

Rhode Island Red, who "forgot" our arrangement to go to see Into The Abyss, replies to say she'll pass on Le Havre tonight, and wishes me "a great weekend." That's two suggestions she's rejected now; I can't extend any more. I'm going with Sixth Form Girl instead (she's in her thirties now but was in the Sixth Form when I met her).

The illustrator and English postgrad who "liked" me hasn't responded to my email, sent six days ago.

Mel and I have agreed to have another chat when I get back from my hols, something I am struggling to now feel optimistic will happen.

I'm letting my sub on the site lapse when it runs out in a couple of days' time. I'm getting jaded with it now, and my response to the Prof suggests it's time to leave it for a while, before I visit my resentments on someone else.

---

Kitty therefore unknowingly timed her visit perfectly. She came over yesterday for a couple of hours. To relax into her bright, witty company, the little self-mocking bits of performance she makes out of conversation (she's a drama teacher), and to enjoy looking at her beautiful tits well-dressed self, was a stomach-unknotting relief, as we started drinking before midday and chatted effortlessly and rapidly.

Afterwards we went round a bookshop. I bought Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, his 1947 classic in which he recounts an incident on a bus in ninety-nine different ways. I collected my daughters from a party, a din of early teenage girls and chocolate cake in the carpet, and took them to the pub where Kirsty and her boyfriend had arrived back from their weekend away. He bought me a drink, and the second shadow of awkwardness of the day crossed the table.