Did my second supervised session on reception at Really Late the other day. I like it and I hope my CRB result doesn't disbar me. There's a Confidentiality Agreement, even the boundaries of which I am leaving unapproached, but I admired the goodwill of couples making an effort, and felt sympathetic towards their awkwardness as I tried to make small talk about the weather and watered the geranium with a show of insouciance.

"You'll get a lot of tears here looby; you've got to be ready for that," said my supervisor. She told me how to deal with seeing clients in the supermarket or post office afterwards, how to show them out of a misleadingly marked door lest they be seen by someone leaving the offices of Really Late, how never to say the organisation's name when answering the phone.

---

Got the girls off to bed and made it to the offy with minutes to go. Looking for some out of date Hobgoblin which he sells off cheap, I notice a man from my bookgroup buying a bottle of wine and some Polish lager. I ask the shopkeeper "Is it all downstairs?" "Yes, sorry, there's only me here at the moment. I can't get it." "No bother, that's alright."

"Are you after something special?" says Bookman. "Yes, he's got some Lithuanian white cider at 99p a gallon. Some say it's got antifreeze in it but I think that's a slur on the Lithuanian people."

At that moment I am arrested by the appearance in the shop of a beautiful late teenage girl with stylised plastic flowers in her long brown hair and a colourful Hawaiian skirt made out of strips of plastic. "Is this your daughter?" I ask Bookman. "No," she says. "I'm his daughter's best friend. Sorry to appear in such an outfit." Look at me.

"Oh no," I say. "Not at all. You're introducing a welcome element of Hawaiian sunshine into the usual Lancaster gloom."

"Buying drink then," she continues. A comment, or a question? "Yes, well," I say, "this is where all the respectable middle class dads get caught out -- ten to ten in the offy." "What's your name, middle class dad?" "Cliff." She guns her index fingers towards me. "Busted."

Modern girls, aren't they lovely?

Kathryn, aka Rhode Island Red, regrets that she "forgot" that we were supposed to be having a night at the pictures watching Into The Abyss by that master of central European comedy, Werner Herzog. People do forget things, and we know we're not after one another, so I've suggested Le Havre on Monday instead.

Why am I so pleasantly tolerant to her and so horrible to the Prof?

To my friends' attractively messy house, with a dirty kitchen from which an almost entirely enjoyable meal was produced.

He's a psychiatric nurse, a kind, long greyhaired biker type, one of those blokes who get passed over for years by women who turn to him when they want to complain about the poor boyfriend choices they've made. Finally, he's met a curvy gothy girl from Northumberland, who dresses in pleated black miniskirts and platform thigh boots and says "fillim" for "film". They clearly like each other. It's not made up.

One should try, when one is a guest. But even by sight, I turn from beef. I slathered it with large spoonfuls of horseradish sauce and struggled through half of it, but I was beginning to retch, trying hard to turn my mind into the conversation and away from the foul physical and psychological feeling of stringy bits of bottom caught in my teeth. The rhubarb and ginger crumble with clotted cream was a purifying, tart conclusion. I only wish I'd taken some dry sherry rather than Leffe; Leffe and rhubarb don't marry. But we drank it all anyway.

The other guest, a mutual friend, was telling us about his squatting days when he lived in the house in Hampton Wick which was a cynosure of Operation Julie, the regrettably successful police operation to break up one of the world's largest LSD distribution rings

Him and a fellow squatter-- neither of whom were involved in the trade--went up to the attic one day to find the entire floor space ankle deep in LSD tablets. My friend said "Let's get our rucksacks and pinch some!" "You do realise, Tom, that the police are recording this conversation?" He's adrift after the woman he was with for twenty-seven years died a couple of years ago. "I feel like I'm crawling along on all fours."

---

At home, I turn the computer on. Someone "likes me" on the website and I am pissed off. How can you like someone without words, a drink? On Friday, Mel went to the bar. Watching the attractive switch of her arse, I pulled her chair a few inches nearer to me so that she'd be closer to me when she came back. That's liking. I can feel my drunken impatience.

Such is the mediated nature of modern attraction. Fucking relax lad. Don't start getting arsy again with women who show an interest.

I look at her profile. A sentence about Meccano which she deftly turns into a self-mocking awareness of how that will come across. Brown hair hairgripped up, looking a bit quizzical, honest, not putting anything on, aware of the artificality. All I can manage after all that Leffe is "Bloody hell, nice hair. But why, H, why?

Next day she writes back an email which ends with "Oh... and I'm aware I've not told you why I liked you. Well, [first,] because of the way you looked [...]."

Because of the way you looked. Thank fuck for that.

An Indian sounding woman, up and down voice, rings me about the room. "It's for my boyfriend, he's French." My interest is aroused.

I've promised the room to a Law postgrad from Tennessee but she hasn't returned my call or stumped up the deposit I am hoping to use as my spending money in Italy. Me, Kirsty and the girls are off to Tuscany shortly. I've paid for my bit because of the PhD outreach work at the Girls Grammar last winter, but I need some spending money to sit glazed outside a taverna.

They arrive at the door, a tall man, late twenties, a small thirtysomething darkhaired woman, and a little boy, who is six, and uniformed in the blue sweatshirt of the school at which I did my teaching practice. Subject to any disabuse which may follow shortly, they are favoured bidders. An invented, deracinated family, trying to make a life.

"I am zer beck-aire." "Ah... on the market?" "I am arf weigh." A Pinterian pause. "Half way?" "I am arf weigh, boze on ze bredd, an ze chiz."

He's over here from Normandy, in partnership with another Frenchman. They run a touring French bread stall on our market and that of Garstang, Longridge, and Carlisle. Off-peak, he helps out on the local cheese and olives stall. I show them upstairs, thinking that he must work six, seven days a week; he'll be out of the house most of the day, won't keep late nights, and we might be supplied with decent bread. He only wants it for a few weeks because he's got an idea to go to Edinburgh and make a killing during the Fringe.

In the better, larger, sunnier, of the two rooms, which he wants, the difference between the future life imagined by his Filipino girlfriend and her son, and him, emerges. I shrug with the sympathetic non-committal body language I have learned from a decade of holidays in Brittany.

"But that is the future," I say, trying to cut off a conversation they'd like to have themselves but are having through me as its conduit. "Think about it and give me a ring. Yes, it's [...] a month, spontaneously adding on fifteen pounds a month from the advert which makes me feel, only in my own head, the dominant party.

---

My email of shame.

The Prof writes:

Sorry not to have heard back from you. Are you on for Wednesday evening?

I've just checked and I did write back, saying her suggestion of some pricey tapas place was a good idea. But I'm hard up. And even if I could afford it, the accusatory tone of the first sentence decides it.

My reply though, was unnecessarily harsh.

Hello Prof

I was in the pub on Saturday afternoon and in one of those drunken conversations in which the interlocutors become assertively convinced of the rightness of their own positions, she said "always go on your instincts."

I think if we all followed that, social life would collapse and lead into dictatorship. But there is an element of truth in it. I think we might be too different from each other in the ways that matter--despite our superficial shared language of a sort of intellectual life.

One of these ways is that I'm absolutely skint and money does come into it. Your suggestion of what to me would be a ruinously expensive afternoon makes the financial disparity appear early on.

I hope you won't mind me declining Wednesday. Twenty-five, thirty quid is a lot for me to invest in what I predict will be one of those head-noddingly agreeable afternoons consisting of an anodyne shared statement of values, never getting on to the kind of reckless, drunken nights with sexual overtones that I'm really after.

A first stone cast, with the insensitivity and arrogance that can come effortlessly to me.

---

With dozens of reworkings, I write as friendly and unimposing an email to M as I can manage, which tries to convey, without directly saying, the following things.

I keep remembering the delight when I realised that the very attractive woman who had suddenly appeared at my side on Friday was the woman I'd come to meet, and not, as I thought for a second, someone who--the coincidences!--was on a similar mission looking for someone much younger than me.

You were great company, straightforward, interesting. While I was trying not to look at your tits, I remembered your picture of you in a low-ceilinged nightclub, thinking, you'd be fun.

I'd like to see you again, as soon as possible.

A nagging voice in my head. "She won't fancy you; she's out of your league; why would you think someone like her would be interested in you; you're way back on the grid, pal, she'll fit you in as a sop to your feelings before going silent; women see you as friend material not lover material." On and on and on, in endless instances.

This post has been withdrawn in its original version, which expressed my concern at a peak in traffic from one IP address, a degree of sustained attention I found a little unsettling.

I realise now that it is indefensibly hypocritical to complain about the assiduity with which anyone might read a public blog. To the unknown reader from the Land of the Concrete Cows: my apologies to you. As you were.

Midday, Saturday. Erica asks me if I'm down the pub. No, but I can be.

She gives me a beautifully designed wedding invite. I avoid weddings at all costs. I've managed to be away for both my brothers', and haven't been to one this century. Making a senseless promise of fidelity is a strange thing to celebrate. "Everybody! Let's have a party. Because the end of our sex life begins here!"

But this will at least be a party of Ericean proportions. We'll first be serious, then drunk, then dancing and off our heads in good company. And I did feel honoured when she gave me the invite for the whole day. I said those words to Erica, but it doesn't sound serious enough, and she's not interested in receiving my gratitude. It goes unsaid.

---

New Business Partner and his girlf are there. White cotton short sleeved top tied at the neck then opening in an oval towards her tits. Lovely blonde bob, broad red-lipsticked lips ready to receive my cock as I scrape my nails down the side of her head. I sit down with them and I enjoy the involuntary sexual attraction I have towards her. He was talking about driving and mowing cyclists down. "It's reassuring, NBC, to know that you are still as much of a cunt before you went to Manchester as you are now," I said. I glanced at her, we all laughed, and I thought, and she knew I was thinking it, ...if things were different.

After a couple of hours or so Erica leaves. Me and her friend go to another pub's garden and tilt our heads to the sun. Some people I vaguely know, and we have a joint. Inconsequential but enjoyable kissing.

---

My carriage in the train from Wigan to Liverpool, to meet the nurse, stank. I was concerned the smell would occlude my laundered, Coco Chanel-misted mask. I arrive in the pub a little early. I got myself a drink then went meandering round trying to find a couple of seats. All of a sudden, someone appeared at my side saying "Hello!"

No, that can't be her. The mysterious pessimism about appearance and attraction.

"Hello," I replied, my face broadening into a smile involuntarily paused. Fucking hell, you're pretty. Blonde hair cut into the nape of her neck, a thigh length thin scooped neck dress over narrow jeans, in a complicated abstract pattern of pale blues, greys and white; underneath, a tight blue vest; an attractive necklace in two or three rings of probably plastic small aquamarine stones that she kept toying with. A stave of thin blue-green bangles on her wrists.

We talked about our raving days, about how nostalgia retrospectively frames those nights, how e can give you a tensing awareness of an unhappy relationship, about living in London, about her rock chick days. Got to the "twat" and "fucker" level of swearing. She told me about turning down another man on the site when he started getting a bit accusatorily narky about whether she'd have enough time to meet him, given that she's looking after a six-year-old by herself. "Whereas you," she said "just understood it."

We didn't kiss at the end but I haven't the least doubt that she knew I liked her. "I had a great time," I texted her, and meant it simply. A couple of texts on the train, promising to arrange a return leg. I texted Kim. "The nurse is a fitbit. Bit of an ex druggie. You might be off the hook soon :) x"

On the train from Liverpool, sweary and laughy chat with three people who'd been to Chester races, telling them about my afternoon, and a running joke emerging after we went through a station called Bryn and wondering if we'd ended up in fucking Wales.

Changing trains at Preston for the Lancaster one, all the demotic Scouse sociability disappeared, and our journeys and our selves became privatised. Single young people spread themselves defensively across two seats, solipsistic in music and texting. A couple came and sat opposite me. I ground out a couple of minutes of conversation with them.

"Going anywhere nice?"

"Broughton. Yes, Broughton."

I nod, encouraging an elaboration, returned with silence.

She looked a lot younger than him. "Is this your daughter?"

"No."

Come on, make an effort. It's the last train on a Friday night. We're all pissed.

When I found out he was a counsellor, it all made sense. An occupational group which sucks out a living from other people's lives whilst giving out nothing in return. I sat silently amongst the tss-tss of iPods for the rest of the journey.