I've just closed the door behind Stefan and Csilla for the last time. Yesterday, The Woman Who Only Wears Secondhand came round with her car to move them. As she and Stefan were getting ready to take everything to the new flat, I said "Csilla. Now at last, we will finally have sex."

Csilla and I cooked a big and successful tea, getting through a bottle of wine each even before they got back. Everyone woofed all the food. The Woman Who Only Wears Secondhand sat there chatting and crocheting, which had a hypnotic effect unrelated to the fact that I was now well into my second bottle of wine.

I'll miss seeing Csilla wandering about in her pyjamas in the mornings. The rent always on time, and in cash. I won't miss their smoking -- little by little, the undertaking to smoke only outside was altered as the long Lancashire winters pressed on, and "outside" started meaning "in the porch with the door open" or "in the cellar while he's out". I won't miss the breathtaking heating bills, Stefan throwing my almost empty toothpaste tube away without asking me first, or his opening bills addressed to me. I won't miss their way they never reused their carrier bags, so now I have hundreds under the sink.

It was, for the greater part, a successful way of sharing a house. But next time, genuine non-smokers only, and people who are out of the house more often.

It was the Modern Soul and Jazz-Funk night on Saturday. I had the girls, so I negotiated with a neighbour that I'd put them to bed, then give them her number to ring in case anything happens while I'm out of my tree on a dancefloor in Blackburn.

John arrives to pick me up. "Is Keith not coming?" I ask. John had gone to collect him but his wife had told him "You're not going out dancing tonight - it's Kyle [their son's] birthday." "For God's sake," I said. "Why didn't he sort that out before?" We sensed we hadn't had the whole story. Why would she want him there at 10pm on their eleven-year-old's birthday? "Under the cosh," we both agreed.

"Never mind," said John, "I don't feel like my Dad's looking over my shoulder now, so we can have some of this." We got the mirror and the little knife out. In the car, John had a superb CD of classic Philadelphia songs remixed in a housey style. The mesmerising lights of the motorway, the music, the refreshments, all aspects of an synaesthetic, coloured, skin-stroking, pleasure.

On the way back I talked about Mary-Ann, and how I came to realise that there'd be too much of my life in which she'd never take part. He talked about the days when a bigger group of us (including several girls) used to go in two car loads to Blackburn. It felt like an elegy, a roundabout way of saying that we might not bother going again. John's a bit of a Golden Ager and not very interested in contemporary soul music; I am, very much. I don't simply want to listen over and over again to the same hundred tracks--as good as they are--from ten or twenty years ago.

Alliterative Woman did reply in the end and we're going for a coffee later today. I showed her profile to The Architect, who said "She sounds not too bad. Though I am sensing something slightly missing....can't put my finger on it." I haven't any sense of excitement about it; it feels as significant as nipping out to buy a newspaper. Maybe that's the best way to approach it.

I've had a couple of very pleasant conversations with a couple of other women too. Someone who's finished an MA in Mediaeval Literature and can read Norse. But... she's a Christian. A witty couple of messages from a musician who starts her profile by saying "Some of you don't half write some bolloxy profiles many of which are total fabrication." But she's in London. Another Londoner said "you sound just what a certain type of girl is looking for", which started my day with a little skip. Kathryn (Rhode Island Red) finally writes back, leaving an interval long enough to be eloquently clear, suggesting seeing the latest Werner Herzog film next week.

It always feels like it's just not quite happening though.

To the local Organic Seaweed Gatherers' and Ethical Lentil Sifters' Social Club for a night of Slovenian poetry from Agata Tr no search engines oja, who is in the UK for a week with an Anglo-Slovenian Cultural Association.

We walked into the tiny room to see a dozen murmuring Slovenians. They are good starers. The teenage girl at the front, was especially relentless in her examination.

Finally the event got under way: Agata read in Slovenian first before the man from the Cultural Association read the translations. Afterwards, the Lancastrians acquitted themselves poorly. Our party--all except me published writers--sat rigidly, without asking any questions, so it was left to me (yet again--this happens all the time) to enquire about the poetry scene in Slovenia, the difficulties of the many dialects in the country, and her itinery.

The room descended into silence again. I pointedly looked at the man sitting next to me, a man who has won a fairly important poetry prize, and tilted my head. "Look, could you pretend, for one minute, that you're not Northern, and actually ask her something?" With chatty grace she finally dragged a few words out of him, even if it was partly a misapprehension that Slovenian is a form of Serbo-Croat.

We swapped email addresses and she extended a picturesque invite to "the land between the [incomprehensible word with lots of zeds in it] and the [incomprehensible word with lots of zeds in it] Rivers", and I went home, pissed off with my fellow countrymen and women, who had just done their bit to hammer home to a foreign guest the stereotype of the taciturn, over-reserved English.

It's something especially distilled in Lancashire: even after thirty years here, I'm still sometimes taken aback with how frosty people are here when you initiate conversation. You can tell that this area was more or less cut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, and that the local historical claims to renown are first, executing witches, then later, clogging down the street, a mass clicking of rickets-bowed legs as we waddled off to get strangled in looms.

I am invited to the offices of Really Late, the organisation with which I have applied to do some voluntary work on reception. An amiable woman with the large head common to those who do too much running showed me round. A poster advised about "Keeping Sex Sexy." Everything went well until she said they'd have to check my criminal record. I'm not sure what's still on there.

I perked up when she said that everyone goes out for a bit of a social every few weeks, since in this kind of organisation, men are in the minority. I'm back there on Tuesday and someone will show me the ropes, although this could all end abruptly if the misunderstanding that arose after I attempted to give one of my A-level students succour comes to light.

Been helping Neil and Kev move into their new flat. Me and Kev alone in the new flat for about ten minutes, me wondering all the time whether I had the courage to just pull him towards me and start kissing him. I feel quite attracted to Kev, without it depending overmuch on his appearance. We just leant side by side over the fridge and talked about the light and which direction the flat faces.

I was on the phone to Kim telling her about the cackhanded way I approached the woman in the jazz club, and she said "Can't you just find a local slattern?" So I added "A local slattern" to my section "What are you looking for in a partner".

Tomorrow I'm going to see a woman about doing some voluntary work at a well-known counselling organisation. And before you say that a man who thrusts his mobile number into the unwilling hands of women in jazz clubs is not the right person for this, I will say that it's only on reception, directing the players in tattered relationships to the right listener. Getting drunk with a good friend and blabbing it all out after the fifth pint works best for me but I understand that sometimes it helps to be able to talk to a disinterested third party.

Most of yesterday I was in the hushed and beautiful, marble, brass and stained glass surroundings of our Town Hall for the appeal by a Bermuda-based landlowner against a Tree Preservation Order made on a piece of woodland near the city centre. I have to say that the Town and Country Planning Acts and their Amendments, the hefty tome of guidance from The Planning Inspectorate about its implementation, ("the Blue Book"), and the inch thick file of years old correspondence which the Council copied and provided for free, have made interesting reading over the last month or so.

The Official Solicitor was dressed in that female legal uniform of tight blackness. Even as a solictor, it's your body that matters. Our side made a couple of representations which occasionally made me wince: someone said that she was concerned about "traumatising the deer"; another called the trees "huggable". It's no good arguing from emotive anthropomorphism; it alerts them more when you can cite a paragraph from The Town and Country Planning (Trees) (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2008.

We were sent into the corridor for a long and boring ninety minutes while the committee made up its mind. Back in the chamber, the air was tense. I was irritated with the elderly committee member who had a tic which made him shuffle his papers compulsively.

Our pencil-skirted arbiter touched her black square glasses, commanding the room into alert attention. With flat calm, she delivered a short judgement in circumlocutory legal language. We had won.

Elated, we went to the pub. Coursing with the adrenaline of the victory of the amateurs against people who knew arboricultural planning law backwards, and for whom, finally, one ended up with a degree of respect, I got more drunk than normal, a bit loud probably. "Listen, with all respect Si, what the fuck are you doing with that woman?" A leaning man told that woman that he thought she was gorgeous. When he was away she said "All they want is for you to suck their cock." "Mmm, it does feel nice though, for a bloke" I said.

Pretty, my age, hair between brown and ginger in a roughly ragged bob which I suspect costs seventy quid a month to look neglected. Wordy. Likes food and drink, and grows much of her own vegetables. She wrote her first sentence in words all beginning with "a" and followed it with a joke about alliteration.

Hi Cliff

Thanks for the interest and I did laugh at your blurb. Am useless at the writing bit so if you'd like to meet up for a drink then pester away. Do you live in Lancaster?

---

Yes and yes. I live in Lancaster. Do you? Would love a drink. Could be free tomorrow, or later in the week. [number] or [email address].

No reply yet, but if she doesn't do so soon she's going to get another nudge on the elbow.

I'd prefer not to bother with internet dating. I'd rather bump into someone in a pub, make some remark about how busy it is, perhaps get her a drink, then hopefully but adeptly give her my number afterwards. I've tried it and I often embarrass myself, the more sensitive of the women showing only small traces of the effort with which they're controlling their faces as I declare my motives; the viscous slowing of time as I leave with a pretended nonchalence, feeling conscious of my bottom.

But self-awareness is permanently ex post facto, and I made a bit of a tit of myself at a jazz night on Sunday. There's a chemical imbalance in my loins at the moment, and I was eyeing someone up a little on the other side of the room. With what may well have been an over-interpretation of her returned glances, I went up to her at the end, and said that if she's at a loose end any time, to ring that number.

What a tarty way of chatting someone up. She doesn't know a thing about me. Well, apart from my real name, my mobile number and my email address.

Yesterday, I was shown how to do it. I went to a reading of T S Eliot's poetry. It was held in the redecorated Storey Institute, a once beautiful Victorian building, the old Mechanics Institute, which has been bleached and painted over with yellow and black flames going up the stairs, an Athena poster-standard faux-Blakean mural, and poetry on the walls (a recent decorative rash in arts centre décor I dislike). The bar, with its stools in clashing secondary colours, plays tinny canned music. In a part of the country with a cornucopia of locally brewed real ale, it serves Japanese lager.

In the few minutes as we settled down, I could feel myself rising with jealousy at the voice of the man behind me. He asked "is this seat free?" and they started chatting amiably, him asking her questions but without making it sound like an interrogation.

Ian Seed, who translates from Italian and French, read The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock in its entirety, reading the Dante epigrams in the original and English, and throughout the reading, helping us with the quotations from L'Inferno. I'd forgotten how apposite the word "song" is for this lovely poem. He also read extracts from Eliot's letters: "Oxford is pretty, but I don't like to be dead."

The reading ended; I turned round and things got worse when I saw her pretty black hair falling over her shoulders.

I am having one of those periods where I feel constantly sexed. Last night ended and started with imagining sex with Denise, the details of which I text to her. My female friends are curvily, sexually, physically, desirable. Spring, I suppose.

It's 9.45. I'm in the kitchen looking out over the backs of the next street, and finding the sight of the men knocking down someone's back yard wall fascinating. A young woman is standing there in her dressing gown, smoking, watching them. I wonder if she's flirting with them, as there's no need for her to watch. It's a racket, with hammers and drills, but I like it. The everyday is more interesting than anything else.

There's a knock at the front door. Fuck. A debt collector? I hide my glass of wine under the sink. Don't let them in. They can't come in without being invited, otherwise it's trespass.

It's one of my neighbours with a carrier bag full of those Aero bubbly dessert pot things. She's offering them to me as they're not Halal so her family can't eat them. I close the door with a skippety-skip of cross-cultural neighbourly feeling.

It's a sunny morning and I've just been round the house photographing all the rooms, as I need to find new lodgers. The flattering wash of the camera smooths out some imperfections and the grotty woodchip wallpaper in the kitchen, but overall I'm surprised at how attractive the house looks. Victorian, stripped but patinad wood; ordered, tidy and calm.

Within two hours of putting the ad up I'm contacted by a girl from Beijing who's moving here in August to start a postgraduate degree. I have a look at her profile, as the site I'm using for this gives you the opportunity to do a bit of a bio and upload some photos. She's pretty, sitting next to some mountain or other in a black miniskirt, black tights, and a red sweatshirt. I'm not specifiying this in the advert, but I don't want all men in the house. A woman betters a house, like a cat.

This isn't my house, but it's the best bit of sexist disco-funk I've ever heard. I've got the album. I was 21 when this came out, and from this record I derive my conviction that women should be strong confident and independent, and appreciated for things beyond her appearance. I like the one on the bed at 0.51.

Mary Jane Girls - In My House (1985)

She's definitely flirting. She's still outside in her dressing gown, laughing , stroking her hair behind her ear.