An ominously envelopped letter arrives from HM Revenue and Customs. My heart sank. I thought I'd dealt with all this.

Mr Simpkins (a wonderful, suburban name for someone in taxation) advises me that I paid the wrong amount of tax in 2004-5 and that he will be sending a "bank instrument" (the 50s language continues) for £434 "under separate cover".

I am utterly delighted. I'm going to keep £34 for leisure purposes, then quietly deposit the rest into Kirsty's bank account. She's spent a fortunate lately in getting us all to Italy.

I forgot to say that yesterday, coursing with the adrenaline of relief, I let myself become a fraction misty-eyed at how both Mary-Ann and Kitty rang up to see how it had gone. Means a lot that. Kitty is an absolute rock and I love her.

Many years ago, Kirsty and her Dad were walking along The Strand following his acquittal at the Old Bailey on a fraud charge. Stan was uncharacteristically quiet. A safe distance away from the court, he turned to Kirsty and said "That's a relief, because I did it."

It's had the happy result of making me wish that Mary-Ann was around for a fuck, a fuck that would, in more senses than one, be lacking in guilt. Apart from the fact that I did it.

DRINK!

I've had the girls for the weekend. Kirsty came back with her tales of pharmaceutical adventures in Kirkby Lonsdale. Her drugfuckedness, my worriedfuckedness, were both smoothed, layered with cheap corner shop plonk. We slithered into a domestic calm, me telling her about a problem I'd discovered about our flight possibly missing the last train from Pisa to the village where we are going on holiday in three months' time, the children gloomy about the end of half term. "I'm not learning anything," said Jenny, complaining about a fuzzy felt picture she was doing for her Art homework.

I walked home along our hard paving stones, with no moon to help, thinking, "If only I can feel like this tomorrow morning, everything will be alright."

It is coming up to midnight and the deadline for the online job application, the time at which my truthful and dissembling prose will be indifferently disappeared. An autoresponder will offer its thanks for my interest in working there, mistaking my motives. But I am more interested in my Christmas present from Kim, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and this fine Welsh Seidr Dai I obtained in Liverpool the other day.

In Orwell's novel, the protagonist observes his fellow commuters on the tube with the haughty but also self-directed disdain which is a trope of the book. "He would be a law-abiding little cit like any other law-abiding little cit--a soldier in the strap-hanging army." Later, talking about a printing process, he mentions a small poetry journal printed on a "jellypress".

Neither "cit" nor "jellypress" appear in the Concise OED (nor in the larger online version). I haven't looked in my Shorter OED as I'm not at home at the moment.

In a recent issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding, discussing the changing life in Britain of the concept of "multiculturalism" ("swaying like a blanched orchid at a Peter Tosh concert was not enough"), deployed the words, new to me, "refoulement", "laudatio", and "tractation". You can guess the middle one I suppose, but I've gone wrong by guessing before.

They are: a legal term meaning to render a person to a country where it is likely he or she will be maltreated in the legal system, usually as 'non-refoulement'; a formal or academic word for 'laudation'; and the treatment of a subject or topic, the manner of proceeding with it.

On the other hand, the words I didn't know from The Sorrows of Young Werther--which I bought recently as a purgative to a piss-poor chick-lit book that someone chose for our book group--were all present in the COED: "clabber", "cruse", "raree show", "manikin", and "chromo" (short for "chromolithograph").

After such an enjoyable night's squirrelling about in the dictionary, I'd left myself very little time to craft an answer to Question 3 on an application form for a bit of short-term work at my alma mater. Ability to cope under pressure. "You don't know you're fucking born," I drunkenly muttered.

A previous job I had was Signalman, during which I would control 900 train movements a shift. The pressure there was such that if done wrong, you could kill people. Working in a more academic environment afterwards was a stroll in the park. I also have triplet daughters, and I think anyone who can hold down a job, do a postgraduate degree, and look after three occasionally awkward teenage girls, can deal with the sorts of "pressure" that any paid job offers.

Arrogant, too informal, insufficiently subordinate? I'll let you know how I get on.

A five hundred pound day out in Liverpool. We had to get passports for Kirsty and the girls.

We walked against a cold Irish Sea wind, along the magnificent Victorian and Art Deco buildings of George's Dock, trying not to notice the huge black blocks of unimaginative modernism scattered round about. They might have the size but they have not an iota of the grandeur of the older buildings. They look like a feeble bully fencing around a silent, mightier foe.

It was four hours before they could be issued, so we had a look round the Tate. Some favourites of mine were there: Yves Klein's blank blue rectangle of the colour he patented (always introduces a sour note that, to me), some Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Donald Judd and Gillian Wearing's "Signs" series, the last of which, "I'm Desperate", I have a postcard.

I was surprised to see another in a series by Jeff Koons, which I first came across on Unbearable Banishment's blog a while ago, where he informed us that another in the series had sold in New York for fourteen-and-a-quarter million dollars. I might have given them a fiver for it.

I sprang to alarmed attention as my children walked across across a Carl Andre. "Girls! No!" "It's OK," said Kirsty. "Look."

She directed me to the explanatory plaque on the wall, which says that you're welcome to walk on it, but by then I'd stopped reading the almost entirely meaningless nonsense prose that surrounds the works (e.g., Passmore: "Geometry, though subject to the quoi of personal judgement, is a guide to the organic process.")

It was therefore a relief to come across Rodney Graham's White Shirt for Mallarmé, that presented the latter's prose work The Demon of Analogy, with its precise and painstaking prose to try to catch in writing, in real time, something of the habit, which I suppose we all have, of repeating words and phrases until they become meaningless, or, rather, they acquire a synathesthic novelty.

I was sent back to collect the passports. On my way back, I nipped into a sex shop to buy some poppers. The man wrapped them in a note written partly in capitals, all in red ink. Outside, I unwrapped it to see what it said. "It has come to our notice that a small number of people are misusing our product by sniffing directly from the container, in the same way that a minority misuse glue by sniffing that product. We reiterate that the purpose for which it is sold is purely for use as a room odouriser."

There's something ominous about that, as if someone knows that this miserable Goverment has spotted another source of pleasure to ban.

Kirsty wanted to go to the World Museum but I was aware that I was in one of the finest Real Ale cities in the country, so me and Jenny went to the Ship and Mitre, which was offering eighty [sic] beers on draught. A lovely warm atmosphere, and no fucking music. But I was out of money. "I'll be two minutes Jenny, I've got to go to the cashpoint. Sit there. Talk to strangers."

A minute or two before we pulled into Lancaster station, we started playing a game where they put their heads in between the automatic doors between the carriages, then wait for them to close. It doesn't hurt. A woman glared at us.