Mary-Ann sends this.

Lovely sexy missive with it as well. Just need to stay out of jail now in order to enjoy its suggestions.

Should probably send Kev a disambiguating text, as I might have given the wrong impression when I said "I would love to suck a man's cock" and then proceeded to snog him for a couple of minutes down an alley. It was a five-pint snog, that's all.

---

I've just been on the phone to the bank.

Could you confirm the first line of your address please?
--[address].
I love you.

I thought that I'd heard that wrong.

And can you just confirm your date of birth?
--[date of birth]
I love you.

I think someone's in the bank's call centre has just won a bet.

Kitty picked me up from my house to drive me to hers in Blackpool. It was her birthday. She walked in and I was momentarily open-mouthed at how she looked, her curvy figure wrapped in a V-neck knee-length creme dress with a black pattern on it, a little woolen top. "You look gorgeous," I said.

"It'll be alright, it's a lot safer on the motorway." Yes but three thousand people a year die doing what we're doing, I didn't say, as I got into her car. I don't like being in cars.

We had to babysit her two-year-old nephew for an hour and a half. He stood there staring at me for an inordinately long time. I tried playing with the toy truck, sitting little toys on a toy sofa, but still the staring. I was relieved when he left. Having my own children hasn't made me feel any more sympathy to other people's.

We handed him over and we went to a lovely pub in Lytham, Ten real ales, and the comfortable air of relaxed older people on good pensions. I love chatting to Kitty, the closeness. I can tell her everything. We went back to hers and her cousin came round. She was wearing a most unusual T-shirt with a ruched scooped neck. You could see her blue bra underneath and the label with the washing instructions tucked in against her waist. On her attractive small tits, it looked very good. There was a tumbling volley of chatter all night, Prosecco and champagne.

This morning I got up early to get the train back home to meet Mary-Ann. A lovely afternoon in bed. She's a beautiful kisser, making me wait and wait and wait until she kisses me properly. An indescribably lovely feeling when she touched me just at the base of my spine. I had no idea I would like being touched there. I cupped my hand round her head and pushed her lips onto mine and felt very close to her.

After she left I went down the pub. I met my two gay friends there and got merrily pissed, doing crosswords. "Hyphenation is interesting." I said, and Neil set us hyphenation exercises to do. To hyphenate or not, that was the question, as he set us awkward cases to resolve.

"I have a fantasy," I said to Kevin, his boyfriend, "Of having a man's cock stuck in my mouth. I'd love to suck a man's cock and have him come in my mouth." "It won't work, because you've thought about it," he said.

I walked home feeling liberated, high. I am a sexual person. What a pleasure it is. To be treated as a sexual being, for that to be normal, to have a lover who sees me as a sexual person, to have friends who see me as that too.

At the next table, two bus spotters are having a couple of pints. Taking advantage of their seat next to the curving window, they are watching the buses coming into the bus station.

I wonder if that's a 56?
--We'll find out in a bit.
It's going round the corner.
--Yes it is.
How can you tell?
--The emergency window curves up like that round the edge.
Why does it do that?
--I don't know.

---

Down the pub the other day I saw a couple I know walk in. The man has been generous and good company to me over the years. He's also got a gorgeous wife.

Keeley looked very tired (and quite sexy with it, in her pale brown cord skirt cut on the bias), chasing after their two-year-old daughter. The last time we three met was about eighteen months ago when I was seeing Frances, and that night I went back to hers. While we were having sex in possibly my favourite position, her sitting on me facing me, I told her about seeing Keeley. Frances was quite encouraging, and with my cock buried inside her I started describing in slow detail the pleasure of seeing Keeley, her lovely tits and the stretchy Lycra scoop neck she was wearing. "There's not many women you could do this with" I thought, even at the time.

Such thoughts shimmered across my mind as I talked to them both.

---

I was the lucky recipient of a hot ticket last weekend - to the tenth anniversary bash of Lancaster Brewery, held in their swish visitor centre. Unlimited ale, wine and cider, and abundant, delicious food (hot fluffy cheese and onion buns, mini steak pies, little cones of tiny finger pieces of fish and chips, and a huge tower of profiteroles).

One of my old customers from the wholesale flower place was there, a woman I detained with endless flirting queries and tilty-headed helpfulness. During a disastrous few weeks working at a bank (they never found that £500 and I certainly didn't steal it), she was standing in the queue behind a rather dashing man who was paying in some money. "Oops," said my fellow teller. "If I had pressed this button I'd have credited your account with £40,000."

Straight away, she leant over his shoulder coquettishly and said 'What are you doing tonight?" ("I'm not doing anything," I felt like weakly piping up.)

Outside the premises there's a large illuminated sign: "Lancaster. The Brewery". Swelled with ale and pleasure, I stopped for a minute and felt proud of my city, glad that people like the brewery's owner are here and helping Lancaster regain some of its lustre, without, this time round, it depending on the slave trade (much of the old money round here is of ignoble provenance).

---

Tomorrow it's Kitty's birthday so we'll be cracking open the champagne with her cousin ("Ooh dear Kitty, that's my third [glass of wine]!"), but with a need not to jeopardise my mens sana in corpore sano as I'm entertaining Mary-Ann here the day after.

I've found the card for her for 14th. In case you can't see, on the back of the card it says "Multipack card. Not to be sold separately."

---

Me	Harry Redknapp

The episodic nature of this post is due to the fact that all events this week have had to compete with a frequently overbearing preoccupation. I'm about to skid into a patch of black ice ahead, in that I might have misinterpreted some technical details of the law. A bit like the recent case involving a leading English football manager; with, I hope, the same result. But on a "least said, soonest mended" basis, we'll just carry on for the time being and hope it sounds convincing enough on the day

The tasting last night was Wines of New Zealand. Ingrid came along, which meant I had to reserve a bit of my attention for her as she's not a very good drinker and dominates the table after the fourth or fifth glass.

Walking home yesterday, and today, after a pleasant night at Kirsty's of shop-bought pizza en famille, (the wall of costly heat hitting me as soon as I entered even the vestibule), I was talking to myself about Mary-Ann: something like this.

What you said the other day about not being willing to live compromised has been going through my mind a great deal. I think the "lack of compromise", along with the idea of "being authentic", is a Romantic brew destined to ruin social life in the hope of discovering something magical beyond its boundaries and calling whatever results a "relationship". No doubt the idea of honesty appears prominently there too.

More practically: I sometimes feel a bit pressured into responding to you more quickly than is natural. I feel conscious of my class, in a way that I have rarely felt, since I'm normally completely at ease in both working- and middle-class codes. Some of my communication with you, apart from the sexual things, feels a bit mannered. There's a lot I can't say to you. I censor myself a lot of the time when I reach to my phone or computer to email you. I can't talk to you as I do with my friends. I can't report my life as it is, I have to reflect upon it. It's all a bit studied.

I like our physical connection, but when we're apart, I think of you more as a woman I would like to love but can't, because I am thinking too much. There are many important areas of my life which I will never be able to share with you. Drinking, dancing, going out. I sometimes don't feel relaxed with you Mary-Ann. There's no such thing as "being yourself", but the self I present to you occasionally feels something of a performance.

To the university to see Maelstrom Dance, in the company of two beautifully dressed women. Karen, PhDer and former lodger, who has decided never to buy any new clothes again, and who has the figure to fit tightly but sexily into her repertoire of beautiful old dresses; and Marianna, my former pupil, now also a PhDer. I had two jobs at Lancaster Girls' Grammar School: teaching music and controlling my eyes.

Marianna wears quiet blacks, greys and whites, colours with which an attractive middle aged woman can hardly go wrong. On the bus with her, I say "Have I told you about this woman in Leicester I'm seeing?" "Well, sort of, yes - you keep sending me texts meant for her."

They sat either side of me in the theatre's frigid bar. I like being seen out with them both. This is the kind of woman I know. Over-sexualised female undergraduates held handbags on the crook of their arm. Too-short acrylic miniskirts required constant tugging at the back.

Marianna and I went down Grad Bar afterwards. Beautiful well-kept beer from a bar that has achieved ten straight years in the Good Beer Guide. A cheerful but predictable band played the Led Zeppeling and Mötorhead covers for which the English have an endless appetite.

Marianna was talking about the Megaupload prosecution and the SOPA bill in the US. She was more informed about the arguments that I am. I just think the owner of Megaupload is ugly. I met a old uni pal who is doing a fascinating sounding PhD about the ethics of public surveillance, starting from Kierkegaard and Levinas. I like how, when drunk, he always forgets that he's told me several times to read Either/Or. "You must read Either/Or," he said. A little bit tipsy now myself, I smiled broadly, conveying the wrong meaning.

---

She doesn't like me being quiet for even a day or two. I sent her a brief email this morning with the subject "Silence Worry Avoidance Email" to reassure her about not reacting quickly enough to her email. An email that is so sexual and articulate, that I'll read it over and over again. But sometimes she makes me feel pressured into a quick reply. She wrote back saying that she hopes she's not starting to "feel a bit high maintenence."

"You are, a bit", I didn't say. "To the extent of having to remember to contact you at night and in the morning." When I'm turned on, I like it. It's more direct then. Sometimes though, I do it out of form, which is a shame because like all relationships, you start off by thinking "this is the one in which I will be honest."