When we begin to fuck, we begin to live

A 5am alarm, and to Kendal for Melanie's eye operation, after which I was to go to see Mary-Ann in Leicester. Her recovery took longer than expected. I was relieved to see her dispose of a cheese sandwich disappear without incident, since the hospital had said that she could leave once she had had something to eat. I rang Mary-Ann to say that I'd be three hours late.

On the train down I read her Christmas present to me, from which the quote from 1690 above is taken. "I must confess," she texted, "to feeling extraordinarily nervous about this evening." I wasn't until we were in her car. A red light seemed to last a long time and I felt unsure if I ought to put my arm around her.

We arrived at her house. Walls of books, the TV knowing its off-centred place, well-tended cats wandering about. We had some English wine in those thick handmade blue-green glasses used indifferently for all drinks by left-wing people who don't drink much. No-one there but us. We stood together in the middle of the room. I felt bashful; but not for long. My fingers, lips, my eyes, and all of the clothed me, were conduits for the relief that at last we were being able properly to enjoy each other. "There's a bed upstairs if..." "Yes, I do, very much."

Midday, we drove to collect her daughters from their Dad's. "Have we got to have a story ready?" "It's OK, they won't ask, but just in case, you're a researcher I met at a conference." The daughters were easy company; driving lessons, the instructor's funny foreign name which sounds scatalogical, A-level exam stress, feline social relations.

Mary-Ann drove me to the station. A hasty, illegally parked farewell. At the train station I saw that I could go home two hours later. In the real ale Pub of the Year I started chatting to a lively Northern Irish and Midlands couple on a crawl and it seemed natural for me to join them navigating round the real ale highlights of Leicester. The last one was the best, a listed early 60s building with an beautiful original interior: an orange-yellow light through mottled lampshades reflected by curtains of a similar colour, the fussy lines of Victoriana straightened into Modernism, and a pint of local Mild for under two pounds.

I'd missed my last train. I explained the situation to Mary-Ann, trying to sound sober, and thinking I might have to throw myself on the mercy of a reader of this blog who lives not far from Mary-Ann, worried about turning up pissed to hers too. "Don't be silly, of course you can stay here." More chat with the daughters, almost feeling familiar now; a bed of propriety downstairs this time. Another, slower farewell, 6.30am in the local station's car park, no coyness of hands or mouth this time.

"You can't use that ticket before 9.30 I'm afraid," the conductor said. I paid the fare as far as Leicester, stretched out a coffee, then went into Wetherspoons and taking advantage of a pre-apologised day of cancelled arrangements, I ordered a pint at half past nine. I was not by any means the first in the pub to do so.

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Sod this I'm going on a SAGA holiday next time

Back home, and thirty minutes to get some clothes together, before we went to Blackpool for the Soul Weekender. Three of us in the double room together, which involved including an airbed and a huge pump in our luggage, circulating the keys and a certain amount of dissembling in the hotel.

Getting breakfast involved them going down to the dining room, giving our room number, then me wandering in half an hour later and placing myself confidently at their table as if I'd just nipped out to the loo. We were gently asked if we had nearly finished our breakfast at midday. We had spread the papers out and were playing The Age Game, where you take the names of the people having birthdays and guess how old they are. It went to a tie break so John and I had to guess the temperature in Oslo the day before. John got it spot on: -2.

I love dancing; it's the thing I most enjoy doing in the world. I deliberately exceeded the stated dose on my prescription codeine for the dropsy on my knee, taking advantage both of its painkilling properties and its recreational potential. I liked the getting ready together on the big Saturday night, drinking, fiddling about with clothes while our subcultural soundtrack played on the iPod. We lined up some Pepsi Cola on the hotel's hyperbolic brochure in which the restaurant was described as "world class", and Blackpool as "exciting".

"Hello." Karen from Chester was in a below-the-knee pinafore dress made of cheap artificial fabric which nonetheless curved appealingly around her tits; thick, touchable black hair waved to her shoulders. "This is my friend Heather. I'm a bit drunk." "How are you doing? Having a good weekend?" "Yes, it's great. She's my best mate." "Do you know Karen, we had an identical conversation to this a year ago."

The man in the subheading, like several others, took the mick out of himself as he returned hot from dancing.

Here's 1:40 of what we were up to on the final session on Sunday afternoon (it's I Really Love You by Norman Hutchins, from Where I Long To Be, 2006).

To Silverdale, a village as pretty as its name, and my friends Steph and Tom's house. We go to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival together but I've known Steph for many years. We met when I was employed as an interviewer for an academic who was writing an oral history of women's experiences of work during the Second World War, and Steph was a Lecturer in the same Department. The book was authored by Penny Summerfield, who, for the wrong reasons, deserves the unusual distinction on this blog of the use of her real name.

I enjoyed the work and I was good at it, both the interviewing, as I sat with beguiling elderly women who fed me endless cakes and scones while they talked, and the background research, writing footnotes to explain some of my subjects' references (the "Pilling Pig", for example - the now closed railway line between Preston and Knott End On Sea), and clarifying the pronunciation of proper names (so the village near Blackpool called Rawcliffe is "rake-ler", not "raw cliff").

The project ended and some time later the book was published. I was astonished to see that my name didn't appear in the acknowledgements. Whole paragraphs of that book were elicited by me. I only hope that it was a production error, although she's never been in touch to say this, neither did she bother to alert me to the book's publication.

Steph's invite to their conversazione untemptingly offered "gentle socialising" and "gluten-free snacks", but this turned out to mean a hectare of alcohol, several yards of delicious homemade food and an arty but unpretentious company. The children were low-key, unobtrusive, and autonomous; three very pretty early teenage girls, dressed in the cord pinafore dresses and thick tights favoured by the academic classes for their offspring, were the daughters of a magnetically beautiful woman who reminded me of Seriouscrush: slightly dark complexion, artfully untrammelled black hair; a woollen black and dark green knee-length dress with an attractively kitschy design of cats. Her English was just short of mother tongue. I hope she didn't hear my smitten involuntary sigh when she told me she was French. Her husband was the only person there who was difficult to draw out; I gave up with him after I felt like I was in a game of Twenty Questions.

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I rang the doctor's this morning about my water on the knee. It's a recurring problem after I slipped on some ice last year and banged my knee hard on the pavement. I had to swallow a snort of juvenile, tactless laughter when the receptionist said "So that'll be 3.40 then, with Doctor Wong."

Tomorrow I have to be up at 5am to take Melanie to have her eye operation; then, hoping that I can stay lively enough for anything that might occur, I am off to Leicester to see Mary-Ann and stay overnight. She's engaged in diplomatic manoeuvres to park her teenage daughters elsewhere for the evening, but if that doesn't come off we'll go to a pub and embarrass the youth of Leicester with the sight of middle aged people pawing each other.

I acquired three teenage daughters on Christmas Eve, as the triplets turned thirteen. Melanie is the stroppiest by far, but we only had one spat, when, last night, she repeatedly told me to "shut up", after her frustration that I couldn't repair their computer immediately escalated into a demand for a new one.

"Don't you tell me to shut up, you ungrateful sod," I snapped, pleased to see unexpected bits of spit landing on the carpet between us despite the absence of plosive consonants in what I was saying. "All the money your mother and me have spent on you and now you want a new computer? Stop being so thirteen."

"Thh-ett-teen," she forehanded back, making fun of my pronunciation. Parental love is unconditional, Melanie. It won't work.

Aside from this, it was all warmly domestic, even down to the cat pissing in the front room and filling it with an acrid smell. Kirsty disappeared for a couple of days to have sex with someone taller, better looking, and wealthier than me in the Lake District while the girls and I luxuriated in an excess of Boursin, chocolate and Amontillado.

My daughters all wanted a taste of the latter, a request I was pleased to indulge, as I would consider myself a success as a father if, in five years' time, I overheard a daughter of mine at the bar saying "Have you got a very dry Amontillado?" If, on the other hand, I saw them fiddling with straws inserted into bottles containing liquids in colours that do not appear in nature, no amount of subsequent success in their stated careers of archaeologist, actress and tramp (sic - that's what Melanie once said she wants to be) would assuage a sense of paternal failure.

Correct	Incorrect

Mr Tall is playing the difficult role of Mummy's New Boyfriend in an admirably low key way that indicates that he is not attempting to replace their father in that rôle. And he's put much better music on her iPod. He's into poppy dance music - Black Box, Stone Roses, Prodigy, that sort of thing - which is a blessed relief after the Guantanamo Bay torture of Van Morrison that she used to play endlessly. As we put the Christmas dinner together we danced around the kitchen to Firestarter. "Look, Melanie," she shouted through to the living room. "You've got modern parents."

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Bit of a test coming up in 4 hours and 10 minutes: I'm meeting Denise in the Sun. I might have described her in a text as "cock-stiffeningly gorgeous", situating this in the context of the fingertip-excitingly sexy mauve wrap-round miniskirt she wore last time we met, which splits up her thigh as she crosses her legs, and she might have replied "Well, you might be in luck, looby. That's one of the things I've packed for my trip to Lancaster."

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In news of seasonal joyousness, a payment I'm due might be coming through a bit early because of the way New Year falls, which holds out the delicious possibility of me being at the Lytham Soul Weekender, and spending a weekend acquiring blisters dancing to my first and most enduring musical love, Modern Soul.

I know that when most people say "I haven't got any money," it's more a phatic than a factual statement, but I have had to think carefully in the past forty-eight hours about how to get through Christmas with literally no money.

Eating of course, is fairly important. Yesterday was my children's birthday party (their actual birthdays are on Christmas Eve) and there was a pizza left over, so I had that, and Kirsty bought me a pint. For breakfast this morning, I found some old porridge on the shelves and had that with water and I pinched some of Csilla's honey to put in it. It was very tasty actually.

Lunch required digging further back into the arachnid depths of the cupboard, where I found some potatoes, "Best Before 22 Oct". After snapping off those eerie growths that look like a mole's claws, I thought I could boil them and chop them up with some chilli-stuffed olives, and some cherry tomatoes which I rescued from the compost bin (nothing wrong with them that a quick wash couldn't sort out).

The thing that was bothering me was having to make the nut roast for Christmas Day. I've dredged out some lentils, a couple of onions, some pine nuts, and a lemon, but that still meant having to find some cashews, peanuts and some tinned tomatoes. Normally I make it with a marbling of prunes soaked in armagnac, but such a costly enrichment has to be eschewed this year.

Then, Lo! A visitor from the East, or at least the sorting office, arrives, bearing not only the new edition of my favourite lad's mag, but also a letter from my mother, enclosing thirty pounds for the postage costs incurred by me and Kirsty because of a misdirected parcel incident.

Pommes de terre d'olives à piment aux tomates

You'd pay fifty quid for that in London. I'm off down town to buy some nuts. Happy Christmas everyone.

I get home and the house is as much of a hothouse as I left it at 10am. The heating is on all day, running up a bill in the hundreds - seven is my guess - of which I will have to pay a third. S doesn't understand money - Daddy's paying for everything. My only hope is that his girlfriend, who has already left for Hungary, will admonish him about the bill, of which she will have to pay a third, when she comes back. I used to have combined gas and electricity bills of no more than seventy pounds a quarter.

In town today I met someone who was my next door neighbour for eight years. We lived in farm cottages built in 1675. Just a coal fire. That was it. At night, jumpers wrapped round your head, and I actually wore long johns. We were remembering how cold it was there. "Why should anyone think they have the right to a warm house all the time?" I said. Only through endless access to money can anyone think this.

Went to get a tenner out. £9.15 left in my account till 2nd January. I'm on one of these baby accounts where you can't go overdrawn and the application form suggests your Probation Officer as a possible referee. I went to Kirsty's and presented a bag full of things I'd bought earlier: different types of cheese, a bottle of Prosecco, one of red wine, some port, crackers, a Christmas pudding, chocolates; so we won't starve. We were all chatting, tea in progress, me sitting on the sofa while they ate. Kirsty was about to throw out Jenny's half-eaten chick pea curry that Kirsty had made. "Are you throwing that away?" I said, just before it got into the compost bin.

All I want to do is to be able to go the Lytham Soul Weekender on 6th - 8th January. Gaynor and her fella in one room. John and Ian in another, and me and Gail in another. I've talked to Gail about the sleeping in a double bed. It will be sleeping, and it's all understood. Besides, we won't spend much time in bed anyway what with the drugs music. Just dancing. Dancing dancing dancing, the thing up there for me with good sex.