Really not sure about Mary-Ann. I'm hoping something will happen on Saturday that will make me change my present mind, which is to tell her that it's too difficult and I don't want to spend five hours in the day on a train to see her, spending money I can't afford. I mean literally can't afford, I mean, spending money that my housemates have given me for the gas bill, can't afford. Sitting in a pub or walking round in the freezing cold. The glimmer of hope is that something will happen to make all this travelling and the ruinous, impossible, expense, and the walking around freezing cold towns in the north of England, worthwhile. It's a shame. She's literate, clever, and dirty, but I can't see any future for it.

I fell into a slough of despond late last night; perversely, after having arranged, yesterday afternoon, to meet Mary-Ann. My pleasure at a date being fixed soon disappeared as I started to wonder whether this will work: spending a fortune every five weeks to go to Sheffield to have a snog in a pub? That's a very expensive and unspontaneous way of getting a monthly kiss. I looked at her excited, teenager-ish email she sent me a few minutes after sorting the date out, and felt distant from it.

She texted me late last night and again this morning, a gentle, witty enquiry about why I've gone quiet (in comparison to our normal volumes of communication). Because sometimes I think this isn't going to work, I didn't say. "Not at all darling - just wanted to reply to your lovely emails properly x".

I was moaning about this to my housemates, who met on a beach in Croatia four summers ago and are still together, and Stefan cheered me up a bit when he confidently said "It will work. If it can work between Croatia [where he lived] and Hungary [whence Csilla was on holiday], it can work in Leicester."

But never mind, at least I can go into Saturday's meeting with Mary-Ann knowing how to flirt using my socks. An article in the local paper, "Does He Fancy You?" includes the following hitherto unrevealed secret of the subsconcious flirter.

He'll fiddle with his socks and pull them up. If a guy pulls up or adjusts his socks in your presence, it's an almost 100 per cent sign he's interested and trying to look his best.

Unfortunately, "adjusting" his socks may be the last thing of any subtlety of which he is capable, for the tips continue thus:

He'll let you see him checking out your body. Some experts call it 'visual voyaging' - his eyes take a little cruise around your body, stopping momentarily at the prettiest ports. Here's he letting you see him do it. The message is 'I'm considering you!'

Considering? What a strange word for slathering lechery. Whilst, to be honest, I must admit to have been on the occasional visual voyage from time to time, I can't say that I've ever used sock adjustment to demonstrate an interest in a woman.

And now, inevitably, follows the irritated adjustment back to normal life as my dopamine levels recover. Getting ratty with my eldest for flooding her plate with tomato ketchup. Doing a very poor job of concealing how reluctant I am to accompany my middle daughter to the museum for a Victorian Christmas afternoon, where we're going to play Victorian parlour games and make pomanders. And snapping at a reasonable request from Jenny: "Oh for God's sake, I've only just finished making Melanie's sarnie!"

A long email to Mary-Ann saying, as carefully and with as bright a gloss as I can manage, that this constant not knowing when I will next see her could turn into a bit of a cloud in the long term, as uncertainty turns from pleasant anticipation to everyday frustration.

Talking to myself: "Why the fuck did you get in touch with someone from Leicester, so difficult to get to, and someone so busy, so little free time?" "But I had to. There's no-one in Lancaster. Sitting around here I'll be sexless for ever, until one day, I hear the detested "compliment" about being a good friend one time too many, and I'll leap up and scream at the well-meaning speaker."

I'm impatient for the next chapter: a un-alarm clocked time of physical closeness with the woman who has already seduced me in the way that first attracted me to her: Hello Mary-Ann. I like your hyphens. Knowing that she wants all this as much as me helps not one bit, or even makes it worse, while the date is unnamed.

A doctor writes: This well-documented phase usually lasts about 24-36 hours at the most, during which time the patient is apt to dwell on a more negative view of his experiences than he would normally.

Kim left on Thursday. We must have looked a state dragging ourselves up to the station. the train, the sudden bereftness and her-missing hit me. I had to be myself again, which was difficult to recover after a closeness in which everything is made together.

I left the house one morning to go to the dentist for a filling. I was self-conscious about my gait, an old man's forward stooping walk being the best I could manage, concentrating to make my legs work. In the surgery I could hardly talk, and made a stumbling, over-salivered mess of asking them to turn the canned music off. Too late, I suddenly worried about how any anaesthetic might react to the drug. But anaesthetic wasn't necessary, and I hardly felt a thing.

On Monday, leaving the house when the sky was already beginning to blacken, we went into town. Everything sensual was more so. Feeling the changes of the dark light of a winter, the wind not just in my hair but staying in it long after it had died down. I couldn't resist chatting, to friends and to shop assistants, my pleasure at fabrics and patterns and jewellery, picking up things just to feel the tiny details through my uncommonly sensitive fingertips; colourful geegaws and plastics, the beauty of artificial things too. In another shop it felt as though someone was turning the world's amplifier down to a hush, leaving only a crackling of packets and wrapping, and I stood still and gazed up to listen to a gorgeous aural snow.

I loved the long silences with Kim, sitting together with blankets over us, having to curl my toes up occasionally with the pleasure of her presence. And talking about sex with her, the tacit permission to get turned on by talking about Mary-Ann. "What do you like?" Kim asked, which caused a deep breath of pleasure at the question.

I had a long late night phone call with Mary-Ann, and was glad that the word "love" has never, not even in the state I was in, imposed itself. I wouldn't know what I'm signing up to, or what feelings prove or disprove it. I do worry though, that we might be storing up difficulties for ourselves with too many words.

Our last re-dosing outdoors took place down an alley, in the dark of overgrown weedy bushes that are beginning to claim back a disused factory. A kaleidoscope of patches of black and dark green leaf, and little piercings of orange where the street light pricked through. We shovelled it into the hollow of a Bic pen top to get it up our noses.

I wanted to laugh and laugh. The comical sounds of our big sniffing, usually followed by something like "Oooh, bloody hell," said in that English tone of self-mockery at having done something a bit modern. The amateurishness of it, the improvisation; the scruffy little blue plastic carrier bag holding our bananas on the ground looking up at me like a friend. We're from Lancashire! We take drugs by using 20p biro lids!