Friday, 4.30pm.

I am in the Sun Hotel. I have been working, honest. I will have to stop using the computer soon as it's a bit antisocial at this time on a Friday night.

The foxy solicitors a couple of tables away have declared the weekend. How do you get to wear a sexy grey woollen dress to work, or has she already changed? One of them has taken her colleague's phone out of her bag while she's in the loo and changed her ringtone to a posh voice saying "Ring ring. Hello?" over and over again. When she comes back they're going to ring it.

Update: much hilarity, with which everyone joins in.

Two male PhD students, who clearly think that making a bit of an effort with your dress before you present yourself in society is to debase oneself with a vulgar self-regard from which educated people should escape, are complaining about how their undergrads can't explain why they don't like a film or a book. Sexually wishful texts ping between Leicester and Lancaster. It's going to be difficult to see each other any time soon as I'll be in Huddersfield for most of the rest of November at the contemporary music festival, trying not to get the giggles over this year's featured composer, whose Christian name is Bent.

Saturday, 9.40am

Great night, as usual, with Kitty and our rarely-seen mutual friend Rod. Kitty flirting a bit with the partnered Rod. Rod making himself all the more desirable through being quite dry. At last, people I can talk to in real life about Mary-Ann. "She's clever and she's dirty," and I can't praise a woman more highly than that. Feel a bit ragged out but we're going to deal with this by having some Pinot Noir in the Sun with our breakfast.

An hour ago, beep beep! "I've emailed you X". She wonders whether I might be available for a couple of hours in Birmingham tomorrow. Yes I am, Mary-Ann, very yes.

My daughter Melanie and I went to Kendal to get her squinty eyes sorted out, before the best health service in the world is privatised. "Your eyes are so wonky I can't measure them with my instruments," said the consultant a few weeks ago. Melanie was up early to enjoy the illicit feel of her day off school.

It was a half hour walk to the hospital, a glare of grey sky and still cold as we got off the train at Oxenholme. Jarring modern houses with white uPvC windows refused to fit in.

In the waiting room, we read flowery magazines about recipes and accepting your boobs. The virus of canned music has spread to the reception area of Westmorland General Hospital. A long wait, then the ophthalmologist called us in.

"Hello, I'm Mr Neill", he said, shaking her twelve-year-old hand. "And is this your father?", a wittily conspiratorial way of making Melanie know that I was but a third party. Drawn in with his manners, his unkempt prematurely balding hair, his expensive but worn yellow-brown shoes, his clashing purple knitted tie, I felt the feeling that is the beginning of something that, on a very few occasions, ends in snogging.

He showed us a model of the eye, showing us what he'll be doing. It was arranged for the first day of term in January. We signed consent forms and walked into Kendal. Pie and chips in a pub, then, with still an hour to kill before the train, we ran up the ruins of Kendal Castle and saw the hole through which lordly shit was delivered in 1500. We found a teenage couple smoking and drinking from tinnies in one of the old wine cellars. "This is the best party venue in Kendal, isn't it?" I said. I saw Melanie slightly shrink from them, then trying to correct her body with politeness.

In the evening, Denise's birthday. Five of us in a hard-lit pub; separating, too-wide tables quashing intimacy. Very little drinking; and a melancholic air which refused to leave. Henry, who wanted to talk about his recent break-up, asked me for a "cordial". I haven't heard that word as a noun for years. "That's a bit of a vague answer," I said in response to something one of the girls said. She didn't know what to do with her face. "I..." (laugh), "I don't like to talk about myself."

I wanted to talk about Mary-Ann, but in the face of such reticence I thought it would be wasted; neither did I want to underline Henry's feeling of aloneness. Denise asked me about her, and I kept it light and brief, before turning my face to the others to indicate that I'd like a new subject.

As we left the pub, Lancaster was full of students loudly trying to find an authenticity through shouting.

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Those of a literary bent might like to consider joining me and some other people at An und für sich in an online book group to read and discuss William Gass's debut novel of 1966, Omensetter's Luck. Follow the link for the book's enthusiastic advocacy and a blog which wanders interestingly between philosophy, theology, and politics.

Kelly, whom I met at Uni a few years ago, is in her late thirties, but looks a lot older, on account of her walking stick, her bulk, and the fact that she's got too much neck for her neck. She's needy, and as lightly as possibly, I have to turn away her poorly disguised requests for help round the house or emotional or financial support.

She doesn't often ring, but I could hear an unwonted smile beam down the phone as she headily sought a reference on a mutual friend. Apparently, there's a bit of mutual smiten-ness in the air between them. I gave an honestly complimentary recommendation, and kept to myself the thought that they are one of the unlikeliest pairings I can imagine. I agreed to her suggestion we go for lunch, knowing, very recently, what it's like to have the words "I've met someone!" clanging around in your head, seeking release.

As we all do, she likes to be liked; and for Kelly it's important that third parties see her being liked. To this end, I knew she'd want to make sure I knew that they are having sex. She used variations on the formula "...and of course the sex is great and everything..." It's a perfectly reasonable sentence to use, but it sounded like a solecism. More followed: "We weren't going to declare it until Christmas, but I think the girls are starting to suspect something." And "He's not ashamed of me. Well, he took my hand in town on Saturday, so he can't be ashamed of me."

Perhaps it's my peculiar conversational taste. I spend hours in conversations which my more mannered friends in the macramé belt of Lancaster would find unbearably vulgar, the expression of social attitudes last encountered in the Gaeltacht in 1959 larded with abundant swearing. Yet I winced each time Kelly, with almost acceptable propriety, said those things.

"I had a date on Sunday actually," I said, and instantly regretted doing so. In the economy of conversation, I had just thrown a bit of capital away on someone with whom I do not wish to be intimate.

"Oh yes?" The trace of disappointment crossing her face as attention, after half an hour, was wrested from her. "How did you meet her?" "On the internet." "Oh I couldn't do that. I'm glad me and Barry met in person. I wouldn't feel safe putting my details on the internet..." Back to you then.

People like you are always very surprised when anyone has any important news. "Oh I never knew that! You kept that quiet!" Yes, because you never fucking listen.

A faint alarm bell: "I hardly drink at all." 

On the train she sent desirous texts at half hourly intervals. An edge of ansiety, expectations being over-egged. I arrived at Sheffield, with its dazzling long sculptured wall of water shimmering almost unbearably brightly outside the station. A couple of minutes later she rang. Confusingly, she hadn't gone to the pub where we'd arranged to meet but was lurking underneath the stairs at Sheffield station.

It is impossible to relate the first moments of our meeting without an immodest reflection on myself, but I've never had a woman flutter so much in my presence before. She smiled and turned her head away, instantly looking back again with a coyness that I hoped indicated attraction. Grey hair, a loose blue blouse, creme trousers, sensible shoes, looking older than her forty-seven years.

We found the pub, a cosy, characterful place for misfits. It had a sticker on the door saying "There is no God. Now relax and have a pie." She had cranberry juice and I had the house's Rutland Cider. We started with books, Jane Austen's relentless satire, our experience of having daughters, how we'd both abandoned the study of linguistics at undergraduate level. She told me about her job, part of which is university English lecturer.

But mainly, it was her sense of humour that warmed me to her. There was a point where she floored me with something she said, calmly pointing out a contradiction in what I'd said with the cool, unanswerable logic of a philosopher. "You're lost for words aren't you?" she said, and I had a flustered moment where I couldn't think of anything witty to come back with, trying too hard to give a good account of myself. To my secret delight, she pounced on my unease, pressing her advantage harder, enjoying my discomfiture. That was one turning point.

"So, Mary-Ann, shall we go for this walk then?" "We could walk to another pub," she said, giving exactly the answer I wanted. We went through a dismal part of Sheffield, all flyovers and spindly 70s architecture, receiving kind directions from a couple who went back on themselves to point us in the right direction through a thicket of car-centred town planning. We walked up a sad looking street past a derelict pub, now one big pigeon coop, and a church clinging on to life courtesy of some fringe evangelical group. Her constant playful pisstaking: it's one of the most attractive characteristics a woman can possess. Finally, at the very end of the street, the pub we were looking for.

More cider. A late-middle-aged couple sat near us. The man was bearded and they were both wearing cable knit jumpers. They could only have met in a folk club.

It was time for her to go. We had hardly got a yard or two outside the pub when she said "stop", and pulled me towards her. It was one of the loveliest kisses I have ever had, not kissing me fully but just playing with my lips and mouth, brushing against them. Every few yards we stopped and snogged, and I felt like a teenager, trying not to beam gloatingly at passers-by.

She missed her train by two minutes. We went to the bar on the station where, to my delight, we managed to find a small room to ourselves, and so spent twenty minutes kissing. I played with her necklace where it nested in her cleavage, gently running a finger inside her blouse. "Well, looby, I think we've discovered two things. What it is about me you say you like, and what it actually is."

I saw her off on the train and went back to the bar, feeling almost exhausted but vibrantly alive.

If this rake's present progress continues thus, I will be slapping a servant girl on the arse on Thursday week saying "Another stoup of port, wench! And for my friend!" In the space of a week, a second creditor relents.

Dear Sir,

We have accepted your offer to make Monthly payments of £5 towards your outstanding balance of £2,779.25, starting on 30/11/11.

Should this agreement fall into arrears then the entire balance will be due for immediate payment.

I will keep to that; you will get your five pounds a month. But even if I don't, you can forget demanding the principal, because I have no assets, having, five years ago, alienated a c.70K interest in a property to Kirsty.

Lord Chesterton's Advice to His Son is overdue for a re-write.

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And with that worry dismissed until I am ninety-three, my mind turns eastward. Several years ago, in the Moscow Times's English-language arts section, I read a review of a book with which I immediately identified. Pavel Krusanov's The Blue Book of the Alcoholic is a record of his St Petersburg coterie's drinking, conversations and events he suggests had to be recorded before many of those involved died.

I've read the review countless times, wishing so much I could translate this and bring it to an English audience, especially my friends in Lancaster, for whom the fact mentioned in the review, that you don't know someone until you've drank with them, will ring self-evidently true. Teetotallers are a breed apart, a separate culture. Joining them beyond the pale in Krusanov's book, are the moderate drinkers to whom Sergei Korovin refers dismissively in the quotation on the right hand side of this blog.

A blogfriend with some knowledge of Russian, has obtained for me a pirated version of the book. Then, Lo! Immediately after telling Mary-Ann where my cock should be in relation to her cunt this morning, I turn from matters erotic to intellectual (they are indivisibly linked for me) and I open the London Review of Books to find an advert from a private Russian foundation, the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund, which is soliciting manuscripts in Russian for consideration for translation into English. From wank-exhausted sexting to demotic, drink-sodden St Petersburg, in one minute. Both imagined, let's caution.

Ideal outcomes:

She's incredibly pretty and I just want to kiss her straight away.

"If you don't have to get back tonight looby..."

"Dear Mr Laine, We are delighted to inform you that the manuscript of Pavel Krusanov that you submitted..."

My adaptation of the translated The Blue Book of the Alcoholic has them crying with identification and laughter in the bibulous capitals of Europe, from Galway, Dublin and Glasgow, to Budapest, Kyiv and Vorkuta.