Mary-Ann has got a very sexy voice, breathy and aspirated. "Hello," she said. I was silent for a second or two. "Have you been practising that or is that how you always talk?" "Ah, I haven't mentioned the emphysema have I?"

I'm getting very impatient to meet her now. And occasionally, I can feel myself speaking as though the knowledge that we will meet provides a script of how things should progress now. I don't want any road maps or plans or expectations. I sometimes go to describe this to her - it's a very literate, writing, relationship - and delete it because my attempts to be honest sound like distance.

I feel most honest at night and in the early morning, when it's just lust and her unplaceable accent, and breath, make me feel like I've rung up one of those "Just Listen" ads at 1.50 / minute in the back of the papers aimed at two-minute wankers. By day, I'm interested in knowing if she's pretty. By night, I imagine she's sexy and abandoned and pretty doesn't come into it.

Denise's gorgeous blue-green, just above the knee, wrap-around skirt opened along her thigh as she sat down and crossed her legs. She was also wearing a vermilion knitted cardigan with toggles as fasteners, black tights and long brown high heeled boots. I smiled with delighted, sexual pleasure, scanning her as she sat down. "You are a good-looking woman Denise." "I know. They can't all be as foxy as me."

We chatted for a couple of hours; as usual, as the drinks disappeared, it turned very flirty and touchy and stroky and hand-holdy, talking about sex, the sex we like, the sex we've had, things she does with her boyfriend. I told her all about Mary-Ann, the first real-life person who knows any of the detail. As we parted she kissed me on the lips and for that few seconds my mind seemed to disappear.

Last night it was the closing party of the Fortnight Project. Very sociable and a cornucopia of food and drink. Walking home, I sent Denise two of the very detailed texts we share. Starting with the removal of the skirt.

Except that I sent them to Mary-Ann. They both mentioned Denise's name.

Despite the hour, I immediately rang Mary-Ann. It went to voicemail and I did my best to explain, although there isn't anything much I can say apart from the fact that Denise is, and will remain, a friend, and that I would hate it the other way round. At home, I sent an email reiterating the same points, apologising profusely, and saying that I'd understand if she wanted to call it off. She's sent an almost painfully considerate reply, saying how it did hurt her, but not ruling out our meeting on Sunday.

I bitterly regret it. I've shattered a lovely spell that was bewitching us. If this is going to work, there's got to be a good deal of remedial work on my part.

This isn't the first time sexting Denise has got me into trouble. Frances once went through my phone and found the texts to and from Denise, and sent Denise a text from my phone saying "Fancy a fuck?". "I know you do, looby, but you wouldn't put it like that," Denise said later. Yes, I was sexting another woman whilst having actual sex with Frances (well, not literally, which might have taken a fairly understanding woman to allow), but going through someone else's phone is unambiguously wrong, and the incident greatly hastened the breakdown in our relationship.

But I feel far, far worse about this. Mary-Ann doesn't deserve it at all and I think if anything did develop between us, it might be an idea to tell Denise that in future, we perhaps ought to suspend this type of communication.

I have spent all morning trying to find the words to reply to Mary-Ann, and must continue to do so.

To my surprise, a debt collection agency accepts my offer to reschedule a debt.

"Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of 14th October. We are prepared to accept your offer of £5 a month in respect of [a credit card]. Please find enclosed a standing order mandate which you should complete and return immediately to your bank."

The standing order instructs my bank to pay £5 on 10th November, "followed by 536 monthly payments of £5, and a final payment of £8.41". So that'll be paid off when I'm 91 then.

---

Someone was in the local paper this week for possession of The Chemical With the Unfeasibly Long Name. He was fined £65 which, to my relief, seems to indicate that the local magistrates have more important priorities than obscure "research chemicals".

I had a free ticket to see Carmen as my friend Neil is a reviewer but his boyfriend isn't into opera. It's a rather silly piece and I wonder how it ever became viewed as high art, but the singing was gorgeous, the girls were pretty, the costumes were excellent, and the theatre itself is a beautiful building of 1782, renovated and cantilevered in the early 1900s by the great theatre designer Frank Matcham.

It was an elderly audience and in the toilets at half time, a murmur of sighed schwas of relief accompanied the collective micturition. I had taken some of The Chemical With the Unfeasibly Long Name, and in the pub afterwards it suddenly came on and I was garrulously sociable, chatting to a couple of Neil's friends with what I hope didn't come across as tiring, one-sided energy.

Last night someone threw a party for the PhDers. The hostess, who has a policy of not buying any modern clothes at all, looked glamorous in red lipstick and a beautiful green vintage dress which few modern women could wear, unforgiving and requiring her rationing-era figure to carry it off. An international crowd from Eastern Europe mainly, bright, un-arsey, socially adept people in their 20s and 30s, and the hostess's boyfriend, very attractive in a rural poet kind of way, wearing what seemed like a dozen layers. We got to taste some pálinka, the renowned fruit-based firewater of Hungary which is served on the merest occasion and which my housemate's Dad, in common with many of his compatriots, has with breakfast. It was delicious, a hotly alcoholic taste of stewed apricots.

I left at 11.30 because me and Mary-Ann had arranged to talk on the phone. Her voice was intoxicating, sending me off into heady and bodily desire. I was pressing the phone hard against my ear wanting to catch everything, her breath even. How will it work when I see her, I constantly wonder.

This afternoon I'm meeting my beautiful friend and partner in sexting, Denise. The way I feel at the moment it's going to be all I can do not to lead her up to Vicarage Field to undress her. But the plan is for a coffee somewhere.

I'm a participant in an art project called Fortnight. Every day we receive text messages telling us to go somewhere to do something. We wear felt badges to signal ourselves to others and in which are contained little microchips which set off the machinery which is often a catalyst to the activity to which we are called.

Today, we were invited to go the old Port Commissioners' Office on the Quay, and look for a record player. Tapping my badge on the record player produced a recording of Freddie Mercury and Monserrat Caballet or whatever she's called, singing histrionically.

As it was playing I got a text message telling me to go through the door on the right. In the room was a table, a chair, and a selection of postcards. Old Penguin covers, much-repeated artwork, that sort of thing. We were invited to put on some headphones and listen to some music on an iPod whilst writing a postcard to "someone you are thinking of today". I think of Mary-Ann all the time.

I don't think I've ever held an iPod in my hand. All I ever get from them is that someone stops the conversation for five minutes while its owner searches for a photo, before they finally say they can't find it, and then they look at me to crank up the conversational engine once more. But only until the next distracting spark of never to be fulfilled illustrative promise stamps on talk once more. I pressed several buttons and it implied that it was playing some sort of Arabic music; but I only heard silence.

I had a couple of drinks afterwards - an amiable nuclear engineer who was about to go to play football. Working and middle class, a foot in both camps, like me. Really though. All middle class people say they're working class and you can suss the fakers out in ten seconds.

On my way home I texted Fortnight.

Today's thing at the Quay has contributed to an incipient, I was going to say love but let's more realistically say lust affair with someone. There are other thanks I could give you but to give me an unexpected way of giving a little tap to the spinning top of our relationship was the most important one of them all.

Their response was flattening and, over-reacting a bit, I found it very irritating.

Did Fortnight (almost) get you laid looby?...TELL!x"

I looked at the phone, downturned.

Oh no, it's not about "getting laid", it's not about striving to have sex with someone, "Wow, thanks Fortnight, I got fucked, in 7 different equally satisfying positions! Bit like porn! Wow! I must Facebook it to make it real!" No no no no, it's about mutual wanting, it's about becoming closer, and about having a fortuitous chance to express this. And for that, thanks.

Lots of other things to talk about, about our ridiculous council controlling Guy Fawkes Night, but in my head, Mary-Ann, Mary-Ann, Mary-Ann. I've suggested Sheffield: woody parks, good pubs. I will book a return ticket for the same day as an insurance policy, as an antidote for any reckless suggestions that her adverb-twisting, desire-inspiring wrenching of our native language might provoke.

My first words to her were "I like your hyphens." She described herself with neologisms made from nouns and adjectives that haven't ever gone together.

She writes the most seductively articulate emails, tapping into a shared joy in playing with English, sending sentences back to me with a different turn, a bit of mocking; "very cultured, without any of the fancy class trappings that usually implies", as George Szirtes said on his blog about someone the other day. And full of desire, on both sides.

As lovely as it is, I'm aware we're falling prey to the internet's way of making you affectively run before you can walk. I email her, trying not to break the spell.

"...but we need to meet first. This elaborate house of cards we're building could still collapse. I've probably got a clearer desk than yours. Week beginning 6th any good for you?"

"...but what a lovely house it is right now," she replies.