Part 1
Written just before midnight last night.

I email to arrange our seaside rendezvous.

"Right then Donna, about tomorrow. There's a train which gets me there at 1145, so I could be lurking in the dunes at midday if that suits?"

She replies suggesting that "as it's been very windy here lately" we scrap the beach idea and go round Preston instead.

"Oh fucking hell, don't let a bit of wind put us off!"

At that moment she texts her number through. I ring it. "Donna? Hiya, it's Looby. So you're not keen on the statues idea then?"

"I'm just thinking of you, if you're coming by train, we could meet in Preston..."

"Oh right, you mean meet in Preston then you drive to Crosby?"

"Well no, I'm just thinking it might be easier to meet in Preston, half way for you, half way for me."

"I don't want to go round Preston."

"Why not?"

"It's a shithole. It's boring."

"It won't be, with me there."

This goes on for a while. We're meeting in Preston.

What the fuck are we going to do in Preston, surely England's least romantic city? Intervene to stop a man beating up a woman before being told to piss off by the woman "'cos I love him"? See the 70s brutalist bus station before it's demolished? We could be frolicking in the dunes, sinking our toes in mud, putting the sand back into sandwiches.

I think sadly about the cheese and onion rolls I've made up for us. And I've got a cold bottle of Prosecco in the fridge which was intended to be popped open as we relaxed in the shadow of the disused chemical works, but it can stay there now.

This hasn't started well. If she makes even the faintest allusion to shopping, I'm coming home.

---

Part 2
Written 10am today.

She's just texted, to cancel. "Family stuff, sorry x"

"OK," I reply. "Hope you get it sorted out."

I might go there anyway and have a pint in the appropriately named Bitter Suite. Donna will now be erased from my phone book and my life.

NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs responds to my request to dispel my ignorance thus: "You may call me Mistress, but Donna would be friendlier though."

Will there be domination in the dunes? Will the suburbs of Southport come alive with the sound of spanking?

Thinking about her photo, with her red lipstick and red dress, I'm beginning to wish we could have chosen to do something a bit dressier rather than getting togged up in wellies and a sensible coat to venture out in 45 degree rain onto a muddy beach in the shadow of a disused factory complex. But there's something erotic about edgelands, especially in the rain.

I'm not sure if the moves for The Spank (or Le Spank as Pamplemousse put it, thus demonstrating the inherent superior sexiness of the French language over the English, even where it's only the article that changes and then only slightly) were ever codified, but I'm quietly proud that I have got both these tracks on 12 inch. You have to be "quietly proud" as saying you've got a good selection of spanking-related disco music is of limited social advantage in the Philistine times in which we live.

Morris Jefferson - Spank Your Blank Blank

Pamplemousse - Le Spank

I come back to find that two of my daughters have made a cake out of a packet sponge mix. I am very pleased, and tell them so, before going into the kitchen to start on the chick pea curry. On the radio, Mohsin Hamid is talking interestingly about The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the dangers of using any simplifying model, be it economic orthodoxies or "purified" Islam, to determine behaviour. I pour myself some corner shop plonk.

There is a warm current of domestic harmony running through everything.

I start dishing up. They are watching a wildlife programme on TV, and I think of how children's experience of nature is to watch exotic animals on TV rather than poking around in thickets of nettles and cutting their legs on jutting bits of rusted tin can.

"Jenny! Turn that computer off and come and get your tea!" I shout to the other room. "And turn that telly off," I say to the others. "Tea's ready".

"Why must we turn the telly off?" says Melanie, with a tinge of challenge. I'm surprised. "Because it doesn't accord eating an important enough place in the social life of the family," I somewhat wordily reply.

"Mummy lets us watch it while we're having tea."

"Really?" I change my register. "Do you all want naan bread?" I try to think of the hundreds of times when we have all eaten tea together. I can't remember the TV being on, or off.

"Does Mummy really let you watch TV while eating?"

"Yes," they say, convincingly.

I serve it up and put it on the table. I take mine into another room, annoyed and disappointed that my cooking, and our conversation, is relegated behind a television programme, making a mental note to check this protocol with Kirsty.

I come back in. TV's still on, and now, it's fucking owl rescue. "Shall we have some of this sponge cake?" They jump up and come into the kitchen to cover it with jam and whip the cream up. I seize my chance to snake back past them into the living room to turn the TV off.

We eat it in peace and talk about the way that Christmas is merely an arrogation of Solstice by a load of Johnny-Come-Lately Christians.

Calm returns and I pour myself another glass of wine.

---

I email NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs about Tuesday. "...And, at some point, do I get to know your name?"

Some literary loose ends. As Smallbeds found out, it was in fact O'Brien's centenary yesterday. Smallbeds responds with his reasons for reading O'Brien and a couple of short essays to help you in. If you can get through At Swim-Two-Birds without your shoulders shaking in mirth at at least one point, I'll buy you a pint of Plain, or Thwaites, at your discretion.

The Oxford English Dictionary appears to be online now. At least, none of my several uses of it over the past few weeks have resulted in being asked for money.

I rest easy this morning because after a hiatus of several months, I have resubscribed to the London Review of Books. It's felt like being on the wrong side of a closed door, shut out from conversations far more interesting than mine.

I thought I'd save money and read it at the University, but it's term time now and the library is a din of overdressed Facebooking teenagers. No amount of visible bra straps and tight black miniskirts is enough to stop me wishing they'd shut the fuck up. The only times it's quiet is before 10am and after 6pm, when the Asian students silently sit with their books on Macroeconomics and Physiology, and the elderly man in genital-hugging cycling gear makes long notes in pencil about the social history of Lancashire.

---

My name is looby and I am a pedant. A future project is illiteratelancaster.com. Were the site starting today, we'd open with these.

Call for Works: Open Up North.
Open to what, the artist's cat?

Exhibition of polite and appreciative contemporary furniture

At 4am this morning, wide awake, I thought I'd see if anyone had been looking at my profile on the dating site since I last checked it several minutes earlier. To my surprise a little notification of an incoming message popped up from someone I've been chatting to for a few days.

"You woke me up," she said. "WTF are you doing up at 4am? :)" I said. "It was you," she replied. "You slammed the door and it reverberated down the M6".

A woman who didn't have any pictures on the site recently sent me a message saying that she fancied me. Giddy with delight over such a rarely expressed statement, I responded promptly, receiving by return her photographs. Crestfallen, I looked at a bottom of considerable substance crowding the frame. She was draped in drab clothes suitable for someone employed in manual handling at the dockside, before knocking off two hours early (following standard Liverpudlian labour practices).

It made me wonder whether her "I quite fancied you" line had been deployed as a rhetorical device. Beauty, as Naomi Wolf said, is an economy, and Stevedore4u hasn't got much capital within it. Neither do I understand how you can fancy someone without having met them. From now on I'm only contacting women whose photographic evidence provokes a lip-biting "phwoar" and a peeringly close perusal of their pictures.

NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs presents herself in a red scooped neck dress and a blonde bob. She lives reasonably near me in a genteel Victorian watering hole. She's got a funny, articulate profile. I wanted to meet her straight away.

...Maybe we should engineer bumping into each other in somewhere glamorous, like Preston (actually I'd prefer Southport). I know we should fence about each other for a while before this proposal is made but I can't think of anything else to say that would serve other than a disguised preamble to the suggestion. Could just be somewhere with lots of available exits and a time limit of an hour, regardless on how we're getting on. It's dreadfully previous, I know.

What often happens at this stage is that emails go on for weeks on end, containing vague references to a meeting that never acquires the solidity of a date, time and place. But NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs is of more adventurous stock, and next Tuesday we're off to see Antony Gormley's statues, iron casts of his own body planted into the wind-lashed post-industrial mudflats of Merseyside.

I must just add that I was last there four years ago with Beleagured Squirrel, who was patiently kind towards me during a difficult time which sometimes tipped me into an un-English tearfulness. Coming over all lachrymose is demanded as a token for emotional authenticity in an American, but it's unseemly behaviour in an Englishman. I've never thanked her enough for the artlessly understanding comments she left, which ended up with her suggesting a day out at the same place to which me and NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs will be going on Tuesday. If the former is reading this I want her to know how precious and re-read those comments were, how much she made me feel less alone, and how much she helped me by everything she said during a time I never want to go through again.

---

Stop press: Linda has just emailed, pointing out that today is the birthday of one of the most illustrious of the long line of outstanding Irish satirists, Flann O'Brien. Here is a fine rendition of his famous poem, A Pint of Plain Is Your Only Man, a message to live by if ever there was one. A glass will be raised in an Irish direction this evening in the great man's honour.