Kitty's here for the weekend. Talking in the kitchen last night, each of us going at our drunkenly high speed, encouraging each other in our hedonism, me thinking how lovely her green eyes are.

Someone added me as a "favourite" on the dating site but without adding a message. I sent her a message "But why, M, why? :)"

"(1) because I quite fancied you, and (2) because I'm feeling too hungover and uninspired to think of something to write in a message."

I don't give a shit about women liking my personal qualities oh you're so warm intelligent blah drone you're a nice friend oh I feel safe with you make me laugh a good sense of humour is so important... Yes right that's great thanks, very kind ta, so are we going to sort of, have a drink then?

She's got a good profile. Sounds a bit pissed off, in an intelligent way, an Aussie in London. But even if nothing else other than this happens, she has made my day and I am walking a foot higher.

Modern Soul music, (none of my friends ever know what is meant by this, guessing at Motown or Northern, thus the example in the previous post) is one of the friendliest and most enjoyable things I have ever been involved with. The cherry on the cake--who may perhaps turn out to be called Cherry--that of meeting a woman who likes dancing as much as I do, remains to be set down, but that aside, the weekend left me with a resolution to do more of this.

Simon, who has laboured through the saga of this blog for several years, and shares both my musical tastes and those contained in a pint or six of real ale, generously made the long journey up from Berkshire to Lytham. Having punctuated the weekend with a couple of visits to some first rate pubs, it was a relief to wake up in the late afternoon after an indulgent doze, to find that he too had fallen asleep. I corrected my slack face and wide open gob, checked for dribble, and thought that it was probably a good job I hadn't met Cherry that particular afternoon.

My least successful conversation of the weekend involved going up to someone who I thought was a DJ and saying "Hello, are you on again?" He looked at me uncomprehendingly. "I'm not a DJ," he said eventually. "Oh, I'm sorry, I got you confused - it was just your shirt, your shirt looks similar to one a DJ who was on earlier was wearing." Every word I said made things worse as I fell unstoppably into idiocy.

Before I left I wanted to quickly pop into The Town House, a pub whose lack of character can't erase some vivid memories associated with it. I was a TEFL teacher in Lytham many years ago. I had a secret and I hope completely invisible crush on two of my 15-year-old pupils, Fabienne and Morgane, who beguiled me with their girlish Frenchness. Partly their Frenchness. They had other attractions as well, but as Wittgenstein said in his well-known meditation on TEFL teaching, "of that which we cannot speak, let us remain silent."

Hoping to revive something of Fabienne and Morgane's presence, I walked in and ordered a pint of the only real ale, Abbot Ale. I will repeat the barman's reply verbatim. "I'm sorry, that's a recently terminated transaction". He went on to offer me a piss-coloured pint of liquified agrochemicals and diglyceride esters. Even with the possibility of something of Fabienne and Morgane lingering in the air, that was too much Newspeak, and I left.

I took my daughter Jenny to the dentist today. She's going to have braces as her teeth are a bit of a jumble sale at the moment. Whilst waiting, she told me of a new way her friends have found of confusing chavs.

British readers will recall that a couple of years ago, young female members of the chemically oranged classes started bearing gaudy bags and T-shirts which advertised the girl's love for someone called "PB". It turned out to be a clothes and accessories brand which provides a slatternly way of dressing to be matched with false eyelashes and unattractively short skirts on girls too young to be sexualised, although I realise that a man who used to take two 15-year-old French girls he fancied down the pub might appear somewhat inconsistent in saying this.

Jenny said, "We ask them, 'do you love lead?'"

We came back from the elderberry plucking, hands dyed after forking the berries off. In Glasson, car drivers advertised the smile that they do when they get out of their cars in a pretty place having put no effort into getting there. Afterwards we went for a drink in the Borough where we met a Grammar School party of two Argentinian teenagers and their cheery but monoglot English hosts. The boys looked a bit lost, coping, as if everything was happening to them. I felt sorry for them, having to behave in a second language.

My phone beeped. It was Karen, commenting on the previous post and saying that she hoped we could all get together again this evening. What?! Helen had shown Karen this blog. I was alarmed at the thought of her having read it, trying to recall what I'd said about her; but her text wittily preempted my worries about it.

Given that I referred in the last post to Karen's desirable front elevation, I walked into the pub, winked at her, nodded at her chest and said "Nice tits!" We spent some time wistfully looking back on the days when drugs were plentiful. I met a man who had lived in Denmark for a long time and we talked about the secret continuance of illegal Halal methods of slaughtering pigs. Everyone except me and Karen smokes so we were steered outside; eventually it became chilly, and I had to collect a cake from someone, so I made my farewells.

"Hey," Karen said, winking and making a little nod towards herself. "Nice tits."

I texted Denise whilst going to collect a wine rack and a ladder from a local Freecycler. She's about to take up a job over the border, so I said "[Pet name], have I lost you to Yorkshire?" Almost; she's moving to Leeds tomorrow but said that when she's settled down a bit we should go to Opera North or West Yorkshire Playhouse, or perhaps somewhere a bit more cultural like The Angel, aka Invalidity Benefit Central, mine and Kim's old pub haunt and a booze-sodden second home to the most entertaining sots in Yorkshire. I slowed to a stop, getting turned on just by texting her.

I clanked home with the ladder. I rang Karen to confirm that we were still going out with Helen, as arrangements involving Helen can turn into somewhat moveable feasts. "Karen, I have in my hands a wine rack and a ladder. What woman would pass over the chance to met a man thus equipped?" Before we met, Helen said "I think you and Karen should get together." I wish I could meet someone locally rather than spending these hours on the train for even theoretical friskiness, but there's the problem of the Already Existing Boyfriend, and I've had enough of that to last me a lifetime.

I did my best to ignore my clenching hiatus hernia which sent me away to be privately sick a couple of times. When I mentioned a walk I had planned to do in the Languedoc with a blog friend, she knew about the Albigensian Crusade and the Cathars, which makes it even more surprising that the word "jewellery" is misspelt on more than one occasion on her website, but she's got nice tits so that's alright.

But I must arise now and go to Glasson Dock. A friend has offered to show me her big bush and told me to do what I like with it, so we're going to trim it and get a couple of gallons of elderberry wine going.

This weekend, I will mainly be on a dancefloor in Lytham at the Modern Soul Weekender, with a long-standing reader of this blog. If you can stay still to music like this you ought to see a doctor urgently because there's something seriously wrong with your central nervous system.

To the University, where the champagne flowed at the MA show of this year's students on the course I completed a couple of years ago.

I spent my MA meandering through aesthetic theory in Western Marxism with a dissertation that added nothing to the subject, failed in its persuasive objectives, is not of publishable standard, and in which quotations from Althusser and Gramsci shine embarrassingly amidst the murk of my own writing. I passed fine, but I'm so ashamed of it that I have collected neither my dissertation nor my MA certificate from the Department. This year's cohort is largely practising artists and the enthusiasm with which their proud Course Director introduced them was genuine and deserved.

There was a tech-heavy theatre piece, magnified snowflakes on a screen, a topless man pretending to run, some text about a fire and looped sound effects which they'd made on a computer rather than actually setting light to something and recording it. I drifted into sleep. I much preferred Joanna Wood's paintings with their playful delight in the sensual properties of oil paint. As she beamed bashfully through her Course Director's introduction, she had the disarming air of someone surprised to hear her work being discussed.

But the outstanding star of the evening for me was Low-Ree Jones. She said she spells it like that in an attempt to get people to pronounce "Lowri" correctly. She presented her performance piece Codes of Romance which is too detailed to describe adequately but which started with her getting entangled in several reels of cotton thread which made a gentle clatter as she pulled them round her. She used props in unexpected ways, a drowned doll, collapsing sandcastles made of earth, a soaking wet shirt, honey all over her arms. It was surprising, intense, deeply-felt, a bit erotic.

The woman in the grey dress in the picture above is Sarah Casey, an artist and a lecturer who was doing a PhD when I was doing my MA. She sold me one of her art works two years ago for 60 pounds - a near-donation, prompted, I can only imagine, by my obvious pleasure in the piece. The picture misrepresents it; in a house, lit weakly by the grey skies of Lancashire, it's much fainter - barely perceptible in fact. Her medium is grease, and the idea is that over the years, the grease will coalesce and what faint marks exist will dissolve into a blank canvas.

It needs to be float mounted, which is a very costly thing to do, but the plan is to suspend a large sheet of muslin over the whole wall of my front room and put Sarah's delicate art work in front of it. Then, finally, I could silence the cacophonous wallpaper. Its strident pattern of flowers on a navy background doesn't so much cover the wall but glares down from it. It announces itself constantly, like finding an out of tune Mariachi band rehearsing in your front room each time you open the door.

Linda turned down my request for her to write my profile on My Single Friend, the dating website where someone else describes you. She said that it wouldn't be a good idea due to our occasionally fractious friendship over the years, some of which, I suspect, is born of my inward railing against the fact that she'll never be my lover. But it was precisely because she's seen the best and worst of me that I asked her.