Kim came up on Monday for a period that I keep wanting to describe as a weekend, although it wasn't a weekend, and felt much longer. This is not a derogatory statement at all; rather, the elongation of time is connected with the fact that her visit involved some chemicals with names so long they need hyphens.

She arrived at lunchtime and we had a few pints in The Sun, a postponement for something. Back at mine we had as short a chat with the couchsurfer as I thought we could get away, before we went upstairs to my room. Every step bought a new worry. What will she think of me? Will I conduct myself OK? How I will I put my body? What about the room's decor, the seating arrangements, the provision, or lack, of food? Would everything please her or at least be comfortable?

She walked in and took the comfy chair, as I had hoped. I didn't want to make elaborate efforts with manners. She unwrapped two plastic bags, one containing One Thing and a second containing Another Thing, a chemical whose sesquipedalian name, being far beyond the average bobby's spelling abilities, fortuitously accords immunity from prosecution. She thinned out the lines with a credit card, so as to hurt our noses less, and left everything there on the dresser, open and available. All night, she constantly prompted me, "help yourself". Nevertheless, I kept asking until I realised that doing so was putting a distance between us.

We chatted all night, quite a bit about sex. The talk didn't always flow, but the times when it paused, when I didn't know how far to relax into sensual solipsism or try to raise another subject, were as much a part of becoming close as the times when it did. We were watching each other, trying to get the right balance of attention to make it better for us both.

Sometime during the morning, facing irresisitible somatic evidence of the law of diminishing returns, we agreed not to take any more, and went into town. A drab beer garden and a drink neither of us wanted; two minutes in an exhibition which was too difficult for us, then a sandwich in a cafe, fending off the nausea. She was asking me what we could do. I had no idea, feeling responsible but incapable. Eventually I suggested we go to Morecambe.

On the train a shell-suited young man was swearingly relieving himself of an inarticulate stream of bravado towards a woman sitting opposite him, while a baby crawled over the seat. "If I see him, I'll fucking... I'll fucking... 'cos we're gonna make this work. Right?"

We buttoned up against the wind and walked to the beach. It was high tide; wet liminal sand dried to a wind-blown soft upper margin. Kim indicated a part of it next to the sea wall where we could lay down, and we curled into embryos and went to sleep in the sand.

As I lay down beside her, I looked at her, her hair directly on the sand, sand that was already collecting in little folds of her clothes. Nothing was separate: the sunlight and the wash of wind over my skin, was the same as what I saw; everything was without design and without thinking.

I put my jacket over my head and drifted off. When we woke up we went for fish and chips but I couldn't finish mine, so I gave them to some winos sitting near us. "Are they poisoned?" the winette asked.

Yesterday we had one failed attempt at putting her on the train. Sitting on the platform, the One Thing and The Other Thing started coming up again, for both of us. She asked if she could rest her head on my shoulder, and said "Would it be an imposition looby, if I got the later train, in an hour? I can't cope with the idea of the train yet, and I don't want to be alone." In a pub garden we calmed each other through another phase of symptoms, talking about our time together, inventing its history. We made a laboured return to the station, where we hugged and exchanged heartfelt thanks.

Everything was still very bright. I went to a pub where I knew I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. She texted me from the train. I replied "...Feels odd to be without someone but am self medicating with cider. Have this lovely feeling of mild bliss. Was great Kim. Loved it. Feel better in the progress of my life for it. You're very rare."

I looked at the last sentence again and was irritated with myself for qualifying an absolute adjective, but such are the hazards of narcosequipedalianism.

I realise that there is evidence of a social error in the above photograph which could result in my banishment from polite society, but Corbière's all I had in.

I've got a Couchsurfer staying at the moment, a twentysomething Syrian Christian who's just finished his doctor's training and has an interview at 8.30am [sic] tomorrow for his first job. Kirsty and the girls had arranged to come round for tea yesterday and I was a bit worried about how it would work socially. Everything went fine, the adults working through a couple of bottles of wine as the background for a long chat about the Islamicisation of Sweden (where Firas studied), a conversation partly promoted by the fact that my part of our street is mainly Muslim. He's looking for flats to rent and is adamant that he doesn't want to live in a Muslim area. Of which, I am relieved to say, there are very few in Lancaster.

We went down the pub this afternoon with a couple of my friends and I realised how incomprehensible colloquial Lancaster English must be to a foreigner. But they all like heavy metal so it seemed to go OK. We came home and I started preparing the plaice which I bought yesterday from the sole surviving fishmonger in Lancaster, not counting the man in Sainsbury's who possesses a certificate about Excellence in Fishmongering Skills which in a couple of years will become a degree, validated by the Pong Ping campus of Lancaster University. I was wondering whether I could buy the whole fish and have a bash at filleting it myself, but the real fishmonger decided it for me. "Plehss? Hawl? Neh mehrt, if y'dunno what ye doon y'v nor chance. Filluts." He showed me two large plates of white fish in the way that a proud sommelier might present a secretly sourced Madiran. I nodded and gave him five pounds something.

Firas, to my surprise, didn't want any tea. "No thank you, I don't eat much." It felt a bit strange to be eating it by myself in the kitchen while he sat in the front room on his computer.

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I emailed Arty, telling her about my show in Brussels, and wondering if we might be able to meet up again next time I'm in Glasgow. She sent me the following effusive email, which I quote in its entirety.

Dear looby
Good luck with your show.
Arty

So I think we can safely assume that one's dead in the water.

Never mind. The other person involved in that exchange is coming over tomorrow and staying overnight. It's Kim's birthday on Wednesday so there are some chocolate truffles for her cooling downstairs and I've got her a card which has a picture of a 50s glam woman in a bright yellow jacket holding a glass of wine. It says "Wine: how posh people get shitfaced." The thing she said to me a couple of weeks ago, "I can get emotionally close to someone, or physically; I find it hard combining the two", rings in my head.

Going to try to get this down quickly before the delayed effects of the cider kick in.

There's a new cider producer opened up in Lancaster and I invited Seriouscrush and her boyfriend out to try it. It's on in a pub by the canal. It was a luxuriantly sunny evening. Seriouscrush turned up alone. "He's coding, and when he gets into that it's bad to stop it."

She wore pale brown flat leather lace-up shoes, scuffed. Pale lime green socks with a ribbed pattern in the weave. A voluminous dull purple skirt to calf length with an unmade hem. On top, her estuary colours: a jacket in mud green with overlapping sleeves; a scooped neck vest in the same colour. She's got lovely tits; a tiny bit of black bra when she leaned forward. I tried to glance down when propriety allowed, half hoping that she'd notice. September 2007: "I don't mind it when you look at my tits actually."

We chatted about the funny bits in Don Quixote, the hopelessness of trying to eat out in Lancaster, the pleasures of copyediting, lying because you can't be bothered explaining the truth. There was something funny and she leant back, her beautiful face and tits, her fingers, that I wanted to be mine, sliding through her dishevelled black hair and onto the table. "You should so be my girlfriend," I said. For a moment she glanced up with recognition before hearing the last word, then corrected herself. "I thought... when you said that, I thought you were going to say 'my editor'."

We stood up to leave. We went outside, by the canal, facing each other. "Right, it's been a pleasure Seriouscrush. See you soon." I felt a little death happen of everything I wanted to do.

I apologise for the vulgar nature of my titular ejaculation, but the excuse is that I've been invited to perform my latest performance art malarkey in... Brussels! Fare, accomodation, and a fee. "Please let me know as soon as possible."

My former collaborator in Glasgow emails me, (that's her above, performing her video performance piece "Slow Furniture Love"), apologising for the short notice, and asking if I'd like to do my thing as part of her show there next month. (Minimalist image-free website here.)

Fucking hellerama, what an opportunity.

In Glasgow the other day Arty, perhaps as a way of preemptively dismissing any ideas I might have been forming about nipping across to Superdrug to buy a toothbrush, said something about sex being an expression of a close relationship. It can be, but just now, I didn't say, I'd settle for a right good seeing to.

It's always interesting to see the people chosen by the women who aren't interested in you in that way. There was Faye, a foxy Jewess with a rarefied job in literature whom I met on a dancefloor at my friend's 50th. We bopped together a bit and she seemed to lodge in my mind rather. I emailed my friend afterwards asking her if Faye was single. She was, and so, again through my friend, I suggested a post-work drink in Leeds. Fairly quickly we realised it wasn't going anywhere, both of us thinking too hard about the next question. But never mind; afterwards Faye told our mutual friend that it was flattering to be asked and that she admired my initiative, if not much else.

A year or so later I found out that she was engaged. I did some rummaging around and found of photo of her fiancé on the internet. I had been passed over in favour of a stumpy, rotund man, with a big bottom clad in skin tight, high waisted black trousers. I thought he might be going to a fancy dress party dressed as a Mexican, but then I found out he was Mexican.

The other day I saw Denise in town, holding someone's hand. Denise's physical charms and her disarming personality have been described on several occasions in these pages. I made a swift adroit move into the doorway of Poundland from where to espy the couple. Her beau was a skinny young man with clothes from the Socially Conscious school of couture, the ensemble being best suited to a day which ends in a police cell with the moral high ground for company. Scruffy pale green trousers with several pockets, and one of those loose jackets with thin vertical stripes of different colours, which I imagine is meant to evoke memories of the time when he couldn't update his Facebook status when there was no signal in the Andes, but a poor person emerged from a hut and gave him a cup of tea and offered a simple room in which to lay down for a while, after which he discovered that he'd mislaid his phone and the four hundred dollars he was carrying as emergency money, an unforgettable experience which taught him how much Westerners could learn from the generosity of humble Peruvian peasants in the face of their extreme poverty.

Of course, a sceptic might say that that's an extrapolation too far, and that my views are provoked by jealousy that he gets to remove his ethically-sourced underpants in the company of a gorgeous 27-year-old girl, but I'm leaving personal sentiment aside here as far as I can.

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And now, a word from our Executive Editor: As a result of a site review, and following another media owner's example today, the previous post "Shh" has been deleted. "Shh" failed to meet standards in three quality control metrics: "Lack of Pretension" (viz., "the unpredictable consequences of the male gaze", which only shows the damage that reading Susie Orbach as a teenager can have on a man in later life), "Clarity of Sentence Structure" (not good when a commenter requests a chart to explain something), and "Having Something Worth Saying" ("Man Has Pint Whilst Playing Football With Daughters Before Seeing Former Sociology Teacher On Other Side of Street" needs a stylist of greater talents than mine to make interesting).