Meet "Steve", as my children named "him". It's a merluchon, a small-tailed hake, from the market in La Trinité Sur Mer. The girls watched half-revolted, half-fascinated, as I made an amateur's job of gutting him and his equally unfortunate friends, before chasing them round the caravan with his severed head, making him talk.

Gutting the fish was absorbing, and I wish I knew more about piscatorial anatomy. The small flat pale brown lungs were obvious, as was the tough optic nerve which resisted the caravan's sharpest knife, the attempts to cut which only resulted in the eye jerking to and fro strangely, making him look like a fish in a circus. Much of the rest of it was a bloody mystery. A few days later I saw a master at work in the same market, slicing a yard-long fish under its gills, holding it by fixing his fingers in its mouth and drawing his hand down along its cut body to remove the entrails.

We ate Steve at a barbeque with some quasi-relatives and a couple they knew whom I'd not met before. I couldn't help wondering all night why the witty deadpan provocateur Mark had decided upon the precise, taciturn Mary. She briefly dealt with our enquiries as though conscious of a need to be courteous, and ventured a total of one question all night, asking Kirsty whether her top was "vintage". After a litre or so of cider I couldn't be bothered to make much more of an effort with her.

Each Monday there's a "Pot d'Accueil", during which plastic cups of cider are dispensed in a gloomy anteroom of the 1830ish farmhouse around which the campsite was developed. Men talk about either "the drive down", or how glad they are to be have been made redundant; women revert to children. I chatted to Florence, the stagiaire, a breathily-voiced 19-year-old girl from Rennes, dressed in layers of opaque and transparent black.

A couple of days later, feeling trapped in a social evening in semi-relatives' caravan, the iPod blaring and a sparing allocation of drink delivered with fractional but unmistakable reluctance, I was mentally searching for an escape plan. An idea came. "Right, you must excuse me, I've got a date with Florence. No, no, not really," I said, lyingly adding plausible detail. "We're just going to meet down Les Terraces and she'll talk in English and I in French and we'll help each other out."

In the silent gap afforded by their incredulity that I had arranged a night out with a 19-year-old French girl, I nimbled out of the caravan and walked into town to my favourite bar for an evening's reverie with some Belgian lager and the harbour water's beautiful glistering.

No Breton holiday is complete without a day of sunburn and multiple mosquito bites to accompany a meander around Iron Age burial sites, so we cycled our way round some dolmen and menhirs on a circuitous route to one of the best bars in the area. The dolmen above dates from about 5000 BC and is interesting for some regular short corridors leading off it, the function of which is as much of a mystery as is my apprehensive face in the picture.

Eventually we got to the bar. Punk and chanson album covers and a literate library round the walls: Malraux, Molière, Edward St Aubyn, and a booklet presenting a translation of Allende's last speech on Chilean Radio, before he met his death in circumstances that were the subject of an investigation whilst we were in Brittany. A few doors away, in my decade-long search for an outstanding Breton cider, I bought some "Extra Brut" (trans.: "medium dry") of François Séhédic. Not bad, but no matter how "biologique" and "artisanal" the methods, the Bretons cannot resist carbonification.

Whilst we were out, a Dutch couple had moved in next door. At dusk, me and Kirsty outside drinking M. Séhédic's overnamed cider, I turned and saw them through the hedge. She, in a red and white polka dot flared dress, gently laid herself down on top of him on the plastic lounger, before kissing him, open-mouthed, slowly.

Arriving at Manchester Airport, we were suddenly outnumbered by a much larger group of passengers who appeared to be coming back from a colloquium on "The Body As Advertising". Most people bore brand names across their chests or handbags: HEN LEYS PRO JECT in silver letters at 45 degrees; others seemed anxious to ensure that something called G STAR was to be taken RAW; and several women displayed their affection for an evidently popular person referred to only as "PB". At the carousel it all became clear: there was an arrival from Malaga ten minutes after ours.

To Leeds: finished Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn on the train as the leaky window spat at me. I wish I had diacritical marks in my surname.

Everyone in The Angel was on fine form. She made a hit of an entrance, dancing into the room in her tight jeans, high-heeled boots refusing the angry weather, the man next to me making a gallant show of moving up for her, both of us glad to be next to her. Someone opposite was surreptitiously eating roast chicken and corn on the cob, ducking under the table to rip mouthfuls of flesh. I produced a couple of mini pork pies for me and Kim, all three of us righting ourselves with studied innocence when the barman came round for the glasses. I can become emotionally close to someone, or physically, she said. I find it difficult doing both.

She went to the loo, upon which I dropped a 20p piece in her beer. "Don't tell her about this," I said to the man next to me, and I fished it out. "It's your glass eye, you've dropped your glass eye!" shouted someone from the next table.

There was a bit of a railway timetable confusion and we ended up with some time on our hands. She suggested we go back to hers to stroke her cat, but we decided to postpone that to a time when less drink had been taken. We wound up the evening with Cumberland Sausage and Mash in the Scarborough Hotel, which felt like a citadel of moneyed respectability after the Angel: the painstaking hairstyles and facemasks of salaried women, the perfectly weighted vivacity of men.

But now it's time once again to iron my swimming trunks and to gather together those novels which are straightforward enough to be comprehensible during afternoons of hazy cider and mild child neglect. Grímsvötn permitting, I'm off to Brittany early tomorrow with Kirsty and the girls. The following will be true shortly.

It's 2am and in one of those unsensible mucked up sleep patterns you can fall into when you haven't got a proper job I am wide awake, quilt-wrapped, with a half finished bottle of cheap Aussie white left over from Thursday's book group by my side. I've been through a sociably drunken drama of Blackpool's tragic own goal self-relegation against Manchester United, before foolishly deciding to have a little nap. Four hours later and I'm wondering where the party's at.

I've got a train to Leeds tomorrow at 10ish, partly in order to see the witty, potty-mouthed and sexy Kim, one of the best-looking women in Leeds (there's quite stiff competition, being "good-looking" "in Leeds"). We're going to Bedlam, properly known as The Angel. In a precipitate but what turned out to be a well-advised move, I also invited Tina.

Tina you (and I) don't know yet, but in the section where you list your likes she put Thomas Hardy and Father Ted, and in the one where you're invited to mention your favourite book she put "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem". Well, that was like an overclocked LED shining off the page. If you've never come across Herr Gödel, you're missing out on a fabulously subversive intellectual journey, and a good way of making yourself look even more geeky than you might already appear is to buy any of the numerous exegetical works in which it is discussed and work through it, dismissively ignoring your lover's entreaties to sex, a cheese and onion sarnie, or a gripping end of season David and Goliath relegation battle, while you concentrate on a fatal inconsistency in the axioms of number theory.

Anyway, Tina. I immediately wrote to her. With the disinhibiting effects of drink, I mentioned that I was meeting Kim tomorrow in Leeds, and asked her along. She can't come tomorrow but wrote back saying that, due to a couple of unwelcome stalkerish knobheads, she's lied about her location. She actually lives in a small town with a mainly ovine-based economy, nearer Lancaster. I probably should have waited a decorously restrained interval to mention it, but I asked her to a reading of Thomas Hardy's poetry in Lancaster next month, slightly worried whether I'd come across as overkeen as the men she's avoiding.

She replied (this is all in the past hour) with a most intriguing message saying "...I know you have a bit of an aversion to that site [Facebook]..."

How does she know that? Just a week ago I came off Facebook. Have I got a stalker from Settle? Am I being virtually investigated by a goodlooking fortysomething into Thomas Hardy and problems in the philosophy of mathematics? Is she reading this? Because if she is, she can "investigate" me any time, wha-hey!

To the pub last night to pay the rent to Seriouscrush and her boyfriend. She looked gorgeous, in muddy colours, a brown T-shirt, a dark green V-neck top, then another buttoned top in a different shade of brown. A long dark skirt, dark brown tights and flat brown patent leather shoes. She played with her skirt hem as her other hand toyed with her beautiful dishevelled black hair. Half way through the evening she undid her top and took it off, which felt like an exquisite torture. When I got home, not entirely sober, I sent her an understated email, telling her in restrained language that "...there is one man who constantly thinks that you are the most beautiful, sexy and desirable woman in the world."

More realistically, F / 45 / Rochdale describes herself as "A short, chubby, opinionated left-wing feminist who loathes our present government and couldn't give less of a toss about royal weddings if I tried". In the section which asks you what you're good at, she says "swearing". An email has been despatched.

An enjoyable few days with the children, mainly at theirs, while Kirsty was away.

My daughters more or less run themselves now, dropping disdain on my fretting over the sandwich fillings in their packed lunches, telling me not to bother, as I'm "bound to get it wrong". "Well," I told Melanie, "you can make them yourself in the morning, but if you're not ready to get out through that front door by 8.15 you'll have to go hungry." It was my anxiety speaking, born of my feeling that a man doing childcare by himself has to reach higher standards than a woman in order to cut a decent figure in the playground.

The following morning, Melanie and her sandwiches were ostentatiously ready by 8am. She pointedly asked her sisters if they were ready to leave. Doltishly I didn't notice the way she was trying to impress and correct me. Remembering it the following day, I bought her a small bar of chocolate, wrapped it up, and gave it to her as a Getting Ready Early present.

Through rain at 45 degrees, we set out to buy the various vehicles for salt, sugar and hydrogenated vegetable fat which would constitute the food at our Eurovision party. Daddy got himself some Riesling. The printer gutterally refused to print our scorecards so we all had to write them out by hand. Melanie got in a temper because she couldn't do straight lines and deliberately snapped her pen. Melanie and Jenny voted for Denmark, Faye for Hungary; I was taken by the minidresses and coloured tights of Serbia.

The next day, in a break in the rain, Faye and I went outside to play. We got one of those extra bouncy rubber balls and slammed it onto the street and watched it pinball down the road, bumping naughtily into cars. It bounced irretrievably into next door's garden and so, for the first time in decades, I had to knock on a neighbour's door and say "Excuse me, our ball has gone into your garden. Could we have it back please?"