I've been internet dating since September 2009. This is a spreadsheet of the results from the main site I've used.

Now updated to end May 2011

I seem to have lost another friend (that's two in as many weeks).

I was almightily displeased when at 5.00 yesterday Bridget cancelled, by text, a long-standing arrangement to take me out for some tapas for a late birthday present. She's done this a few times. Several confirming emails at weekly intervals, then a sudden cancellation, citing the no doubt genuine reason of work pressure. Now she wants to "rearrange" this one too, for some weeks hence.

Taking firm control of my lip, I wrote back saying "...I realise that my desk is a lot clearer than yours, but I also have to co-ordinate things with Kirsty and the girls and when I arrange a night out it means that she has to turn down offers too. We can't cultivate a friendship on this basis, because I have no reason to think (through reasons you can't help - I do understand that) that it won't have to be cancelled again."

She wrote back saying "Yes, sorry, I do understand everything you say. All the best, Bridget."

I was completely taken aback by the baldness of that response, and stared at it for some time, thinking that she'd put up more of a fight. It's a sudden end to three years of dinners and chats, someone I told everything to. Part of me now feels like a fool for trusting her with all that information, when what matters most to her is work.

It's all for the best. Perhaps we can just meet up spontaneously from time to time, although at the moment I feel so pissed off with her that I no desire to do that. Muttering to myself, I wandered into town to buy something to eat instead of the tapas, where I serendipitously bumped into Linda. We spent half an evening down the pub where I was able to get it all of my chest.

It was hectically busy and they made a mistake with the order and we got a free pint. I found the little button which controls the music in the room, so was able to blank some of the din in the pub. The barman came into the room to turn it back up. A couple of minutes later I turned it back down again.

I was 47 on Wednesday. The best card was Barry's: it was homemade, in pen. "To a special friend", he put on the cover. Inside, several names were scrubbed out before mine. He also does these interesting Lucien Freud-ish nude drawings and he put one on the back.

That, or Kirsty's, which she made from a catalogue of an exhibition she went to of one of my favourite artists, George Shaw, who uses enamel paint, the kind you use on Airfix models, to depict everyday scenes, usually devoid of people or much activity at all, often from the nondescript estate in Coventry where he grew up. I find them very moving, and slightly eerie. I saw a big exhibition of his in Birmingham a few years ago and was stunned into admiring silence.

Linda and an old friend of mine Faye, who has the same birthday as me, who I met twenty years ago on teaching practice, came round for tea. It was great seeing them again. Linda's busy with her academic job and is often away seeing the lucky bastard economics professor she met last year, and Faye is devotedly, novelistically, tending to her aged mother who seems to stagger from accident to accident in a genteel but surprisingly injurious part of Morecambe.

Linda gave me The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien, a book which she originally intended to give me a long time ago, but didn't after we had an argument in a bar when she disappeared for fully half an hour to go off smoking.

"The poor mouth" is an expression both in Irish Gaelic and Anglo-Irish which means to exaggerate the sadness of one's situation in the hope of accruing some benefit thereby. O'Brien takes this to absurdly overstated lengths, where the villagers try to out-mire each other in expressions of destitution and poverty. On the blurb on the back, it mentions another Gaelic author whom O'Brien acknowledges as an influence. Her surname is IrishLawyer's nom-de-plume on the dating site, so I've used that as an excuse to get back in touch with her.

In the evening, down the pub, I was delighted to see Esther again. In November 2009 I was in a pub and Esther was there with a mutual friend. After several pints of strong ale I deployed the kind of subtle, playful and intelligent conversation that women love - that is, I leant over to her and whispered "I'd like to fuck you." We left the pub together and maintained the refined ambience that my understated prose had created by disappearing down a back alley for a snog. It was quite exciting until I discovered the acid tang of her cigarette mouth. She's got a boyfriend now, so I said "Hello Esther, how nice to see you. And what a shame I can't chat you up any more."

Tomorrow will be an early start: I'm girl-sitting while Kirsty goes on the big demo in London, but now, to Leeds. After the work bit, me and Kim are going to Bedlam - her name for The Angel, my favourite pub in Leeds.

I had a chat on the phone with Denise to find out what Frances had done with my phone after she'd turned it on and trawled through my messages. Turns out she'd sent her a text saying "Fancy a fuck tonight?" then another longer one about what a "lying, two-faced bag of shit" I am. We had a really nice chat and although in all honesty it's the last show I'd choose to go and see, I said I'd come and see her in Jesus Christ Superstar which her church theatre group is putting on next month.

This morning, an envelope containing a handwritten note from Frances appears on the mat. Inside, half of the money she owes me (the rest to follow), and an olive branch which I have no intention of accepting. She says she's not angry any more and hopes we can sit down and talk about it "and laugh at the absurdity of it." There's nothing absurd about it: it's too real for that. Paranoia, envy, suspicion, maybe; not absurdity. She never apologises, even one of those apologies which doesn't quite have your heart behind it but would help the situation and the people involved.

On Sunday I went to the jazz club. She came in an hour after me, with her daughter. I blanked them, training myself not to look at them, to treat them like the strangers sitting in front of me. A few weeks ago I read one of those back page interviews in the glossies, in which Michael Caine was asked whether he hates anyone. He replied no, but on the rare occasions when people mistreat him, he just "freezes them out. It just stops." Good practice, I thought. You simply arrest the relationship. You leave it immobilised, untouched.

I'm 47 tomorrow: I'm going to see the Lancaster undergrads do A Picture of Dorian Gray, then see the girls for a bit, then off out for a few pints. Linda and Seriouscrush will be there. Possibly Gaynor. ManICan'tHelpFancyingAfterAFewPints also. GorgeousAdminWoman said she's coming but she's as reliable as a politician's promises. She has big tits a curvy full figure and long black hair which I imagine spread out on my pillow, and something slightly hard and selfish in her character, which, combined, I find very attractive despite knowing that it can promise only a débâcle of a similar nature to the one from which I'm extricating myself now. But as Vanessa said when I told her some of this, "the best fucks are the mad ones."

And as it's my birthday, I think I will also tell everyone at university that I want to indefinitely suspend working on the PhD. I can't afford the fees, which are now months overdue, but more than that, it's spoiling my enjoyment of reading, and the music itself. When I'm drunk, I talk to myself and say You don't have to do it.

I think I lost most of my local readers when I had to introduce the password, but just in case: George and Dragon, St George's Quay, 9.30ish.

She brought the phone back. I wasn't in. I was down the pub, chatting to two friends about the Frances episode. She'd deleted all my texts to and from Linda, one with some information from a debt collector, the frisky texts to and from Denise, some from Kirsty about looking after our girls and several others.

She sent an email which hints that she might have used my phone to text Denise and Linda. Then, a few hours later, another to tell me that she's set up a filter to bin any email from me, and saying, with unconscious irony, that she'll delete any texts I might send her.

It's a shame because she could be good company. The sex was always good, and at times intense. Even just the other day I remember clasping her to me while she was on top of me, not wanting anything, the slightest thing, to change, delight and sex coursing through me, knowing it was special and rare.

My children were being funny this evening, saying how you can confuse irritating people by saying deliberately nonsensical things, and going on little riffs illustrating it. Melanie insisted on sitting there without a top on, both me and Kirsty unspokenly uncomfortable with her prepubescent breasts. "I'm expressing myself," she said, theatrically.