To Lancaster for Christmas.

I worked for hours to get the fare down to £33. Coach to Birmingham, dodge the train as far as Stoke-on-Trent, single to Alsager but stay on till Crewe, single to Preston, dodge it from Preston. On the last leg, a masked guard from my railway days, whom I didn't recognise at all, greeted me warmly and chatted away until he suddenly remembered he had to open the doors at Lancaster.

This year we only had two of my own girls and our semi-adoptee. The eldest was away selfishly earning £600 a week with full board in Cambridge. She was "teaching English" in a place tellingly described as a "camp". It's a private school where rich parents can pay for immunity from accusations of child neglect.

On 28th I used another set of half-unpaid-for trains to Middlesbrough. I turned up a wee bit merry to my mum's house, which was stuffed with brothers nieces, nephews, girlfriends. They're all teetotal Christians, so they'll understand.

I'd left all their Christmas presents on the train. I recovered them from Northern Rail's hideout on platform five at Newcastle Central station. The lass handed me my bag full of spangly-wrapped presents, unmolested by chav attention.

Last night I was in a near-deserted Tesco with my scooter. At the till was an unhappy lass, who might consider a move to Wigan, where she'd find the diet more to her liking.

"You're not supposed to bring those things in here." "Am I not?" "No, there's going to be a policy about it." "Oh right. Can't see any notices about it." "Well, there's going to be a policy."

Got a response today from Tesco HQ saying that they "don't have a particular policy [...] However as with most new technology it's common sense at the moment." There was nothing in her email to suggest they're considering formulating a policy towards scooters.

So why do people like Mrs Blobby pretend they're spokespeople for their companies as a cover for inventing policies? She's translating her own response, which I'm guessing might be one of these.

"I can't stand all you scooter riders, having fun and getting about town for pennies a day. You represent a sort of freedom I am secretly envious of, but I'm too fearful of joining in with."

Or, "I'm poorly educated and struggle to adapt to situations with which I am not already familiar. I'm only being unfriendly towards you because I try to limit the number of novel events that I've got to deal with."

Anyway I wasn't in the mood for an argument and bade her goodnight.

In future I'm sticking to the local Pakistani-run shops. More expensive, but better (cricket-related) chat and no fucking arguments about scooters, masks, pay only by card, keep apart, one way systems...

Mr Khan treats me as a person. Mrs Blobby treats me a mud-scraper to temporarily rid herself of her own resentments.

Last weekend's edict from the Department for Anxiety scuppered my plans for my European Tour.

I was going to Lancaster. The cheapest way was to fly to Manchester via Venice on the way out and Riga on the way back, which was £22 return, plus £12 to get from Manchester airport to Lancaster and back. Had I gone on the train, it'd have cost me £120. Instead, I hardly paid, mostly bunked the train.

The best blag was the Birmingham to Bristol bit on the way back, which saved me £60, by saying to the guard that I'd been seeing my daughter in her student digs "and I distinctly remember putting my cards -- and my train ticket -- on the windowsill in her room. I've got my booking reference, and I..."

"It's OK. Just sit down and ignore me when I come through. It'll get me through the carriage quicker."

Before then, on Friday, me and Mel flew to Newcastle to see my mum in Middlesbrough and to go to a house do a friend of mine runs in Glasgow. Cider in the airport at 8am.

Storm Arwen roughed my mum's house up a bit. Roof tiles clattered to the front garden, and her fence, erected by my late father, whose ability at using tools was as poor as mine, was wrenched off in two long sections. The fourteen-foot-wide trampoline in the back garden went AWOL, and, at the time of writing, has not been found.

We couldn't get to Glasgow. We turned up at the station for the first leg of the journey and everything was cancelled in both directions. Instead, we had a pleasantly drunken couple of days in my mum's house and Wetherspoons.

I felt for my mum, in her eighties, stuffing cotton wool balls in the gaps in her windows and old birthday cards folded up in the front door. Heating turned up, expensively but necessarily. I took several photographs of the gappy frames, to use against a rich landlord who needs the prod of litigation before he'll do any repairs.

Mel was a bit irritated that I couldn't fuck her. "You haven't asked me to keep my bra on all the time we've been here."

I took her down The Astronaut, a pub which refuses anything internetty. As I thought she would, Mel settled into a proper working class pub, complete with shouty but harmless men, to whom Mel endeared herself by choosing an old Hawkwind track on the jukebox; and fifty- and sixtysomething women chewing over various disgruntlements, laughing. People talk in a collective way, which I encounter less often in Bristol.

The storm abated on the Monday and we flew back to Bristol. I got the train to London to meet up with Trina, who several weeks ago had secured my agreement to accompanying her to a gig by MOR jazz-lite crooner Myles Sanko at Ronnie Scott's. His neediness made me cringe a bit, as he repeatedly asked "is there love in the house?" Love for him, it meant. £37 for a bottle of the house red.

We slept in the same bed, her in her red slinky nightie. With her head on my chest and my arm round her shoulder, she said, "no, I'm getting a bit turned on," and went to sleep a few inches away.

This morning, she sent a text saying that she wanted to cancel our week at a house music event in Tenerife next February. She loves me; I can't reciprocate it. "Mel's like me, but without the hassle."

It's been all work and little play lately: fifty-seven hours last week, forty-seven in the one coming up. I just want to shift this overdraft and stop seeing my income merely change the shade of red on my bank statements.

I have been very tired at work, making some amusing mistakes. On Thursday, a man asked for a jacket potato with beans and cheese. He came back a few minutes later and asked about its progress. I looked around. I couldn't see the jacket potato that a couple of minutes ago was wrapped in foil on the warming shelf where we incubate the bacteria.

"Yes, sorry, just give me a minute." There was no jacket potato to be seen. I rummaged in the dustbin, thinking I might have thrown it away. Eventually I thought I'd have to microwave another. It was there in the microwave, looking limp and discoloured. I heated it up again and served it to him, with apologies.

He took it took it to his table. And I realised I hadn't put the beans on it. I heated some up in a Pyrex measuring jug, then had to do a walk of shame through the tables to pour them over his potato. Masterchef was on the telly. "Hey looby," shouted one of the customers. "You ought to watch this. You might pick up a few tips."

The other day I realised that I had left a bottle of cider in the fridge. I'd bought it on my way into work to save fannying about in the off-licence on my way home. My boss said she'd poured it down the drain as alcohol is not allowed on the premises. The following day I rang a couple of things incorrectly into the till and pocketed the money I'd spent on it, plus enough for a replacement.

On my one day off last week, I managed to persuade Mel to accompany me at a night of trippy-hippy dancing to Banco de Gaia and Transglobal Underground. Mel had met the leader singer of the latter band when she was working in Greece. Unfortunately by the time I came to book the tickets it had sold out, so we had a more cerebral night with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group instead.

As the air conditioning churned out its droning accompaniment, we tried not to think about being on a crowded, hot, dancefloor. The centre's manager bounced on stage at the end, dressed in the faux proletarian style favoured by artistic directors throughout the country, dispelling any reverie that might have been created with a puff about forthcoming events. "Wonderful", "amazing", "incredible."

Scootering through the park the other day, a cyclist behind me threw out a comment as we went through a flutter of leaves. "It the fall!" "It's lovely isn't it!" I shouted back. "It's like snow!" I felt all light and happy.

Mel has signed up with a cleaning agency with the kinkily coercive name Maid 2 Clean. She has also acquired a very attractive tight dress which gives me a great deal of pleasure. I try to encourage her towards a slight degree of tartiness. I find it a turn-on when I'm out with her and she's looking curvy and sexy, yet not being able to do much about it for being in public.

"I know you like it looby, but I don't want to go out looking like mutton dressed up as lamb." "Your problem Mel, is that you just don't realise how attractive you are." "Attractive to you."

I let it rest. There's no remedy against female self-dislike.

I've distanced myself from Hayley over the last few weeks. There's little in it for me. But she sent me pictures of a large diptych she's had commissioned and has executed for a posh restaurant in Cambridgeshire. She painted directly onto its concrete walls using yacht varnish. It was impressive, and I thought that maybe she was on her way to a more enjoyable life where she could enjoy things outside of her crackhead. So, after many calls and texts, I agreed to go round to hers (it's never to mine) after work.

It was a grim night; the wind throwing rain in my face. At hers it was freezing. All the windows were wide open, and my change of clothes remained unchanged into in my bag. I sat in my coat on and my hands thrust between my thighs. She showed me various marks on her legs and neck which she described as bruises, although they were more small red circular eruptions which didn't look like bruises to me.

She doesn't talk in complete sentences, let alone paragraphs. The very disjointed story was that the windows were open because her boyfriend had come into her flat -- presumably wearing a gas mask -- and wiped all the surfaces down with chloroform, before shutting it up and waiting for her to faint on returning home. The marks on her body, she claimed, were the results of a rape or an assault.

I sat there shivering, disappointed that despite such a significant and well-executed commission, nothing has changed.

It is Mel's birthday.

We meet outside a dull but central pub mid-afternoon. She's in my favourite dress and I surge with smiling delight as I walk up to her. She's sitting cross-legged in my favourite dress of hers, which shows her sexy figure off, and is taut against her blackly-tighted thighs.

The Japanese restaurant was on the harbour side and is one of a series of foodie places housed in former shipping containers. The waiter took a photo, which gives me pleasure every time I look at it, magnifying it to look at Mel. I send it to Kitty, Wendy, Kim, and my eldest. The compliments roll in for her. Every man likes having a trophy wife.

Kitty: "Oh wow! What a gorgeous pic. Mel is bloody beautiful. Truly. Gorgeous. That warms the cockles of my heart, looby. You look so happy together... This is fab. Keep the pics coming."

Wendy: "Mel is very attractive," and both my eldest and Kim repeated the bit about us looking happy together.

Back at hers, I achieve my highest ever score at Scrabble, 254, still not enough to defeat her.

I'm not sure how it started, but I tell her about when I used to take my mum's catalogue to my bedroom and wank looking at the bra models. Talking about the Grattan catalogue circa 1980 gets my cock hard. "Do you want me to...?" she says, and we stay on the sofa. "I could see all those images passing in front of your eyes, so I thought I'd better do something about it."

I tell her about sitting in my local and getting talking to groups of girls up from Wigan or Preston, one of whom will eventually pat my hand, saying "well it's been lovely chatting to you, you're so nice to talk to and I hope your daughter gets on OK in Moscow" before perking up and twiddling their hair when someone more with a more masculine carriage walks in.

I never felt more than momentarily disappointed to lose the Wigan girls. I just accepted my market value, which was somewhere between a flat cap and a pint of bitter. But it gives me a calm, not to be part of that economy.

At work, we have this godawful radio station playing 70s hits in the kitchen. I turn it off when the boss leaves, but the songs persist in auditory hallucinations from the noise of the machinery, and it sounds as though the Stylistics have locked themselves in the fridge.

Another day, another scooter accident.

The one a few weeks ago was more physically debilitating; this one added an additional injury: to my confidence. I slipped on some cobbles which were slimed with wet leaves. I sat down on the grass to compose myself, and a passing couple gave me some tissues with which to wipe the blood away from just above my eye. With the accompanying damage to my cheek, I looked hard for a week or so.

I got back in the saddle as soon as I could. The security guard in Sainsbury's asked me how fast my scooter could go. "Well, only twenty, but that's enough."

"Well, you don't want to be going too fast at your age."

I was going to argue the point, but my leg, eye, cheek, knee, shin and hip were a little sore.

Trina and I were supposed to have been in Croatia this week, but we decided the testing regime is too worrying a thing to carry with you on holiday, so she invited me up to hers. Mel went a bit quiet when I announced my plans.

At Birmingham New Street, a tramp-like shoplifter offered me a litre of vodka. We settled on £7. On the train back down, the man sitting opposite me offered me some vodka and iced tea, which we sat drinking out of cardboard cups. He was chatty and generous, talking about his twins and his job as a night porter, and repeatedly refilling my cup.

He did his best to include the willowy woman next to us. She was content with her coffee, but we all talked easily. It was a trio which could only be composed on a train, consisting of a retired consultant dermatologist, a Polish pisshead, and an English one.

As he got off, he presented me with a bottle of the stuff we'd been drinking.

Thank you Witold!

It went very well with Trina. I was indulged even before I got there, with help with my train fare, and she was generous with the bill division whilst I was there. The women in my life treat me so well. A good deal of drinking, but had a day in Port Sunlight and the Lady Lever Art gallery there, a pleasure for fans of the reclining Victorian nuddy woman. It also holds Joseph Farquharson's Hallmarked and Clintonised picture of sheep in winter.

She drove us to Middlesbrough to see my mum, my sister, and the latter's debut solo art exhibition. Some good photography: the iron arches of Darlington station; a long, rough stone (sewage?) pipe stretching into the North Sea. Some less good textual pieces which show the influence of Farce Book.

In a cheap chain pub, one of a trio of coarse, tightly-T-shirted men said loudly as I walked past, "gotta be a paedo."

Back at Trina's, the local paper reports, with a relish I am afraid I enjoyed, some details of a fraud case involving a pensioner and a younger Italian woman.