Thursday. Mel rings and wonders what I'm up to. I'm very pleased to hear from her. After the usual preambles, it ends up where I know it will: in the pub. She suggests a country walk, which I'd be interested in, knowing that with Mel it never lasts more than an hour or two, but I have wrenched my ankle and bashed my coccyx, in an accident of which I have only the recall of its pain, not how it happened. I plead injury, and she agrees to meet in the pub.

As I'm walking through town to get the bus, I notice a trendy burger shop is advertising a very expensive beer which uses my uncommon surname in its title. "Hiya, can you just have a drink?" "Well, we have to serve it with food. Just some chips or something?" "OK, it's just because that beer -- that's my surname."

"Oh well, I'll just put a portion of chips through on the house." I thought they'd do just that, but they cooked them and brought them out to me with my eponymous beer. When I went to pay, they said they had a spare glass from the brewery, which they'd already wrapped and put in a wee cardboard box, and presented it to me. People are so kind to me, all the time.

I advise Mel I am near the pub. A woman in a white top and sunglasses is bustling up the hill. I don't recognise her at first. Mel's a plain dresser normally.

We sit in the garden. The arrangement isn't as good. I'm facing her; I want to be next to her. I shuffle our chairs a bit. Kissing, a bit leaning, a bit of an effort but nothing if it means kissing her. She has on this lovely white top. Curved little high collar, V-neck, and an arrangement of buttons doubled at stations of the cleavage. I gently pull the bottom of her shirt down. She undoes the two top buttons.

I pull myself away from her and make my proposal, tortuously. "Mel," and I place my hands on the table in a gesture of honesty. "We never got married but had he been my father-in-law, Kirsty's dad once said to her, and I think it's good this, 'always ask. What's the worst I can say? No'. Well, look, I was just wondering if on Sunday you'd like to um..."

She finishes it for me. "Have sex?" I laugh and kiss her on her head. "Well, as you might have noticed, I fancy you and I just think it'd be a nice way to spend an afternoon on Sunday. Everyone's going to be out at my house. We'd have the place to ourselves. Might be nicer than a bus stop."

"I'm not sure looby. It always changes things." "Not for me it wouldn't Mel." "I don't know, things become different afterwards." "You'll carry on being you, as I will."

There's no-one in the garden and I'm all over her again, us both glancing doorwards to see if anyone's coming in. "Do you want a feel?" she says, and puts my hands on her tits. I quash a laugh about her phrase, as sophisticated as me saying to her two weeks ago "come on, give us a snog." But the act is lovely, playing with her buttons, tugging her blouse down to show her tits off better for my sex-gaze. She smiles down at herself being fancied.

The agreement is sealed and I go home and spend two days trying and failing not to masturbate, before Richard (our co-lodger) tells me he might be in and out all day as he moves into his new house.

I ring her to tell her that we will not be able to liaise in our intended way, "but were you inclined to meet me in the Suffolk Arms in that white blouse you had on on Thursday I'd be very happy to meet you."

"Well I know you're moving so don't worry if you're busy with that..." "No, of course Mel, if there's a possibility I could spend Sunday afternoon assembling an IKEA shelving unit rather than spending some time with someone I slightly fancy, of course I'll choose assembling the shelving unit."

I tell Kitty all about it. Part of what she says is "be generous to her in all ways."

Mel texts. "Still mortified for behaving like a wanton sex starved lush on Sunday...in a bus stop! No standards, obvs." I reply telling her that she's met another roué, and that I regret nothing.

I tell Kitty about the events at The Bus Stop of Sex. I tell her that it's made me feel even more sexually alert than I am normally. About the woman about my age in the cafe the other day, knitting, wearing a close-fitting lilac dress to below the knee, bare legs, dark blue wedges. I expect she had no idea how desirable she looked.

She says that I could suggest to Mel an afternoon in for when we meet again on Sunday. Cath would raise an objection putatively based on her fears about corona, but which perhaps might derive from her desire to monopolise my sexual attention. If she's moved to the new house by Sunday we could have the place to ourselves. If Cath is in, she'll let us know it, repeatedly.

Harry, inexplicably, is insufficiently excited by one of the sexiest women I know. Hayley is bored of a monotonous diet of cunnilingus. "I fake it now, to get it over with." He enlists my help in obtaining some pills to remedy his failing. As he seems unaware that it is possible to obtain them from any pharmacy or on the internet, I got him some and doubled the price. What a distasteful degradation: buying tablets to get another man's cock into a girl I want.

Sexy Ex-Boss at The Big House texts me to see how things are going. She says she's bored. I suggest we take advantage of the titteringly-named eat out to help out scheme. We meet in a pub garden with her husband and my fellow housekeeper, policed by young staff who take too much pleasure in telling us that standing up and going to other tables is not allowed.

I stand up and go to another table to enlist a young person's help with the app-based menu, which we can't work. Our little policeman scurries over and it's only with difficulty I restrain myself from telling him to fuck off.

There's something giddy about the night, encouraging disclosure. We have The Drug Talk, and I am not at all surprised at what I learn. Sexy Ex-Boss reminds me of the time when I was working there and came out of the toilet with a white-ringed nostril. "'Hayfever', you said. Yeah, hayfever in November."

She says that they haven't had sex for several years. They invite me back and we sit up doing coke, before I am invited to luxuriate in a vast bed in their elegant mid-C19th Italianate villa. I lay there, thinking about all these bright, witty, attractive women going to waste.

For the first time since moving here two years ago, a date. A couple of hours in the pub, chatting easily. She says how much she misses going dancing -- something I stress how much I enjoy on my profile. "There are two types of men," she says. "Those who dance and those who don't. My husband didn't."

Next day she says she doesn't want a second date as she lives too far away and the last bus to her village in Wales leaves too early. It's either true or at least she's made an effort with a plausible story.

Cath's in the garden, and suggests a smoke inside. Obvious sexual tension, about which I do nothing. As I was stroking the cat, she said out loud, in a curious dope-induced muddle of persons, "he's only stroking her because he wants to get me into bed."

She runs out of patience with my inaction, and takes herself off to bed.

The following evening, we are watching something on the telly, both sat on the settee, when she gets up to sit on the armchair. "What's up Cath?" She tells me that I smell of drink. I currently have a fifty-minute cycle ride to and from work. I tell her that I'll never be teetotal and I think I deserve a pint of cider after my arduous journey home on a hot day. She gets up in a huff and goes to her room, all the pleasure and promise of the previous evening screwed up and thrown away. I take it as a translation of her irritation over my passivity of the previous evening.

With Mel, however, it ends more happily.

I met Mel during my brief time working at Parks and Carks.

I am lugging a copy of the two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which I purchased on the way there from a curio shop, and my burdensome jacket, which repeatedly ejects my cards onto the pavement.

I'm early in the pub, and a man wearing a T-shirt with some regimental badge on it can't open his packet of peanuts. I was going to make a comment about not relying on the British military in a crisis, but ex-Army people are sensitive souls.

We went to the garden, where the SOED became a conversation piece. We joined tables with these window fitters and their boss ("no, I own the company, I just watch them work"). We started a game where we had to give the meanings of words picked out randomly from my volumes. Peart: clever, sharp, intelligent.

They shared their joints round, which got me and Mel gigglingly stoned. At the bus stop I said "go on, give us a snog," and we did.

Yesterday in the same pub, we were adopted by three women and a bloke from the Dictionary Game. It was good, raucous, sexualised banter. I told one of the women "you've got fucking lovely tits you have." She said I looked a bit like Dirty Den -- a murderer in real life.

The author yesterday

The light was fading. Mel draped herself across me and took my hand. Her soft fingers stroking a small thrill into my palm, my arm around her shoulders close to her breasts.

At the bus stop, we start kissing. She unbuttons her shirt, takes my hands and put them on her tits. But she wants an unmediated touch, and pushes her bra up over them.

The bus arrives suddenly, and I withdraw, leaving a disarranged sixty-year-old woman on a high street.

My youngest texts. "I'm reading a book about cults, and I'm more and more glad that we had an effeminate ninny for a father rather than some mad patriarch. Love you x"

In the park with Tammy, Hayley and Harry. Little repeated qualms in my stomach as Hayley kisses him.

Kim came up to my room in a green thigh-length dress, tightly presenting her beautiful tits; difficult not to stare.

A long walk, by my feeble standards, over the Suspension Bridge and through Leigh Woods, before we came across a cider pub near the docks. A bin man who had found some blood pressure tablets and several Viagra that morning was trying to sell them for a fiver a box. Kim sat there crocheting. It was restful watching her.

The barman had an American accent. He said he was from North Carolina. "Do you hang blacks there?" I asked, because it's good to open conversations with foreigners in a friendly and uncritical way.

Today we went to Clifton, meandering amongst its C18th terraces softly beaming in the sun, before settling in a public garden with our cider. I was a bit wary of saying that I'd already had one while she was getting ready. "It's OK, I've been on the vodka this morning."

We went to a gallery and she liked this ugly wire sculpture of a bird: blingy, gold-painted. I thought it was shite, but just said "hmmm", and she walked off without buying it. I rang the gallery and bought it for her birthday next month.

Cath took me by surprise last night. She said she'd been to see a house. She'd had a couple of glasses of wine, so I wasn't expecting her to offer to drive me there to have a look at it from the outside, and its down at heel area. "You might prefer it there," she said. "It's a bit more...", and she couldn't find the word. She didn't need to, over my laughing. "Are you implying I'm common, Cath?"

I commented on the young women walking around in bras and shorts, and we wondered together about prudishness and feminism. A thick, unrefreshing wind blew into the car. Lidl, an empty plot with a litter of pallets and half-bricks, a small modern housing estate, tatty student houses.

Why, I wondered to myself, does Cath want to carry me with her? Why doesn't she dismiss me once our tenancy ends? I lay in bed, occupied with the thought that she's willing to hold my hand.

At Hayley's there's no-one in. A man is delivering a table and chairs. I assist ineptly, down the awkward steps, round a stubborn corner, and into her flat. I am about to wave him off when he asks for £45. No answer from Hayley's phone. I leave an irritated message and apologise to white van man, who drives me to the cashpoint so that I'm able to pay him. She's lucky: it's far from every day that I have £45 laying around.

I get a phone call from Harry, asking if I've seen her. She went round to her dealer the previous evening and hasn't emerged since. No outsider can get through a pea-souper of crack, so I decide to sit in the park and compose myself.

About twenty minutes later, I see Harry coming towards me in the street. He's looking somewhat bruised and sore about the head. He says he's been mugged in the same park and has had his money and keys stolen. He says he can't cope with Hayley any more. Again, there's little I can do, and he walks himself home.

Later, Hayley rings, brightly not apologising, saying that I'll get my money, and asking me round. I want to see how she is.

On my way, and feeling somewhat fatigued by now with a hot day of cider and Hayley drama, I sit down next to an elderly homeless woman in the street. She reckons she's about my age, but I'd place her at the mid-sixty mark at the youngest. Homelessness is a dree for even the hardy, but seeing someone of her sex and age in that situation is particularly affecting.

I give her a can of cider and my spare coins. Near where we are sitting, there's a narrow lane locally known as Crack Alley. She asks me if I want to go down there, where she'll "sort me out" for a tenner. I decline her offer, at which point she tries to enhance her advertising by lifting up her T-shirt and showing me her surprisingly well-kept braless breasts.

I wished her well and set off to Hayley's, who was all blithe charm, none the worse for her sojourn at the crack den. She says she's coming off it, which is like me saying I'm stopping drinking.

Cath approaches the same topic, which involves me in an unsettling vulnerability. She tells me that she wouldn't be happy having me living with her and Ingrid, her daughter, if I can't get my drinking under control.

I had had (very unusually for me), two dry days at this point, and had been thinking about kono's suggestion of using a dose of mushrooms as an attempt at erasing at least some of the often irrational desires for alcohol that come upon me hundreds of times a day. I'd also had a chat with a doctor about my referral to the Drug and Alcohol Services.

But instead of saying this, I invented a story about having started on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Course at the local hospital. "It's just an introduction so far. You know what I liked? We weren't asked our names or anything. I was expecting some sort of confessional AA-style meeting, but it was more like an academic seminar." And on and on, detail upon lying detail. I just have to remember now to be out of the house for an hour on Tuesday mornings.

Kim, who is laying in my bed across the room, is camping in the garden here for a couple of days. She dropped a clanger last night as we sat round the fire, peaceably drinking with Cath and Richard, by saying how indifferent she is to the risks of catching the lergy and that she takes no precautions against it. I thought she could have kept that to herself, when I have had to overcome Cath's reluctance to have visitors here at all. But all seems calm this morning. Cath was on the cognac, so I'm hoping its amnesiac properties have worked on her recall of Kim's tactless remarks.

Up in my room, I'm lamenting the lack of interest that my dating site profile is exciting in the middleaged women of Bristol. "Why don't you add, 'I'm looking for a fuck, or a friend'?" she suggests.

This strange poster has appeared off Gloucester Road. Richard deflated my enthusing about Bristol's artistic culture by pointing out that in tiny print at the bottom, it indicates that it's an advert for Halifax Building Society. I still think it's a strikingly confusing image.

Ageing ravers will need no help with the reference in today's title: Shut Up And Dance's 1989 cellar rave tune, 20 Quid To Get In.