I didn't realise before I booked it, that our airbnb was bang in the middle of hardline Unionist East Belfast. There were Union Jacks and paramilitary flags all down the streets. Although I had gone trying to remember the advice "don't mention the war", I actually found some people, especially in the Loyalist pub that we adopted as our local, were quite keen to talk about the Troubles, which I was assured are in no way over.

"It's a good job you weren't here a few years ago. They'd have thought you were informers. But it's not about religion any more, it's about drugs." And in the city centre, on finding out where we were staying, a man said "oh no, over in the west we have proper guns. And Semtex."

I became utterly absorbed in the question of whether the pub's doorman, who waved us in without a word, was collecting money for the cause. People came in, paying nothing, or something only in coins, or sometimes, with a note. I approached him after an hour or so, saying "were we supposed to have given you something on the door there?" "Well, it's just for the DJ, but yous two can just give us three quid between yous." "Yes, but is it going to Loyalist groups?," I didn't say.

We tried another "pub" -- a pizza place with a large range of lesser known ales on tap -- but our round came to just short of fifteen pounds, and they refused my paper money. We met some friendly Hondurans, who were interesting about the violence in their own country, but the bland, international atmosphere with young people and their orthodox positions on everything, was dull, so I was pleased when Mel said that we could return to brave the disco at the Balaclava and Timing Switch.

It was a shame it was so loud; I was learning a good deal from a woman who came over and talked to us; but on the dancefloor there was an animated version of The Fat Slags going on, lots of tit-wobbling and dry humping in the doggie position, and we joined in with the dancing once the Guinness kicked in. A woman broke off from giving it backwards to start jabbing her finger at another who was sitting down, reminding her about "that time you were calling me a fat cunt." A man next to me asked me if I liked rain. He looked confused when I replied saying it reminded me of my home town, before I realised he was enquiring whether I enjoyed wine.

Which I do, but not at the prices charged at the airport. A 250ml glass of Shiraz is precisely priced at £13.78.

Friday before last, I woke up to two missed calls and a couple of texts, saying there had been a flood in the flat. The Bulgarian in the flat upstairs had put in a load of clothes into the bath, and started the taps running. Settling into the vodka, he fell asleep. I came back to find sodden carpets, streaks down the wall, water in my kitchen cupboards and worst of all, a damp bed. There was no electricity, and the emergency lights in the corridor outside had run out.

The electrician had just about finished sorting the lighting out when he looked with concern to the ceiling. "That looks like asbestos to me," he said. There was enticing talk of me being put up in a hotel -- I claimed I don't know anyone in Bristol who could accommodate me -- but they put me in the guest room on the floor above instead.

I've moved back only today. It's forced me to have a big clear-out, and apart from the distressed carpets, it's looking a lot better compared to antediluvian times. I found a cabinet thing in the local community secondhand furniture shop for fifteen quid which, by hiding unruly miscellanea behind its MDF doors, has already started calming my flat down.

The dipsomaniac Slav has not been seen since, and I would greatly prefer it if he remained missing.

In the way that lying, or, at least, sieving the truth, becomes my default position with girlfriends, I tell Mel that I am going to London for a gig, and that two of my daughters and my middle one's girlfriend will be there, and I'll be staying in a little back street airbnb in Hammersmith.

All of which is true. What else is true is that I'm going with Trina, and sharing a double bed with her. Neither of us have any interest in "muddying the waters" as Wendy calls congress, but I thought it best if I skipped over that detail away.

Before I kept a night time distance from Trina's arse, I met up with my two daughters and the gf in a pub in somewhere near Victoria. They were all stylishly dressed, the eldest especially, looking a bit Weimar, in a long green shirt over wide trousers and brown strappy flatties, all charity shop. I liked being with my girls; they're sunny and pisstaking. We didn't seem to be able to radiate the mood though. The pub was lonely and atomised. An elderly woman was going up to tables and pointing to the cricket on the tv and getting rebuffed with silence or a few polite translations of "do fuck off, there's a good pisshead." I've lived in London, and have felt lonely like her.

I met Trina at Hammersmith; we settled in and stripped and reclothed, then went out, to find our part of the Tube was closed due to maintenance work. I was relieved when she suggested a taxi.

We got to Ronnie Scott's and were shown to our seats. We nodded to our neighbours along the banquette. The singer was Miles Sanko, who has an attractive but standard black male voice. I liked the piano solos from Tom O'Grady and the way the band were tight in their endings. But Sanko's repartee - like asking us if we want to make "a circle of love in the room tonight" - was toe-curling and self-admiring. The bloke sitting next to us said "this round" (for three of them) "has cost me hundred-and-twenty quid, but we're having another, fuck it."

The following morning we went for breakfast in Wethers, where the resident loony welcomed two couples who were sitting down at a nearby table by saying in their direction "sit down you cunts. Shit heads." I was blathering with Trina over the whole weekend, not thinking about what to say, and was sorry to see her leave for a train two hours earlier than mine. I told her in a text afterwards that "I do love you in a funny way." She doesn't love me "in a funny way," with a qualification. She loves me.

I have this calculator in my head where: Trina, long distance away, effortless unthinking talking, bit of a fear of sex on both sides -- she finds the whole thing a bit ridiculous and despite all these years I'm not sure what she likes -- but I know that she loves me.

Mel, half an hour away on the scooter, laughing a lot, her Greek cooking, and an understanding that this is a practical sexual relationship, where "I love you too," -- thankfully not that often said -- I think more means, "this works, let's keep it going."

It's not been a good couple of weeks.

Last Thursday I behaved appallingly at a social evening with Miss B's friends (cider was involved) and ended up sleeping on the pavement for a while and getting home at 3am. The following day I noticed the latest round of scooter "accident" injuries, involving my jaw, my leg and most persistently, my armpit. I've made abject apologies to all concerned. I was relieved that the hostess accepted them. It doesn't justify my boorishness, but she can get a bit self-pitying and accusatory as well when that fateful next bottle of wine comes out.

My computer started going very slow, and then the screen began jerking up and down, before it switched itself off, immune to my efforts to resuscitate it. Hours of reinstalling and recovery and setting up.

Then, after a tortuous recruitment process involving a long application form, a set of computer games which tested manual dexterity more than anything to do with the job, following by a "situational judgement" test -- I failed at the final hurdle, the interview. The job was being more or less in charge of two semi-rural stations in north Somerset, doing everything from selling tickets to chatting with the locals and helping people with the wardrobe-sized suitcases that they take with them nowadays. It would have meant a pay rise, a European rail pass -- after a year in the job -- but more importantly, being on a predictable roster, with the occasional long weekend. At the moment, on Wednesday evening, I don't know whether I'm working the following Sunday.

But I have acquired -- for free -- a lovely leather and wood backgammon board. Inside are some old newspaper cuttings from Omar Sharif's column for beginners, called Throws of Pleasure. Of which I could do with a few now.

The family -- now augmented through my daughters with one ex-girlfriend and another present one -- went to Brittany. Our twentieth anniversary of being there, during which we've missed only four years, Kirsty worked out. We stretched it this year to two weeks and four days.

At 6am, the bars in Bristol airport are full. Surely, no other country has this kind of drinking culture, where "going on holiday" is a licence to ignore any respectability about the hours of drinking. (And if there is one, I'd like to go there). Women are dressed in gym wear, pyjamas, or lingerie. Many men love a chance of some hyper-masculine strutting: tattoos; tight tops with "Athletic Dept" written on them; names of places in America sieved of their consonants, or doing free advertising for "ellesse".

There was an early moment of friction between me and my youngest, and the sea floor. I had run into the sea, but dived too early into shallow waters, and grated my mons pubis against the coarse sand below. I compartmentalised the mild pain, and continued swimming. Later that day, in the perhaps too public setting of the middle of the living room, I pulled my pants away to peer at the damage. I was told off for this (I can't remember her exact words), to which I responded "oh shut up! I've cut myself."

I went to the bathroom to continue my self-examination -- both of my pubic bone and of my lack of a sense of considering others when performing such an inspection -- and, better attired, I apologised to my youngest. She did so too and we had a little hug.

Kirsty is a lot more restless than me -- I remember nights in our bed when her jerking foot only slowed rather than stilled -- but I was glad I signed up to her excursion to Quiberon, a cheery place where some people do work that doesn't involve catering to tourists. My youngest got bus-sick, and fifteen minutes after we arrived, threw up on the promenade.

A French woman in a flat opposite asked her, in English, if she'd like some water. My daughter thanked her and apologised in French (she's currently in Brittany full-time, on the third year of a degree studying it). "Heavy night, eh?" the woman ploughed on.

At this point I took against her. It reminded me of something in Max Egremont's superb history of the decline of East Prussia, (fortunately, there are maps), when he was deflated by a train conductor congratulating him -- in English -- for having very good German. Always that demotion. "I don't mind giving you some water, but we'll keep our language to ourselves, thanks."

Never mind: a crystalline foreign sky and sea air cures all. We clambered over the rocks of the côte sauvage, and the sea rolled in, impatient for high tide, the colours all turned up. There were pools populated by fish and crabs, into which I lowered my feet gently so as not to scare them off from doing their fascinating collective scurrying. I described the five-inch-long pale green fish to Kirsty, but in case things were getting too enjoyable, I said "what a shame we're going to lose it all."

The housing association told me I'd have someone coming round to do a fire risk assessment. So I had a busy morning of tidying up, washing up, making the bed look polite, posing my spider plant in prime position, hiding the Robinson's golliwog and dusting the windowsills, glad to have an external social pressure to induce me to do the tidying and cleaning whose intrinsic value I cannot naturalise.

As he strolled round "my" flat with his clipboard, I noticed that one of the sections on his report was "evidence of alcohol and drug use." The one thing I inexplicably failed to hide was about a third of a pint of cider which I had left out from the previous night. I assume he'll be going back saying that I was on the pop at 10am. Just to help matters, I told him I work on the railway and was going to work in an hour or so.

My latest appointment at the dental hospital lasted three hours. I didn't mind the fillings, the needles, the drilling and scraping; but the chair, after that length of time, was an ache-inducing instrument for my neck, shoulders and back. "Nearly there," she kept saying, which I eventually learned was not to advise me not of the treatment's imminent ending, but its prolongation.

She said (again) that a toothbrush should be the last thing that goes into your mouth at night. I am very glad a saucy rejoinder to that advice neither occurred to me nor was uttered. Still five extractions to come.

After looking at the roundabout at Poynton, I went to Manchester to see my actress daughter, and by default, her girlfriend.

We sat outside a bar near the Central Library. They intercepted a couple of their actor friends walking past. I didn't do well when introduced to "Cassie!" Who was a luxuriantly-haired brunette roughly the same age as my daughter. I rummaged my head but could only stall. "You know, Cassie, from Lancaster." I faked recognition, she faked her acceptance of my recognition. The discs of mozzarella on the pizza were cold, as if the chef had forgotten them, and put them on at the last moment.

My daughter and her girlfriend desisted from their irritating habit of pawing and snogging each other in public, as if to throw down the lesbian gauntlet, in an arena -- central Manchester -- where, one hopes, that's a won battle. (A moment's reflection and I know my impatience is unjustified, because I bet in real life, it isn't.)

It was Love Saves the Day in Bristol the other weekend, and I'd like to thank the person who lost a bag of refreshments in a well-known chain pub behind a large railway station. I came down here to take up a better job, and for a livelier cultural scene. I didn't realise it would come with free coke every few weeks.