Hayley's done all the running in finding us a new place; and as I felt a sigh coming on in the pub when she asked me to walk her part of the way home, I gave myself a big slap round the face and stopped that resentful breath coming out.

It's my sex that makes women fearful of walking home alone. It's her that's walked over to the house viewing (I was at work) and walked back to report back. So STFU looby and walk her to the bus stop.

She'd been to see a room on the first floor of a house owned by an Indian couple. "She had a...Sahara on, you know, and they were so polite. I felt like a queen! The husband said that they've got a few other people looking at it tomorrow but said 'my wife likes you'." It'd be £480 a month, an exploitative rent for a room but when halved we could save up for when we can get exploited more expensively.

There was a kerfuffle at the table opposite. A couple were talking to a homeless man, but some blokes at an adjacent table start haranguing the couple; the argument developed noisily before it was forcibly becalmed by the barman.

Hayley was refilling her coffee (she's not a big drinker, restricting herself to speed, coke and crack), and I went and sat with them. "I saw and heard all that, and I'm really glad you were helping that homeless bloke before that twat behind us stuck his oar in. It's a sad state of affairs when people object to you giving help to people."

We sat with them for half an hour. He had simply been giving the homeless man a number to ring at the council to see if they could help him. "And then he said 'you've just given that man false hope." "Don't worry mate, it's because they're cunts themselves." When we left them I stuck a single finger up at him, which I regret he didn't see. I was in the mood for putting him down with a weapon he'll never possess.

I lost the phone Esther lent me ages ago and replaced it with a similar model. It was an old one which fetches 40 to 60 quid on ebay. I hardly use it, as having a smartphone is like having a demanding toddler in your pocket.

On the bus from work the other night, sweaty, manky, feet aching, Esther rings and demands her phone back. I explain the situation and say that by a fluke, having changed my jacket tonight, I can give her the new one if we meet down the pub opposite her house when the bus got in, as I'd like a drink after nine hours at the dishwasher.

An unknown number rings me. A black man's voice announces himself. "Hi, this is O'Neil." I have no idea who O'Neil is but the man's such a cunt that I break the normal rule of obfuscating people's real names on this blog just this once. "Is that looby?" "Who are you?" "Esther's friend. Have you got that phone? Where are you?" "I'm on the bus?" "Where on the bus?" "At the airport, what's all this about then? I'm meeting Esther at a quarter past ten."

"You'd better have that phone." "I've got the phone, what's the problem?"

He then kept ringing me repeatedly, leaving message after threatening message, until my mouth was dry with fear as I walked through Castle Park to meet him. She's slept at mine a couple of times but we went a shorter, more twisty way home through a park she'd never venture into nor remember, so she wouldn't be able to give my address to the bloke who fancies himself as Bristol's answer to Jimmy Cliff.

"I'm coming now. No, no, I'll see you before you see me. You'd better have that phone otherwise I'm coming through your door." A few minutes later: "I know people. They're coming." (I've added punctuation, of which he is ignorant.) And then, a longer voicemail. "Ahhh, blood claat, you some pussy..." in this big man Jamaican patois intended to intimidate the white man. It worked.

I changed my route with a mental "fuck you", and texted them.

"Hi, I am sending this to you both. I was perfectly happy to meet you tonight with the new phone, so that this ridiculous affair could have been brought to an end, but there is no way I am meeting you now after receiving these threatening texts and voicemails. I have saved all of your texts and voicemails and I'm perfectly happy to take them to the police tomorrow morning should they continue." To my surprise, silence.

I met Hayley briefly last night. She passed me the post-work resuscitation potion, before withdrawing it. "Hang on, let's make it stronger," and rubbed it in her crotch before handing it back to me. Her advice was to tell Esther to go fuck herself. I haven't done that, because me and Esther have spoken for the last time.

I feel like I'm on a production line, metro-boulot-dodo; I've also had to prise some distance from Hayley. I have hardly any time to myself now and I'm losing my generally sunny disposition. I'm colonised -- by work and, at times, Hayley. I have absolutely no money, to the extent of having to borrow the bus fare to my work at the airport.

Yesterday we went to the most middle class dancey event I've been to for years. It should have been good -- a rooftop terrace in the centre of town. There were babies there, wearing ear defenders, their parents presumably not having heard of babysitters. Men in Stax and Philadephia International T-shirts stood around encircling the dancers -- in which group I was the only man. They were not my people. Hayley (again) didn't seem to like me dancing with them and kept herself on the periphery. The whole afternoon was flat and I couldn't dig myself out of it.

Last weekend was brighter. I went to Lancaster and for the first time for many months, saw Kitty and Wendy together for a brief hour. We chatted, drank and parted, with Wendy giving me the longest hug she's ever granted, her slender body a couple of layers of cotton away.

I then went to see Trina in Chester. What was meant to be a three-hour visit turned into an overnight one, and I got the 6am train and went straight to work. There's a synchrony in mine and Trina's attachments: just as I appear finally to be freeing myself from eight years of corrosive, wearing attraction to Wendy, Trina seems to have loosened herself from the grip of her own jealous obsession with her.

I had an interview on Saturday for a mental health support worker job. I quite fancy a job that involves taking people down the pub and to the cinema. They're people with various degrees of learning difficulties, from fiftysomething upwards. I'd be the only man working in the place. She's ringing me today to tell me the result; I've another interview on Thursday for a similar position.

A year ago today I moved to Bristol. Three jobs, one resignation and one dismissal in ignominious circumstances; one night of sex with a much younger very attractive woman; and one hernia gained after over-exercising in the park with a friendly black man. I like that in Bristol I don't know what's going to happen in each day.

Last week Hayley said she'd like to come to Manchester with me on Saturday. I'm going to see Wendy, Kirsty and the one daughter who is still in Lancaster, then off to a house music all-nighter. The thought of Hayley looking alluring in one of her miniskirts, choosing to come out dancing with me, was one I turned over repeatedly, a little fix of pleasure as I bent over the dishwasher for hours on end. I told Wendy and Kirsty, who both said they'd be pleased to meet her.

Everyone lets everyone down at some point, but the first time it happens, you feel it keenly. The fact that her reasons -- that she might be able to move some of her art up, and see her son, if she goes to Devon this weekend -- made perfect sense, did nothing to shift the disappointment I sat under for the rest of the night. My feet ached and moaned from work; she was on her phone a great deal.

She's currently homeless, staying at a friend's house, wrecking her back from sleeping on a settee in order to escape her previous place in which mould was growing on her suitcases. She loves me for my futon. I have asked my landlady if she could move in here while we found somewhere together.

That would be quite a strained few weeks all round. I'd find Hayley being here all the time oppressive, and I'd be worried about everyone getting on with each other; but she's nowhere else to go, I work long hours now, and the stress of it would be an incentive to get our own place as soon as possible.

We're having a summit meeting tomorrow evening. The landlady has stipulated that I am to be sober for it. Whilst I will avoid making a spectacle of myself, she can fuck right off if she thinks that a plongeur on his day off can give such an undertaking.

Fiona and Melanie, my eldest and youngest, are unhappy at their voluntary work on a farm in Brittany miles from the nearest town, and no bus service. The hosts provide lovely food and drink. but leave them completely on their own devices after about 2pm every day. The somnolent days in a tiny internet-free village in deepest Brittany move slowly. They want to come back on Friday, so I've got to tell the hosts something to relieve them from having to give any explanations themselves.

I went to Taunton, to see the play that Jenny (actress daughter) is taking up to Edinburgh this week. Sitting outside a convivial cider bar, I get talking to Karl, an ex-Army Officer able to quote passages from an unmodernised Chaucer and who was recommending a radio play he'd heard recently. "Now let me guess," he said. "You're an engineer."

I spent much of the time in France wearing women's knickers, since I left my bag containing all my clothes and books on the train when we had to change at Wigan. Kirsty lent me hers, their firm support prettily counterposed with a little bow at their front. My daughter lent me some shirts, and I went sockless, à la mode Londrais.

We went to a cello recital held in an early C17th church. On enquiring as to the location of the toilets in the church, I was advised to have a discreet piss on the beach. When I came back the man on the door asked "est meilleur?" Bach's first and third suites bookended works by Britten, Bloch, and Mieczysław Weinberg, whose star seems to be rising -- at least, earlier this year I gazed longingly at the programme details for the complete string quartet cycle in Manchester from the Quatuor Danel. But mainly, it was eating butter-based products, drinking cider, swimming in the warm sea after nightfall, and games of cards round midnight.

Middle daughter, the actress, seemed to have it in for me for a while, making provoking remarks dressed up as jokes about my overall general failure as a man -- "a rather reductionist approach that Jenny," I bristled, "for someone who calls herself a feminist", before I realised that implementing the Wildeism about turning the other cheek (since nothing annoys one's enemies more), took the energy out of her in a better way than using pompous pseudo-academic twattery in a riposte. That, and undoing the U-bend under the sink to clear a blockage, worked.

I met Hayley after work. We sat outside the Wethers at Temple Meads on a warm, histamined evening. There was a table of three work colleagues a couple of yards away, the pub being next to a building where the lanyarded classes work on "projects". A man was becoming more and more loud, hectoring his female colleague. Hayley and I started mimicking his harangues.

"Look looby, I hope you would always come to me for support if you had any issues with your performance! And I say that vehemently! By jabbing my finger at your chest!" "Hayley, do you know what, the other night I went out with two boring colleagues from work and we talked shit all night and didn't notice that this couple at the next table were taking the piss out of our conversation, using the same phrases we were using! How about that? And I say that vehemently!" We got louder and louder, almost shouting, but he was impervious.

Conversation moved onto something more mundane. The other week we met the fish-importer-cum-crack dealer outside a club at 6am, with whom she went back and took both crack and cum. "Looby, I really need my hairdryer back." "Yes, I'll get it to you tomorrow." "Does my hair look awful?" "Hayley it looks great. You look like a right dirty bedhead. Looks like you've been fucking whilst on crack. Oh hang on, you have been."

It's midnight. I've been at work, day nine of eleven on the trot (I said ten earlier but I volunteered for Thursday), then down the pub. Back here, the landlady has just done a histrionic piss, closing the toilet door with sufficient loudness to serve as a message to me that I must go to bed unshowered.

I stayed at Hayley's the other night. We lost the speed somehow in passing it back and forth underneath the table in the pub garden, concealing it from the man we were with. He works for an environmental charity. He let me buy three rounds to his one. I don't mind buying Hayley's. She's in the same financial boat as me, with greater problems to deal with, but many middle class people guard their money carefully, and conflate poverty and moral failure.

He was giving Hayley that little back rub that sexless left-wing men give women they are too timid to approach directly. He'd got the impression that he was staying at hers, and there was this awkward stand off as we were walking back and had to part ways, with Hayley mollifying him by saying that he could come round another night. I disliked him because I recognised myself in him.

She told me about her Saturday night, when I was too tired to come out, which ended up with her fucking the fish importer and crack dealer whom we met the other weekend. The latter occupation is true and "fish importer" is too unlikely a tale to be made up. He's articulate and cultured.

I had to get up at 5am to get to work. It's a delicious companionship, sleeping with Hayley, curling our legs together, me safe from any of the corrosive, wearing, draining feelings that I had for Wendy. I want my body to be next to hers. I want to be touched, stroked, kissed, slept with, with someone I like. And I like Hayley. Hayley, unlike Wendy, comes at no cost.

She's been through such a lot, at the hands of members of my often horrible sex. Her £400 / month bedsit is a converted corridor and a tiny extension for a bedroom. Most of the floor is bare concrete. She had to lean over me in the middle of the night to put the electric heater on. I felt such compassion and tenderness for her as I kissed her sleepy head when I got up and said goodbye.

Now that I've got work sorted out, I want to get us a nice flat together. I want to make her life better, and mine too. Somewhere stable, pretty, with her art everywhere, with paintings and objets trouvées, and the better class of drug users coming round. We've got to save up a grand each, since the rent and the deposit will come to something like 2K. We'll do it though, and in the meantime, having seen the Rachmanite bedsit in which she lives, I'll offer her a place in the bedsit I might be getting. I now feel selfish and unkind to want to have it to myself.

Read something I liked in the LRB this morning. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville: "I love the fact that effort is useless. Climbing towards failure is an altogther human thing."