There's something I've not been telling you. I got the sack. After meeting Kirsty and our girls in Manchester on 8th January for her birthday, I stayed at hers and got the early train back to Bristol, where I was starting work at 4.30pm.

I got back in good time to press the self-destruct button. I sat in Castle Park and added a couple of pints of strong cider to the previous night's sherry and whatever the fuck we got through at Kirsty's.

I turned up for work, ponging of drink. On the platform, a colleague said "for fuck's sake looby, get some mints or something." I did the first bit of my shift without incident. We got to The Big Station and I went to sit in the mess room.

The roster clerk or whatever his title is came in and enquired after me. He called me into his office, saying that it had been reported that it looked as though I'd been drinking, and said that there was "a bit of a whiff" about me.

"Now, look. If you've got anything in that bag, you can put it in that bin and I'm not looking." He thought I'd been drinking on the job. It was kind of him. I was then led down to some manager's office where we waited a full three hours for the breathalyser test woman to arrive, chatting in a friendly way, me hoping that it would take a long time for her to arrive.

I was positive -- 41μg/l. I had to wait until I could be escorted home on the train. The manager who did so was interesting, telling me about his Glaswegian alcoholic mother whom he used to see blind drunk during his childhood and who suddenly stopped drinking one day, twenty years ago.

I was suspended on full pay until my hearing, which was on Valentines Day. I felt ashamed, bumping into my (former) colleagues as I was led up to an office which you don't normally have reason to visit. I set out my sob story, about having returned from a rare chance to get together with my whole family for Kirsty's 59th, missing out the bit about drinking on the morning before I was going to work.

I was sent out to await the verdict. I was called back in and got the legalistic preamble, before a paused moment during which he said "and my decision is..." and held it, like they withhold fortune from TV game show contestants "...summary dismissal."

I've put in an appeal, but my letter is weak, simply repeating the emotional pleading in what I hope is restrained but powerful, slightly legalistic prose. I'm not sure my heart is in it.

Only you, Wendy, Kitty, Fitbit and my dancey friend from Keighley, know. I haven't told Kim. She's a bit harsher on wilfully foolish behaviour than the others. To everyone else, my family mainly, the story is that I've been made redundant.

My sister, who lives in Middlesbrough near my mum, commiserated, but was pleased that I'd be coming back to live there. I fancy neither that, nor going back to Lancaster. I've exhausted Lancaster for a while. There's Kirsty, our friendship revivified now that the ex has gone, and my youngest (the other two are here in Bristol, and Belgium respectively) -- but little else. In Lancaster, I'm a professional drinker, and there's fuck all work there. It's "Chilled Colleague" -- an actual job title in Asda -- or Reader in Biochemistry, and nothing in between. And then there's the damned Injunction.

Having an income of nil is quite a motivator. I got an interview for a job in a cafe.

My detailed lies rolled fluently off my tongue. "One thing I would like to ask though," he said, "is why did you leave a job in Lancaster to come here?"

I shook my head, laughed, and flicked my hair in a pretence of reluctant self-disclosure. "I knew this would come up. Well..." (keep him waiting) "I met this woman on the internet about eighteen months ago and she said 'looby, this isn't going to work. We're two hundred and fifty miles away', and I thought -- well she's younger and better looking than me, and I really don't want to mess this one up, so basically, I'm here for Hayley."

He was smiling. "Um... I'll just put 'personal reasons' for that." He then surprised me by saying "so are you getting something together with Hayley then?" It's a fucking job interview mate. "Yeah! It's going well, she's nice." I haven't spoken to or seen Hayley since our first meeting which ended in a night of Semi-Successful Settee Sex last Sunday.

The day after my interview, the manager rang me up and said "I liked what you were saying there," and offered me the job. I've got references to forge, but friends will help, or if not, I own a couple of domains I can use for this purpose.

I go for a dirty pizza in Old Market and I somehow get involved in talking to this Afghani who plonks himself on my table and initially tells me he's Japanese until I point out the flaw in this argument which is that his eyes aren't slanted enough. We've swapped numbers, but I couldn't remember his name, so I've put it in as "Sosh". I just wanted to eat my pizza in peace really. But without random Afghanis coming up to you in a pizza place at midnight telling you that they're Japanese, life's a bit dull.

Esther cooked us a chicken curry, which I woofed down in the way that an alcoholic who gets most of his nutrition from beer will do when a plate of real food is put into his hands.

"I'm working tomorrow," she says. "Better make sure he's still coming," and goes to the yards-long glass table to find her work phone.

We turn the flat upside down looking for it. My manly nine-and-a-half-stone frame is called upon to lift up settees and move beds. We decide it must have been stolen by Midge Ure's Best Friend the other night.

All her clients' details and texts are on there, and she hasn't backed anything up, nor put a lock on it, nor a GPS tracker, and my suggestion to ring the phone company to have the SIM barred was shunted aside by her loud worry -- competing with her as loud television -- about the "petrolheads". These are men who find a callgirl's location, are let in, then douse her with petrol before holding a match in front of her whilst asking her where she keeps the money. I will never consider engaging a prostitute again.

After what felt like hours of me ineffectually going "hmm", and "yeah" and "fuck", after exhausting what help I could suggest, she resigned herself to the phone's loss, and we watched an interesting television programme about Whitney Houston's coke addiction. Esther said that she had indeed been, as she told me in our first five minutes of aquaintance, an offshore tax advisor, living in a flat in Chelsea that even fifteen years ago cost £2000 a month. Parties every weekend, sugar bowls filled with coke.

"I'm sorry looby, you've really had it in the neck tonight haven't you? Do you want to stay?" and we slept together, me wanting to stroke her in sympathy but knowing that would be interpreted as an unwelcome sexual advance.

We got up about eleven; her client was coming at two. "We could have a cup of tea -- or actually, what about some lager? I have to get pissed before I can do this," so we had a breakfast of San Miguel and vodka. As she was getting what she called her "whore's kit" out of her bedroom cabinet, she slapped me on the back and gave me an unwonted kiss. "Look what I've found!"

She asked me to help getting the place straight. I did the kitchen and hoovered about. She got her clothes together and did the bathroom and got her hair and make-up done. The client is seventy-eight and likes her in an evening dress and nothing else.

"It's not just sex, you know. You've got to be a cleaner, a make-up artist, an actress, a hotel owner...it's not just an hour. My trick is to keep them talking, talk talk talk, and then 'Oh look at the clock, we'd better get on with it!' I could charge more if I did some of the things I get asked for. They want you to shit in their mouths. Fuck. I couldn't do that anyway -- I can't remember the last time I had a solid shit."

I was at a bit of a loose end on Sunday afternoon, so rang Esther. There was a man on her settee in a dressing gown.

"I don't have much trouble with women. I mean, look at me." He reckons he's best mates with Midge Ure and is three degrees of separation from the Pope. The only time he sounded vaguely honest was when he tells me that he is, or was, or coulda been, an art dealer, which at least had a bit of detail that was just about plausible.

Some casualty of a bloke turns up. Dark glasses, taciturn, wouldn't sit down. I was wary of him at first, but he struck too ridiculous a figure to be threatening for long. Esther confided in a stage whisper that he's a coke dealer. "So fucking what? That's no recommendation to me. We could rob him them," I didn't say.

Esther gets a phone call. "It's The Girls. They'll steal all the booze. Looby, quick," and I had to help her put most of the wine, port and vodka into her wardrobe. Tammy and Hayley, thirtysomething maybe, arrive. I am squeezed onto the settee between them. They are involvingly honest, interesting, fit. I'm an open book to them, as they are to me.

I'm now at four degrees of separation from The Pope. Midge Ure's Best Mate keeps referring to me in the third person. "He's alright. I like him," accompanied by this thumbing gesture towards me. "Yeah, cheers, likewise," and I mean it, but I'm more interested in The Girls. Conversationally, honest.

This odd social mix was working well, until an argument boiled up between Casualty Coke Dealer, Midge Ure's Best Mate, and Esther. Esther kept turning the television volume up and down, (none of us were watching it), to the degree to which she was included in the conversation. They got to the shouting stage, at which any person of even modest refinement must leave.

There was a convulted exiting process. The Girls left, singly. I stuck around for a bit hoping things would improve, but the antagonists in this uninteresting in-group argument wouldn't let it alone.

I started wandering home, and found Hayley and Tammy at the bus stop. Tammy was upset because Midge Ure's Best Mate was supposed to be her boyfriend. He hadn't paid her the slightest attention all night, and she was trying to find the resolve never to get in touch with him again.

We stabbed at the bus timetable, a normally reliable method of summoning cheap transport home which failed this once. At some point earlier in the evening it had been decided that me and Hayley were sleeping together. I would tell you more but I can only remember the moment, not its adjacent context. I got us a taxi back to Tammy's and we headed to the pretty, and prettily-named suburb of Totterdown. It's the one you see on postcards of Bristol. Most people have painted their houses in different pastel colours.

Tammy's flat is more like an art gallery or an installation. Gothic, Catholic, mesmerisingly dark and serious, sensual. A tabby and a black cat prowling around added to the surreal atmosphere. Hayley showed me an artwork Tammy had done, a hyperrealist set of paintings of flattened insects, capturing that angular way spiders' bodies cramp into underfoot. Tammy opened a bottle of wine. Poor old Esther was right to be suspicious: Tammy said she'd stolen it from her flat.

Hayley and I took our clothes off and lay down under a sleeping bag on the settee. Not wishing to assume anything, we started top to toe, but she said "you can come up here if you like." It's been a long time since I've had semi-successful settee sex.

Next morning we swapped numbers and we all walked to the bus stop before I waved them off. Feeling as high as a kite, and revelling in my coating of unwashed-off sex smell, I sat in a harbourside pub, dying to tell someone about it.

In the pub an attractive middleaged woman is sitting by herself laughing at something on her phone at a volume that seeks to advertise her amusement.

"Something's tickling you," I say, and she invites me to sit down. She tells me she's an offshore tax advisor -- "avoidance really". She's likeable and kissable. She'd come from her Dad's funeral. "I'm fed up with crying. Tell me something else."

She wanted to show me a picture of herself, and I got my face ready to fake interest in some dreary scene involving a child, or a wacky drunken night out with the girls. It was infintely better. She's sitting crossed legged on the bed, in black high heels, stockings and suspenders, a red camisole top. There were a couple of failed attempts to send it to me. I repeatedly took her phone off her, enlarging the picture, combing it. "Not bad is it?" she said. "For a fifty-seven-year-old." "It's a bit more than not bad. You look fucking gorgeous."

We go back to her flat across the road. She gets us some drinks while I rack up. She's new to phet and quizzes me about what it'll do.

Any moral doubts about employing a prostitute were confirmed in the hours that followed. She's not a tax advisor, but in her word, a "hooker." "I have these fat, ugly men, and I do that just to pay the rent. It's... wrong." She veered between contextualising stories of her past, tearful self-disgust and regret, during which it was impossible not to feel for her; and checking herself, pressing me to continue a story to get her mind off it.

"Are you staying then?" she said. She wanted to show me her tits, and undid her top to show me several grand's worth of work. They were gorgeous, but my fondling was rationed. In the bedroom, she issued me with pyjamas. I put them on, disappointed, and in that sexless costume we went to bed, and wrapped round each other. I ventured a hand down from her shoulder, destination tits, but it was repositioned.

We got up at twenty past seven. "No," I said. "I'm not drinking till half past. Standards love." We spent some of the morning in amusing video calls with Faye, a cigarette-voiced friend of hers and her new boyfriend, during which we hatched one of those half-serious drunken plans to go on holiday together. "I've not even seen his cock yet," she said. "Not through want of trying!", I interjected. "He was like Mr Tickle last night." "Mr Tickle? I have to say, Faye, that's the first time I've been compared to a Mister Men character whilst attempting sexual intercourse."

The author yesterday

She said she charges £150 an hour, which is the amount that the central Bristol call girl I got in touch with charged. I wondered if this was indeed her, but although she's on the same site, her alias is different.

We went back to bed. "No touchy feely," she said. I lay gloomily awake, staring at the curtains, and composed a little speech which thankfully went unsaid. "So, you're allowed to touch me but I'm not allowed to touch you. I feel like a limp rag doll. I like you, and I find you sexually attractive, and I'd like to express that physically." The weight of my own rationality depressed me.

Late in the afternoon, I got up, and left her a note. "Esther, I am so glad I met you. I'm your friend now. Keep in touch X." Tonight she sent a text saying "I LOVE YOU" nine times.

My knack of meeting women who are interested in sleeping with me -- literally -- continues on its reliable, frustrating course.

What is success in life? Loving children, a happy and mutually supportive relationship, a close circle of friends, a stable job you enjoy, and cultural interests that expand your worldview?

No, it's falling off the waggon at 9.45 on a Monday morning in Lancaster Wetherspoons. I lasted twelve days.

It's Kitty's birthday tomorrow so a few days ago I tentatively suggested I could be around in Lancaster, whilst knowing that my presence might not be welcome and that The Injunction would mean I'm not allowed at Wendy's. She wasn't keen and said she was too busy and tired to be doing anything. I decided to come up anyway. I told Fitbit I'd be here, who was more enthusiastic and kept checking to see if I was still coming.

I found a bargain place to stay for £15. It was in this little terraced house near Kirsty's. The front window was crowded with cheap coloured vases, dozens of them, lambent even in Lancaster's resentfully granted light. In my room in the attic, he had an open drawer for his shell collection, sectioned in little open boxes. They were gathered together in a taxonomy of "mere" physical resemblance. I liked that he privileged visual similarity over any other kind of classification, and it was a long pleasure to pore over them.

Fitbit was in the company of three women: a friend with whom she'd recently been reconciled after calling her a fat bitch, her mother, and the latter's best friend. It was Fitbit's birthday last week, and I'd sent her a card with two common garden birds on it with the words "nice tits" printed on it. I love the way that her shirts fall and rise over her tits.

"Your card!" she said, looking at me with faked displeasure. "Yeah, well, you're a common bird, so obviously I thought of you straight away. And you have got lovely tits." She slapped me on the arm, a dissembling show of offence.

We went to another pub -- the roughest, it's alleged, but watery tame in even regional competition. A bloke I vaguely know from Lancaster pub life kept leaning over and shaking my hand in that overstated demonstration of closeness peculiar to the uneducated working classes. Me and the old bird got up and danced and got snogging. I liked it, and I liked that no-one in the pub gave a fuck.

Today I came up to Middlesbrough to see my mum. Middlesborough is the socially warmest place I have ever been to. You make the slightest effort and you're in; you don't make an effort, and they wonder why you're not trying.

My mum makes me laugh. We often visit the same topic, our impure, darkened bloodline. I knew that one of my uncles was called "The Nigger", ("well, we never meant anything by it, just that he was dark") but I didn't know until tonight that my grandma's sister was nicknamed Inky.