All day and all night, there is a large self-destruct button in front of me, with "push me" printed on it.

Round midnight, I send Wendy a drunken lascivious text. As usual, scrabbling apologies in the morning. She doesn't like it, and tells me so, that it's alienating her. Kitty rang, saying, amongst other things, that Wendy doesn't want anything to do with me for at least the time being.

It would help everyone I know, but especially Wendy and Kitty, if I could drink less. To this end -- and I know it's not much of an achievement to most people -- this is my ninth day off the booze, which is the longest I've avoided the pop in over fifteen years.

I divide the day up into two-hour segments, since facing a full day without a drink is an ambition too remote. All I have to do, when I get up, is to make it through till 10am. I have to start it that early, as I've had many a drink before 10am.

The next milestone is midday, and so on. The hardest hurdles are the 4pm and 6pm ones -- that's when the yen comes on the strongest. Once the 8pm one is reached, I know, even with my reflex towards instant gratification, that it would be a shame to throw all the attainments of the day down a pint glass -- for example, by sending unwelcome sexualised texts to a friend.

The following morning, I give myself a silver star and add it to my star chart. I like watching it develop into a constellation. I am being a good boy; my inner teacher is giving me a reward. I earned my first green star yesterday, the badge of a complete week. Green for go.

I told Kitty all this last night. Her justified scepticism about whether this will make any difference in the long run is an incentive. Avoiding behaving like a lecherous man towards someone with whom I'd like to recover our former closeness, is a far greater one.

I go raving with someone I know slightly. Outside the club, we wait to be searched. It's a perfunctory show of "zero" tolerance, but they find something inadequately buried amongst his tobacco. I sail through, my refreshments safe in an area that is rarely touched by anyone other than myself.

He's led off to a table removed from the queues. Unwanted memories of the London rave scene in the early 90s reappear, of people being taken off to closed rooms and strip-searched, before the bouncers intimidate clubbers into buying what they've found; but things seem softer nowadays: the stupefacient is confiscated and he's told to go home. He returns in different clothes and gets in.

As often happens, I am adopted by younger people. A twenty-five-year-old man asks if I can budge up on the sofa and asks me how old I am. "Wow! Well, I hope I'm doing this like you in thirty years' time." At the end of our chat, he gives me a bomb of mdma "just in case you need a lift later." "I'm really sorry," I say, "I haven't got anything to give you in return." "No, no, I wasn't..." I feel awkward, regretting turning his simple generoity into a transaction, but he doesn't seem to mind. "Anyway...you could come and dance with us if you like." I'm willingly led, by the hand, into the thick of it.

Walking home, me and Mike attempt a bit of banter, but it misfires, so he starts telling me about some caves under the city centre that he has explored. He's more comfortable when he's telling me things. I get into bed, sex in my veins.

On the London to Bristol train last week, two women have finished the wine and are now on the G&Ts.

"So I said to Mark, 'you know it's my birthday soon? Well, how about you pay for a boob job?'" "'Alright', he said."

"'How much can I have then?'" "'You can have two grand'." "Well no, because it costs about four." "'Well, you could have one done'."

After our day in Manchester for her birthday, Kirsty invited me back to hers.

I order us pizza from L---, run by a Mezzogiorno immigrant, who left his rented shop on Market St to the highest bidder and now runs it from a phone order only and pisshead-free unit on an industrial estate. He's an habitué of a betting shop in town. He always smiles the same smile to me -- outside the bookie's, as when he arrived at Kirsty's. I like the uniform lack of apology on his face.

I'm on a warm high from the gas fire in Kirsty's house and the cheap wine from the corner shop, when L arrives with stacked boxes of pizza and garlic bread. I shake and then clasp his hand and we chat for a couple of minutes. It's lovely to be warm with someone without the slightest qualification.

We watch shit telly, which I enjoy, fat people and first dates and baking disasters. I say to Kirsty "I like you Kirsty. I'm still fond of you." I feel free saying it, not aiming at something, nothing tendentious. She gets me a quilt and I snuggle down, contented, on her settee.

In the pub the morning after, I'm with the 11am drinkers. Mel is there, the man who knows a bit about horseracing and who once won me eighty pounds. "Very well thanks. I'm in Bristol now." "Yeah, I know." I like Lancaster's monitoring reach.

I went over to talk to the Scots man I know. Twelve months ago he was all pally, inviting me into a fraud he was setting up. "You're as dodgy as me looby, so shut the fuck up," he said, when I demurred. I didn't want to get involved with him in that respect but went along with it. Business inconcluded, he told me he was getting married.

A few months later I came up for his wedding. Having just moved to Bristol with very little money, I "slept" under a tree on the cycle path that night. I thought this might be a good introductory anecdote, but he just nodded and shook his head through my tale, waiting for me to finish. He's still wrongly convinced I am after his wife. "Just go back and enjoy your drink." I shrug at her, and she shrugs back.

It's not finished. Back at my table, some unwanted reputation precedes me. "Hello," says the small-headed man whose eyes are too deep in his skull, who once burst into our cubicle when me and Well Meaning but Loud Mouthed Friend had just finished a chat. "Hello," he said, leaning into me. "I assume...I assume, you can get some coke for me?"

"No, no, not any more. I live in Bristol now mate, I can't do that." "Yeah but surely you can get it?" The best way to get rid of a cokehead is to make them wait. "No," he said, "I was thinking in the next five minutes." He looked at me disdainfully and walked away.

All that was easy to say; this is more difficult. It's Kitty's birthday in a couple of weeks. Wendy texts me to ask if I'm about in February at all. I'd love to see her, and I tell her that I'll be in Lancaster for Kitty's birthday weekend, although there's no arrangements yet, and it depends on Kirsty having me to stay.

"Oh dear," she replies. "I'm working Friday, then it's The Little Dictator all weekend."

This means: "At some point me and Kitty will be getting together for her birthday, but I just need to remind you that The Injunction still stands and as The Little Dictator will be there, you're not to turn up."

It cuts me so much, that I can't see two of my closest friends together, that I am excluded from the gatherings we used to have. I miss those times, but I can't talk about it with either of them. They take a resigned view of it, not being affected by it.

It's a re-run of the time when Helen came over from Norway. We were in the pub, having a great time, before she rang Kitty to tell her that we were going to come up to hers. I could imagine the call without actually hearing a word. "Oh God no Helen, are you with looby? No, The Little Dictator's here -- the invite's for you, not him!" Helen had to say "thing is looby..."

When is this going to end? When she's sixteen? Eighteen? When she leaves home? How long must this jealous ex have his power over me, and for how long will Wendy enforce his judgment?

Me, my mum and my eldest are in her still, bright living room in Middlesbrough. Wide streets, houses with front and back gardens and lots of sky, built for working class people before they became landlords' villeins again. But mum is getting worried.

Fiona is asking me how to get on the other web, and how one installs the browser. We mischievously provoke mum's curiosity about this novelty with hints of rugs, weapons and fraud.

"So why would you be interested in that?" she asks Fiona. "Hang on, I don't want to know." We then compound her unease by discussing our plan to go to North Korea after Fiona's graduation. A woman who has never been abroad and doesn't want to, whose last two votes have been for the BNP and Brexit, suddenly becomes knowledgeable about life in the DPRK.

One shouldn't, but there is sport to be had with the uninformed elderly.

To Manchester, where I'm to meet Kirsty and the girls in Manchester Art Gallery. It was Kirsty's birthday, and she (we all) wanted to see the Martin Parr exhibition. Walking slightly behind them all at one point, I smiled inwardly and out at my bohemian, arty brood in their secondhand chic, bandying conversation about.

We were accommodated without a reservation at a lovely tapas bar. We'd left all our cases in the Art Gallery and a delegation was sent off from the restaurant to fetch them. We ran, advert-fast, through the city centre. I was very pleased at being able to keep up with two twenty-year-olds without feeling as though I were courting a heart attack, and without needing much recovery time. I was hoping they'd comment, but no-one said anything.

The food was delicious, and by the time I'd paid for three glasses of Manzanilla, I wish I'd ordered the whole bottle. I was supposed to be getting the last train to Bristol, but Kirsty wondered if I'd like to stay at hers and go back the following day. The rejuventation of our relationship has been an unforeseen pleasure of the past few months.

There is an unpleasant episode on the train back. Two young Asian men get on the little suburban train, and start jauntily moving up and down the carriage, the noisier one half-singing, half-shouting Allahu Akbar. He then stands and leans over a teenage girl sitting down; she looked at me imploringly.

Coming to a boil of anger at this point, I told him "shift your arm," intending to knock it off the stanchion, but he moved it before I could get him. I stood facing him and with my back to the girl, looking him up and down with as concentrated a look of contempt as I could manage. I looked back at her, and she mouthed "thank you."

After a few minutes I had to tell her that I was getting off at the next stop. The Devotee is still standing a foot away from me. As I moved past him, I spat a "fuck off" at him, then spent a good half hour wishing I'd made my parting shot much stronger. Later, I berated myself for not having had the presence of mind to ring the BTP; and later still, realised that it hadn't crossed my mind that he might have been equipped with the fanatic's current weapon of choice.

There's an old brewery near an older quay, on the roof of which someone has painted in large letters "ACAB". In case you're not quite au courant with the acronyms employed by British left-wing groupuscules c. 1990, it stood for "all coppers are bastards."

Underneath it, someone has appended a new translation: "All clitoris are [sic] beautiful." They were mean-spiritedly jetting it off yesterday.

My landlady suggested we could all go down the pub where her boyfriend works on what is commonly known as New Year's Eve, although she had to point out to me that they don't normally celebrate festivals on their dates in the Gregorian calendar. This modern mania for individuation.

They were making an effort to include me, I know; but why would I go straight from work into the bellowing mire of New Year's Eve, shivering outside all night so that they can smoke?

I got in. "I'm very sorry -- it's just I've spent an easy shift of well under ten hours being nice to people," and lumbered up to my room with a show of factitious tiredness. It occurred to me that as they've not had a single visitor in the three months I've lived here, and as I hear little about any friends, they might be a bit lonely.

On Christmas Eve, my girls' twentieth birthday, I managed to get to Lancaster after work for 7pm. We went down The Macrame Belt with a shop-bought cake, but my youngest left early. Kirsty later told me that she'd got a bit upset, and said that she felt "useless, like Dad," a remark which caused much merriment when it was disclosed to the rest of the family. Always set out to disappoint, then ordinary competence surprises.

On Christmas Day, my eldest, Fiona tossed insouciantly into the room a remark that she has a girlfriend now. This disclosure -- which is only an instantiation of a long-known generality -- met with indifference, overshadowed by the more important question of whether it was to be Swan Lake or Bake-Off next.

The former, Fiona's preference, prevailed. Fiona got amusingly tipsy on port, clapping violently along to the more strident numbers. "All the the Ruskies clap along in this bit...whoa, come on!" It was like watching a heavy rocker who'd wandered into the Royal Opera House.

On Boxing Day I went round to my old house in Lancaster -- the one that Trina announced she was buying for "us" when she picked me up from the airport after the Kazakhstan episode -- wondering if my key would still work.

It did, and I let myself in, pushing the shoal of post away to look round the denuded house. A list of weekly inspections going back to May was in the kitchen, surveys which had failed to spot the stray tab of acid in one of the kitchen drawers. I collected some letters: 5.7K still outstanding, despite it having been thrown around in the debt market, its value decreasing with every new "Assignment", as the correctly-buttoned letters called it.

An hour or so with Kitty, in her fairy lights- and lamp-lit front room, cosy and unaffectedly arty. We drank to her success in getting her new job, and her escape from the institution which might have once been a school but is now a combination of a children's day hostel and palliative psychiatric unit for the under-11s.

At this point, with my pleasant demeanour starting to dilute her reserve, I knew I should have stopped or greatly slowed my drinking. But no, the juggernaut trundled forwards, the brake marked "self-control" flat to the floor yet ineffective. I got truculent with her over her doubting that the microdosing is actually that.

The mood was gone now, but she offered me some tea, which I should have refused; but never cooking in my place in Bristol I am often hungry, or malnourished on train sandwiches. I ate it and left, the Days Since I Have Acted Like a Twat to My Best Friends meter, set back to nil.

Kitty sent me a text. "...I wish you weren't so self-absorbed and so easily hurt."

Rght then, 2019.

1. Continue to get a grip on the drinking. Most of the unpleasantness I inflict on others comes from the bottom of a pint glass.
2. Rebuild the trust and perhaps, in the long term, the closeness with Kitty and Wendy. Almost everything I need to do is in Kitty's text, but points 1 and 2 are closely related.
3. Get my own place.
4. Get out in Bristol more. Find a couple of pals to go out dancing with.
5. Fillet three chapters from this blog to dangle in front of an agent.

To Lancaster for a couple of days. Wendy rang as I was in The Shipbuilder's Arms. I'd told her that I have some presents for her and wondered if I could pop them round before I went back to Bristol to work Christmas Eve. To my delight, she said that she'd rather us leave it until we could arrange an unhurried handover, maybe in the New Year. An afternoon or evening with Wendy is what I really wanted, not just a brief hello at the door while her possessive ex simmers with unjustified jealousy inside.

The conversation got round to Kitty. I had a text from her on Saturday, the day after she broke up for Christmas, but nothing since. I've left two voicemails and a few texts, saying that I hoped she was enjoying days of bra-less leisure. She had an interview last week -- her escape route out of her desperate current situation -- and I hoped that it went well.

"But she got the job!" said Wendy. I was shocked into silence. "Are you still there?", she said." "Yes." "Oh, sorry, I thought you knew."

I walked up to Kirsty and the girls' house, my stomach and eyes working somersaults over the distance that now pertains between me and Kitty. I texted Wendy. "Please don't say this to Kitty but I'm really upset that despite texting her and asking if I could bring her pressies round she never told me about the job. I suppose I've not been the best of friends this year though. It really makes me almost tearful." (It wasn't 'almost'). "Please don't tell her this. She's every reason to keep me at arm's length."

Still stunned, I went back to Kirsty's. The girls' birthdays fall on Christmas Eve so there was plenty of distraction. I was muttering, criticising myself for being yet another man upset at not being included, a telling-off unable to erase the visceral upset. I was glad to get to hers for a forced change in my self-pitying mood.

My three girls, and a suspiciously industrious Kirsty, who was using the busy occupations of the girls' birthday and Christmas to cover tipsyness or, more likely, the effects of something more dessicated. I improvised various precarious perches on the furniture in order to tack the paper chains, decorations, and card string into the walls and the ceiling, as The Wombles wormed their way into a semi-permanent lodging in my ear.

But thoughts of Kitty stalked insistently round my head. As I was leaving Kirsty's, Wendy replied, saying that Kitty's been under a lot of stress and not to take it personally, and asking me if I were seeing her. I'm not sure how I can not take it personally, but I didn't say that. "Yes, of course she has been. And as to seeing her, I think not -- she hasn't replied to anything since Saturday and I don't want to push it now. I'm just glad for her, and a bit upset that she didn't tell me. A lot upset really. Never mind, off to Bristol now x"

My instinct is to ring her, congratulate her, tell her that a little bird told me some great news, but she probably just wants me to leave her alone for a while.

With commendable timing, my adopted pub in Bristol has been kind recently. Last week I found a bag of what might be dangerous chemicals. Worried that these might fall into the hands of children, I took them back to my house for safe keeping. A few days later, there was a tenner on the floor looking unloved.

Thank you all, for persisting with me this year. Writing this is one of the few activities in my life that I care about intrinsically, where the effort involved doesn't feel at all like work; but it would eventually be a lonely furrow to tread without your reading and commenting on it. And to the small but almost perfectly formed gang of fellow bloggers -- your endlessly interesting and sharply individual styles are a source of pleasure to me all year. Merry Christmas everybody.