Helen is over from Norway, but a chatty afternoon in the pub turns sour. Helen blithely says that she is going round to Kitty's to have a couple of drinks with her and Wendy. On the phone to Kitty she says that I am coming along, then there's a bit of "oh, oh, right, yeah."

Because Wendy's daughter will be there, I am subject to the injunction by Wendy's ex, prohibiting my attendance at any gathering where The Little Dictator will also be present. "No, I can't come Helen, I'm not allowed."

I am angry and upset in equal measure, and I text Wendy. From memory: "I know it's difficult for you and you have to negotiate [the Ex], but I'd be very grateful if you could resolve this thing where my social life with my closest friends is still controlled by him. You did promise to sort this out months ago."

She replied, saying that The Little Dictator was ill so they can't go anyway. I went up to Kitty's for an hour or so, but the cloud of the injunction hovered over us. Kitty urged on me a greater understanding of how Wendy is under pressure enough, having to keep on the right side of a man she'd have nothing to do with were it not for the The Little Dictator, how he's got a powerful weapon of control over her -- the withdrawal of his time looking after The Little Dictator, which even now is granted with great reluctance if it's for Wendy's social life. She has to lie to him if she is seeing me.

The following morning, still incensed, I text Wendy to say that I consider ourselves estranged. I inform Kitty and Helen that I have done so, which provokes unanimous condemnation. In the week afterwards, I think of nothing but Wendy. I am unable to make up my mind whether I am relieved to have severed relations with her, ashamed of my petulance and self-centredness, whilst having occasional moments of feeling liberated at last from the way I allow her to have a hold over me in the pursuit of an impossible Wertheresque romance.

After a week, I dropped this postcard round, relenting with a written sincerity I did not fully feel, resenting that I am not allowed to knock at her door and hand it over in person, lest I breach my injunction.

A further week passed, and she replied by text thanking me for my postcard and saying that she didn't know what to say. After a day or two I said that I am truly sorry, and I hoped we could resume intercourse. "I'm sure that would be possible, you fucking boundah X". There's been only desultory contact between us since.

Friday night, and over to Leeds for a night with Kim and The Racing Commentator. We all chipped in for some pepsi. Enjoyable at the time, streams of consciousness as conversation, but it made my stomach croak with the pain of repressed farts as soon as me and Kim were in our restless bed. I tried to relieve my gut-ache by doing minimalist farts that would not be out of place in Cork Street, but the operation proved noisier than I had hoped.

I had to get off the next morning because I was up to Glasgow. I fiddled a much reduced fare, paying only for the section where they're likely to check your ticket. Me, Trina and a female friend of mine I introduced her to, were going to my favourite club of the moment, a wee little basement place in the Merchant City.

I was staying in Govan, so I called in for an hour at The Brechins, one of those combinations of Scots Baronial and chipped 70s plastic that Glasgow does so well. I invited myself onto a table half occupied by a sixtysomething couple. When he stood up to leave, he took her in an embracing, mouthy, lippy kiss.

"Are yous two going out with each other?" "No, no, that's my brother-in-law. I've never had anything like that off him. Never. Never before known him like that in my life." "Oh right, it just looked like you'd been going out for years." "No, he's just so quiet normally. He's never had a girlfriend, I think. I've never known him do that. I'm not ready for anything like that though." "It's nice though, isn't it?" I didn't want to leave her, and we bade each other a stroky farewell short of lip-kissing.

In the club, girls outnumber blokes. A girl comes up to me and puts her hand round my waist. "Yer dain thess wegglin." "What?" "Yer dain thess wegglin. No -- yer dain thess wegglin. I'll show ye. I'll copy ye," and we wiggled together. I wasn't aware that I was wiggling, but was happy to go along with a touchy imitative Weegie bird on a dancefloor.

A man came up to me. "Next tam ahm heer, I'm wer'n those hot pants, lake Ozzez galfrend." Ozzy is one of the DJs, and he did have a woman arraying herself about him who was dressed in an orange translucent top, dark blue bra, orange hot pants, and black kitten heels.

I got touched round the waist every time someone I half-knew left the dancefloor, both by men and women. My policy on dancefloors is to say nothing, do nothing, never approach women or say a single word to them. And in the club I was at, it works.

Trina got jealous of girls talking to me, shuffling away in a stoop, before doing an ostentatiously unaffected dance a few yards away from me while I am being interrogated about mah wegglin. She had a cold, and at half past one she said she'd like to go. I tried not to look relieved. Once we'd gone through the long ritual of leave-taking, and once I'd clamped the women into a taxi and watched it turn into Ingram Street, I went down the stairs, went straight back onto the dancefloor, and exhaled with real relief.

My journey back was eventful. I thought it'd be about an hour's walk back to my airbnb in Govan. I dispensed a couple of quid to beggars and got some chips from the chippy outside Central Station. I walked out along Dumbarton Road, through Anderstoun and past Kelvin Hall, and got as far as the Clyde Tunnel, which I needed in order to get to the south side. Beside the tunnel for vehicles, there's one for pedestrians.

Arriving at the entrance, it was double padlocked. To cross the Clyde legitimately would have meant walking all the way back to the next bridge at the SECC (the Exhibition Centre), adding another two hours to my walk. I had 40p on me and had lost my cards at this point, so no money for a taxi. I clambered over the barrier separating pedestrians from cars, and started my descent into the vehicular tunnel. There's a narrow walkway less than a foot wide, every car roaring itself into a fury of noise. One false step, and that's it; and whilst dying from having been hit by a car at 3.30am in the Clyde Tunnel whilst full of powdered refreshments is an honourable way to go, I'd prefer the most mediocre demise, much postponed.

At breakfast the next morning, in a disarmingly bohemian place -- framed poems in the bedroom about letting yourself go -- I casually ask whether the Clyde passenger tunnel is open twenty-four hours a day. "Yes," she said. "You just have to buzz yourself in and wait for them to open it." I do vaguely remember an intercom button now.

In the pub the following morning, I saw a young lad about twelve wearing a T-shirt with the word "CUNT" in eighteen-inch-high letters printed across its back. I went up to him and told him that that was a brave T-shirt to wear. Someone, possibly his mum, didn't know what I was talking about until he turned round and showed it to her. She was laughingly nonplussed. I told him he'd be on this blog on Monday, so with apologies for being late, a drink in your direction. I'm not sure what to think about it.

Kim and her boyfriend split up earlier this year, so she asked me if I'd like to take the latter's place at Penrith for The Winter Droving, a revived old English festival which was originally an excuse to get farmer-bright after doing something involving sheep. The ex had already paid £120 for a hotel room for the night so there'd be no expense to me, other than my drinks budget.

In the bar at the George Hotel, there is a fake, pre-snowed Christmas tree, canned music, bar staff in waistcoats, and two thrusting televisions keeping us to date with domestic misogyny and foreign civil wars.

Judging by the accents and the bulk, we appear to be in the middle of the AGM of Wirral Weightwatchers, perhaps one of that organisation's less successful branches. A global woman, whose arse begins just under the shoulder blades, heaves herself back into her seat and announces that she's just been to put some make-up on, because it's well known that a bit of eyeliner makes you look eight stones lighter.

Kim walked in in a black dress with cherries all over it, black tights and black boots. Men do a quick full body scan of her, then a glance at me as the phrase "lucky bastard" flashes in their eyes, little knowing that mine and Kim's relationship is as sexless as that they have with their wives.

The actual Droving procession was a bit Girl Guide-ish -- literally so in that we inadvertently fell in with the local pack however much we tried to avoid them. It had all the elements of one of those formless English "celebrations of", in which the point has long been lost -- paper lanterns, torches, and badly co-ordinated marching bands. I had an amiable quick word with someone who was playing in one of them and whose wife helpfully disposed of my virginity when I was eighteen and she forty. I've been imprinted for older women ever since.

One is encouraged to wear masks, so Kim went as a ram and I as a bull, any virility bated by the fact that my right horn kept flopping down over my eye.

It was all over by 8pm, but the council decided to make a late night of it by putting on entertainment for a further forty-five minutes, The best bit of the weekend was just talking to Kim. "I've got the libido of a twenty-year-old," I said speculatively, knowing that she both understood my subtext, and that she'd ignore it.

Next day, Kim left me in town and got herself off. I wanted to look at some pre-Norman burial crosses in the churchyard. They date from the first half of the tenth century when the language there -- and here in Lancaster -- was Cumbric, the Brythonic language eventually ousted by Norman French and English.

In the pub I met someone I'd not seen for years, a Christian, teetotal woman who did her best to chat me up when I was doing my MA, despite the fatal objections just mentioned. Afterwards I composed a text saying it was nice to meet her and that I hoped we'd bump into each other again.

She has the same name as Trish, (which lasted only two weeks last year, but what a fortnight) and I inadvertently sent it to her. Riskily, I decided to ring her, ostensibly to apologise for the misdirected text but wondering if I could turn it into a date for a day of fucking. "Thanks looby, I did wonder what that was about. Are you OK?" We assured each other that we were indeed so, but she wasn't to be drawn. "That's alright then. Bye bye," she said.

Back at my table I get talking to the couple at the next table. She was from Egremont, so naturally the conversation turned to gurning -- a Cumbrian sport in which the aim is to pull the most grotesque face whilst inserting it through a braffin or horse's collar. I mentioned that a friend of mine, several years ago, organised a cabaret evening featuring the then World Gurning Champion. "Oh yeah, that'll be Snowball," they said.

The World Championships are held in Egremont at the Crab Fair, which has been held since 1257. "You should come next year." It's in my diary already: Friday 14th September.

Claire Spedding and Adrian Zivelonghi, 2017 World Gurning Champions

A repeated thumping from downstairs in the middle of the night; then, from my kitchen, a calm but loud male voice announces, "we're in." In one of those pacific intervals of insouciance that often precede great difficulties, I lay abed, turning over how the Rug Squad could have found out my new address so quickly.

I go downstairs, dressed only in my pants, and find myself surrounded by four bulky firemen. Yellow rubber. They have taken the excusable liberty of breaking into my house, as my smoke alarm has been going off "for hours. Your next door neighbour rang us." In the living room, a beeswax candle is guttering, a tall, black-tailed flame sloping smokily into the old whisky bottle. I am given a restrained bollocking about the need to blow candles out before I go to bed, but they want to be off, and my admonishment is brief. "You'll have to get a new bolt and clasp on your ginnel door. We had to kick it in."

A couple of days later, the landlady of the empty house next door comes round. I tell her about the broken clasp and blame it on the bad weather. I go to the other neighbour with a bunch of forced carnations, and apologise for the alarm.

Our Music Festival is the nearest Lancaster gets to carnival in a Bakhtinian sense. The crowd sloshes about bottle-necked streets, and for once, smiles are for no instrumental purpose. In The Shipbuilder's Arms, a couple sit so close, perforce, that my bare forearms skin and sellotape against hers.

She says she's a drug counsellor, and is interested in my stall. "Well, go on then," I say, reluctant to feel the suck of my arm if I stood up, but thinking of the money. "Would you be able to pay for my taxi? I haven't got it on me, so I've got to go and fetch it."

To my surprise, they are still there half an hour later. Chatting freely as rogues now, I tell her that I have, every day, a shadow self hovering at my shoulder commenting on my behaviour, criticising me. She shows more interest in this than I had meant to provoke, or that I think such a banal observation warrants. She says that I should go to my GP to get tested for schizophrenia. I laugh, partly because of the old-fashioned word. "There's no shame in mental illness you know."

Last week, from one of those email lists that one doesn't remember ever subscribing to, I was alerted to some English teaching positions in Colombia. It's a State-run scheme to find English teachers for the poorer urban areas of that country.

I gathered a parcel of evidence and sent it to them. The reference from my MA and (abandoned) PhD supervisor was so unbearably kind that I have still to read it to its end. I had a phone interview this morning. "Why do you want to teach in Colombia?" Because I'm stuck in a cycle of minimum wage jobs and masturbatory attachments to women who don't reciprocate my lust. Later, they email to say that I'm through to the second and final interview stage.

My sister congratulates me, starting her text with "Columbia!???" "Colombia, sis. Columbia's in America, and there's no way I'm going to such a dangerous country."

"It'll be a man. He got his throat cut. Women don't do that." I turn my head to scratch an invented itch, to get a glance at them. She's playing with her wine glass resentfully.

"Good job we got telly in our house, innit?" she says. "Why?" "'Cos you don't have to talk to anyone." He doesn't reply and a few long seconds pass. "Boring shit," she says.

I take a call from a man from Swansea, one of those dull commercial exchanges that one can only brighten by turning it into theatre. "My wife?" he says, "We don't have wives down here -- we have sheep. And you've got to get up early to get a pretty one."

Karen cancels our dinner date for the third time.

The night before, I text her to ask if she's still coming, and she says that she'll let me know. On the day, I ask her again, as gently as I can phrase it. "Don't know if you're still ok to come round for a bit of scran me petal?" "Just at my dad's love," which struck me as a non sequitur.

She went on to say that she's going round to see her friend on Thursday, and that I'd be welcome there. I tell her that I'm meeting Wendy at dinnertime and ask if the afternoon would be OK. "Yes, I'm meeting my friend T--- for dinner so it'll be afternoon love." "Great, that'd be lovely," I reply meekly, my status confirmed.

I wonder both at her lack of tact, how she didn't think that I might find it a little hurtful to be informed of another dinner date in the same exchange in which she'd cancelled ours an hour before it was supposed to happen, and at the knowledge that she's fixed the boundaries of our relationship at their present position.

I wanted to rid my thoughts of her. I made £40 on the horses the other day, thanks to a winner called Big Les. An habitué of the Shipbuilder's Arms -- Les -- made a lot more, having put a hundred pounds on it. In one of the occupational hazards of professional drinking, I got stuck for a long hour or so with a man who proves that having a degree is no warranty of intelligence, nor grants one an awareness that the word "conversation" has an element which means "with" or "together". His disjointed lecture, tolerating no interruption, reminded me of Don Paterson's adage about all his teachers having been women, whilst men have often told him things.

"I know you like her but just be careful," said Kim, a couple of weeks ago. "Because you do tend to get fucked about a bit by women." How prescient.

I ring her, and we slope into a mutual consolation of misery, talking about loneliness and the hard work that is the cost of being single, ever self-reliant, never getting a hand with anything. "I want to be looked after a bit," I said, and before we bucked our ideas up in the disciplined English manner, there was a bit of unhappy sniffing and the quavering voices that impending tears cause.

I felt close to her, and as the call ended, I told her that I loved her. "The feeling's mutual pet." We're having a weekend together in Penrith week after next, me taking the hotel place intended for her ex, from whom she split up this year. We'll be in a double bed together, and whilst the rules are established and respected -- apart from that simultaneous wank in my bed last year, which made me come with an orgasm which went on and on and on, and had me shuddering like an epileptic, a translated expression of everything I feel about her -- how I would love a bit of spoony physical closeness with one of the very few people I can really talk to.

"Let's text each other more often," she said. "We don't keep in touch enough." "I'd love that," I said, swallowing to control my voice.