I got up at a quarter to five on Thursday to work at the Local Government Elections. I was garlanded with the title of Presiding Officer and stationed in a ribbon development village, where houses tremble trying to front lorries.

Many good-looking middle-aged mums. One came in with ruffled hair, a long dress over trousers. Their little girl, about four or something, walked in looking like an interested invitee to a cocktail party, a beetling nappy showing up her spindly legs.

She was running up and down, doing a long "haaaa" and giggling as she ran from one end to the other of the click-clack floor of the community centre. We turned it into a game, where I would lift my hand, hesitatingly, hesitatingly, no, no, no....and eventually I dropped my hand like a race starter, and I said "haaaa!..." and she ran across the room, laughing, It was just fucking lovely. The two of us playing.

The parents took a long time over voting, dawdling after they'd done so, noticing their daughter occupied in some silly racing game with the person who seems to be in charge. As they all left, mum did a little nod of appreciation. I dipped a headlight smile at them all.

Me and the clerks were fifteen-and-a-half hours together. I told one of them that I used to be a signalman. He had been one once too, and like many men when they light on what they think is a shared interest, went into a monologue that would have been interesting had it had a decent editor. My Life On The Railway: Fascinating Facts About Signalling In Lancashire In The Fifties. Do old people command the conversation because they know they're going to die soon, and they need to get their stories out? I hope that I never assume I'm interesting.

We did our complicated accounts, got all packed up, and drove the ballot boxes to the Town Hall. A camaraderie, men burlily taking the heavy work of relieving us of the boxes and screens, and anxious girls checking checklists. Everyone mucking in, a collective pride in what we are all doing, in the Council itself, in Lancaster itself. I asked a policeman outside the time, then laughed, and said "do you know, I'm fifty-three-years old and this is the first time I have asked a policeman the time. "Aye, and you're not pregnant and..." [male smut redacted]. A sinful joke of inclusion.

All done, I went to the Sun Hotel. Shouting men see-sawing on their foot pivots, girls dressed up for nothing, their treble-sharp laughter wrongly calibrated for the occasion. There's a back room, a bit quieter. I had Ulysses with me. I chewed the serviette corners into two spitty boluses and waxed them into my ears to pillow the canned music. Yvonne Elliman and James Joyce, both fine in their own fields, but not at the same time.

My housing options shrink by the day. 2.15am yesterday, Kim texted me to say that she'd started seeing her former boyfriend again. "I won't see you homeless, but you must see chez Kim as the very last resort."

There's a homeless shelter in a church where you can stay from 10pm to 7am, in the company of people whose idea of culture is the subtleties of heroin injection. Went on the church's website, and found out that it closes from Easter to October.

I ring Wilma to see if her offer of a room is still open. She was out of her head on Librium. "There's too much stuff in it and I'm not sure I can handle anyone else here at the moment. I've got to do this Librium thing."

Trina, however, texted saying that she had had an idea: me staying with her at her mum's house. She was secretly delighted that I won't be going to Kim's, pleased at my current state of dependency.

I turn over a plan, were I to go to stay with her. She lives in a hamlet of privatised Conservatism near Southport, but it's only half an hour on the train to Liverpool. I want to do this CELTA course and I found two colleges in Liverpool that offer it.

I rang the first one, and asked whether their CELTA was approved in such a way as they would be able to accept a student whose fees would be paid by an Advanced Learners Loan.

This was too convoluted a sentence for the second languager who answers the phone. An unerotic, nervous breathing. "Yes, all our teachers are experience." "No, I'm not asking about that." I tried to simplify my request. She played me some music, and came back with an even more irrelevant answer. Fucking dodge college. Certificates for the uncertified, so that they can work in their cousin's burger bar before accidentally forgetting to use the return portion of the ticket.

At the second one, a chatty Scouse DoS said that whilst they'd never had a student using the Advanced Learners Loan, they'd be willing to look at an application. And yes, they are accredited. By the British Council, and whatever the Department of Education is called this week.

Wendy said she might be able to come out for an hour or so today. She turned up in my favourite dress of hers -- that is, favourite in a competition won by an infinitesimally small degree of sex over the other ones she wears. Eye-stroking her, because that's the only stroking of Wendy that I'll ever do. My hands crossed politely in my lap, I am reaching, as distant as Mary getting the brush-off, noli me tangere. A small rib of dark blue bra. The relentless sexiness of her, the shape of her green dress over her; her rough, sexy hair.

I mention the plan to live with Trina for a while. She isn't keen, recommending that I continue banging my head against the cul-de-sac I'm in, going through application forms as long as essays, online webcam assessments, telephone interviews, failed face-to-face interviews, target-driven, hungry for success, minimum wage. "You living with Trina would be just be the same as with [her ex]. Getting control over you. You should tell her to stick that offer up her twat."

"I don't know what I'm doing here," I said. "My girls are going away in October, I'm never going to get anywhere with you, I can't get even minimum wage jobs here, and I haven't got anywhere to live in under a month's time."

She left to pick up her daughter from school, because it would be unreasonable to expect the unemployed father to rouse himself off his mum's settee at such an hour of the afternoon. As she left the pub, I watched her dressy slinking, till I couldn't see her any more.

Kendal.

I feel like I've been tricked into making the first episode of a new Channel 4 series called Disaster Interviews.

"So, you live in Lancaster, but you've applied for the job [in a bookie's] in Kendal..."

"Right. I was under the impression that the job was in Lancaster, but Kendal's OK." It was in Lancaster -- it's their cock-up. We then went into a diversion where we talked about the practicality of getting back from Kendal at 10pm at night. It's possible, if I walk two miles to Oxenholme station, outside of which is the phone box in which I flirted with hypothermia the other night.

She asked me "so" -- everyone's started prefacing sentences with "so" all of a sudden -- "tell me a bit about yourself." I must have looked a bit startled as I sat open-mouthed for a second or two, before guessing that the question really was "what is your work experience and how is it relevant to this job?"

The cv I sent them contains slivers of truth dotted about a larding of out-and-out invention. I was about to tell them about the one legitimate element of the current stage in my brilliant career when she interrupted me to say "so then you went to work for Sorrento Cafe in Ormskirk?"

Sorrento Cafe in Ormskirk doesn't exist, but on one of the many versions of my cv, it's my current employer, but I had forgotten I'd said so. During one of our spells of cordiality, Trina agreed to pretend to have been its owner, and to forward to me any letters from prospective employers, so that I could do the vetting process on myself. What a good robot he was. Charming, honest.

"So, you were living in Lancaster but working in Ormskirk?" "Well, at the beginning, yes, but I started going out with the café’s owner. I was commuting there every day but I started staying at her house and then got a room in Ormskirk to be nearer her."

I blundered my way through the rest of the nail-picking hour, my nervousness a catalyst for my loquacity. I demonstrated a talent in which I truly excel -- talking at inordinate length whilst saying nothing at all.

At last it was over -- the one moment of togetherness with my interviewers being our shared relief at this state. I went to the chip shop, then to Wetherspoons.

I bought two pints of ale and one of soda water. I teetered up the steps and set them down on a vacant table. I looked up and noticed my interviewers sitting at the next table. They were fiddling with their phones. Just as I thought I had escaped their fields of vision, one of them looked up and said "hiya."

"Ha ha, great minds!" I said, continuing the nervous, improvisatory mood I had forced on them. Fucking hell. Even in our dinner hour, we can't get rid of him. The interviewee as stalker. The interviewee as leech.

It's 3am. Not normally a time you would be loading the washing machine.

I went with Wilma to her appointment with the alcoholism clinic. There's normally a three-month waiting list to get referred -- this is how pissed we all are in Lancaster -- but she's in a bad way and her doctor has fast-tracked her an early first appointment, which consisted of being her given a bottle of Librium pills and a chart of how she's got to dose herself with them.

Back at mine, we had a couple of bottles of wine, the last hurrah before she has to stop drinking at midnight. Everything's going fine and we're chatting away. She's the size of a studio flat but she has got quite nice tits, and with a preamble I cannot recall, she takes her top off and I start fondling them and sliding my hands inside her black bra. We both enjoy it and it gets a bit kissy.

We go to bed, where we do not have sex. I don't fancy her, and I have this idiotic but tenacious idea in my mind that I don't want to be unfaithful to Wendy. The knowledge that we will never have sex does nothing to dislodge my pointless fidelity. Wilma and I are sexlessly spooning, and I am nodding off, when I notice that peculiar form of warm wetness that comes from embedded piss. I am outraged that she has done that, on my futon mattress. I get up, wash myself, change my clothes, and stomp off downstairs. I write her a note.

Wilma. You have pissed in my beautiful lovely futon mattress. You are never coming round here again, ever. You just piss piss piss. On my floor I can cope with, but in my bed, NO. I will always be your friend but I am never ever going to have you in my house again.

I sat in my kitchen, twisting my clasped hands in resentment, then thought "why the fuck am I sitting here?" I went up to my piss-scented bedroom and roused her and told her she's got to leave and that she's never coming back. "You've overstepped the mark, you really have Wilma." Not a word of apology, but "where are my clothes?"

You can't wash futon mattresses, part of the reasoning being that you're supposed to not fucking piss on them. They're heavy enough without the addition of a couple of pounds' worth of a friend's urine, but I manhandled it down from the second floor to the cellar and out into the yard, where I've hooked it over the line.

Earlier, in the pub, Lancaster's Most Unconvincing Transsexual was droning on about the death of her (his?) former boyfriend, with that draining expectation that others are going to be interested in a long recitation of the details of the distress caused by a stranger's demise. Vic was equally boring about some ludicrous scheme to grow and sell pot, into which he has wasted two grand. I was reminded of something that a man in a pub in Glasgow said to me the other week: "They see people like you as easy meat."

No-one was listening to anyone. I was trying to tell the story about Wilma pissing on my kitchen floor, and never got to the end of it, constantly interrupted with the immediacy of the drunkard's chat. "Oh, are you off?" said Unconvincing Transsexual. "Yes, you're not listening to me, so I can't be arsed. I'll see you soon."

I'm tired of all this drunken, pubby, mutual self-examination. I'm tired of my own voice and that of my friends. I want to go to Newcastle and do this course and be busy and tested, and make sociable, tasty meals for me and Kim, and amuse myself at night by making my stories about unzipping Wendy more elaborate, and to write over-sexualised postcards to her and then rip them up in the morning.

The application for the CELTA course which will further such hopes is quite difficult. The grammar and the vocabulary sections are easy enough with a bit of Googling to aid my extensive knowledge of English, but the pedagogical sections are more testing. "How would you teach the difference between 'skinny' and 'thin', bearing in mind that your students' command of English is limited?"

Monday morning. As I was making my useless canapés, Wilma rang. "Have you got any wine? I really need a glass of wine. I've got the DTs." It was a quarter past nine. I had a bottle of red, intended for Wendy. "Well, I'm cooking for Wendy at the moment." The hint flew over her head. "It's just I'm really shaking."

I crooked the phone and opened the fridge: half a bottle of the lodger's Pinot Grigio. I suppose that's replaceable, so I said she could pop round. "Wilma, don't piss on that chair will you? Wendy's coming round in a bit." She drank the wine, continently, then got in her car, because even a five-minute walk is beyond her.

Wendy arrived. We got stoned, drank Prosecco, ate my useless canapés. She said that her ex was vile towards her after she'd got back from her being out with me -- and, as he was lied to -- Kitty -- slinging insults at her in front of his daughter. In another scheme to isolate her from me, he told her that he is not allowing his daughter to be around anyone (me) who takes drugs. "OK then, well, you'll have to have The Little Dictator more often." He agreed, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Male jealousy and possessiveness were also rampant in County Durham last weekend. Kim rang and told me she'd ended it with her boyfriend. In the latest of several incidents of its kind, he'd gone on and on at her at an outdoor rave when a bloke started talking to her, pulling faces behind his back and not letting it drop when she was trying to brush it off.

Whilst he was away for a few minutes she rang her brother asking him to meet her when they got back, the ripples of a former boyfriend turning violent when she left him extending even unto now. All these insecure men, wrecking relationships with intelligent, gorgeous, well-dressed, witty, sparky, younger women none of whom are interested in me.

Kirsty said the other day, "surely, one of your friends must be able to put you up for a while if you're stuck. What about Kitty?"

Kitty said the other day, "surely, with all the people you know, you're not going to end up homeless?"

Wendy said the other day, "in extremis, couldn't you stay with Kirsty for a while? It is your family after all." No-one in my coterie is in a position to help me. They all think someone else will.

However, I have had two offers. Wilma said that I could live in her spare room for free. I imagine a urine-soaked immiseration, piss and bleach fighting against each other for supremacy. The other was from Helen in Norway, which I will decline for the reasons I set out in a letter I sent today to the newly-single Kim.

Hello pet

I would like to make you a decent proposal (for once). I can't remember how much I've told you about the house, but I have to be out by 4th June. I'm in a bit of a pickle and it's thickening every day. My friend Helen suggested I go and live with her in [---] in Norway, which is a much more attractive prospect than staying with my mother in Middlesbrough, but a pauper like me might struggle a bit in the world's most expensive country.

Then, Kirsty made a suggestion the other day about something called the Advanced Learners Loan, which has the great advantage of not depending on any credit checks. I could use this to do the modern version of the TEFL certificate. I did my TEFL cert twenty years ago and anyway it's been superseded by the new CELTA qualification.

At the moment I'm applying for minimum wage jobs, and recently attained a new nadir in being rejected for a job in a pie shop. It does seem a bit of a waste for someone with a degree, an MA, a PGCE, and a Tufty Club certificate in crossing the road right.

So here we go -- the CELTA is offered at [a college in] Newcastle and the next course runs full-time from 5 - 30 June. I wondered if you fancied having a well-trained, domesticated house guest for a month. It's quite a demanding course so I wouldn't be under your feet, although I'd be very happy prancing about your kitchen in my fetching Orla Kiely pinny.

I thought I'd put this in writing so that you could consider it at your leisure. Whatever happens, I hope we can meet up soon. I'm sorry it didn't work out with...but men like that only get worse over time. Nil desperandum! X

There was rejoicing in the House of Kirsty on Friday. My middle daughter, the actress, has been accepted onto the BA in Professional Acting, at Bristol Old Vic. Three interviews and auditions, a thousand applicants chasing thirty places. It all started when she was one year old, when she painfully winded me and Kirsty by bouncing onto our stomachs at 5am, arms akimbo, announcing "I, awake! I, awake!"

I've been at the girls' house all weekend. In the garden, chatting with them as Lancashire v Somerset burbles away on the radio. Back here, the private tears again. I'm worried about what's going to happen in a few weeks' time, when I won't have anywhere to live. I can't afford anywhere here. I have no money for the deposit even on a room, and I'll have to give away all my furniture and white goods. I am trying to get a job but time is running out. There is no council housing round here for a single man.

Wendy is coming round tomorrow morning and I want to welcome her with some nice things to eat. I have set my alarm for 7am -- a pointless precaution, since I'll be worrying wide awake long before then, and I'll look worn out, dark-ringed, panda-eyed for her -- not that how I look will ever alter her total lack of sexual and relationship interest in me.

I will go to Sainsbury's and get the things I need so that I can make something to present to her. The sadness knowing that all effort with her is useless. I want to make one of the last times we'll sit uselessly distant at this house, knowing that we will always be distant wherever we will be, uselessly nice for her. My useless canapés. Forty useless pounds left in my account. A successfully useless smile tomorrow, thanking her uselessly for our little factory-stamp clamp-release hello. My useless cooking for her. My useless love, which she doesn't want. My useless knowledge of this. My useless efforts at resigning myself to this.