To Blackpool with Trina, for the house and soul weekender.

I was going to stay in a "hotel" chosen on the criterion of price alone, but she said if I gave her the money I'd spent on that, she'd pay well over a hundred pounds extra to get us into a fine mid-nineteenth century hotel with broken pediments into the function rooms and swirly carpets in estuary colours.

I was miffed when a young couple at the next table in the pub where we were meeting mistook us for ballroom dancers, but they were from Ayrshire, and you have to make allowances for people who grow up on a diet of oats and rainwater, washed down with toddies of sectarian bile.

The weekend itself got off to a bumpy start. I can get good friends their wristbands at a discount, but it does involve a bit of co-ordination when I get there, and the timetable went awry by all of fifteen minutes. When Trina arrived in the bar, she had a face that was a physical expression of the voicemail she'd left a few minutes earlier informing me that I was a wanker and suggesting I could fuck off.

We all went next door to the venue, and collected the wristbands for Trina and two girls with homophonic names whom I was also helping out. I naively hoped that we might now be able to restart with a drink and a bit of a catch-up with Marion and Marian, before we started the long and pleasurable hours of dancing, but Trina started berating me for "thinking so little" of her.

Knowing it's pointless presenting my case in such situations, I excused myself with everyone and said that I still had to go back and get ready. Marian leant over and said, sotto voce, "Go and get ready looby -- we'll calm her down." And they did -- the rest of the weekend she was more emollient.

We went for some pálinka in someone's room, which I will blame for my Saturday night, when I found myself doing a spidery 60s arm-wavy dancing, a depravity I do not wish to repeat. And good-looking, well-dressed women everywhere. There was the stupendously attractive one who looks like Kim who seems to be with a different, and older, man each year; and it was undoubtedly the case that Marian was flirting with me.

---

Sunday dinnertime, and a couple of calming pints in the pub to smooth the morning jitters that can come with my habit. There is always some sort of juvenile dance festival in Blackpool at the same time as our weekender, and the racket of demob-happy eight-year-olds glad to be released from their leotards at last was so jarring that we repaired upstairs, to the floor of cruisewear, a sandbank of beige zip-up cardis.

At the next table, an attractive woman -- mid forties? -- was sitting with a huge man who had an fattily engorged dewlap overhanging his waist, a spectacle which always induces the unwelcome thought about the difficulties such a man must have in finding his penis.

Diane was the same age as me. Thick, naturally kinked and unhairdressered black hair; black denim jacket and black jeans. Her mother left her and her brother for a footballer when she was seven. She's spent the last six years educating herself up to a History degree with the Open University, in the middle of which she'd been homeless for a while. She was now seeing a property developer from Cheshire. Perhaps sensing my nascent interest in Diane, Trina kept turning everything she said back to anecdotes about herself.

Diane told us that she was having problems with her flat. I offered a room or at least a sofa in my house for as long as she'd like it. We swapped numbers and she said she'd get in touch the following day.

That day arrived and by 12ish and I was twitching with wanting to know what was happening, so rang her. She said she'd like to come up with the property developer in a couple of hours, then cancelled that, but texted at 3am: "Gonna come over tomorrow if that's ok with with you, me and a friend T---. I might stay over if u play your cards right lol X".

She turned up with her family friend, whom I assume was acting as insurance against me trying anything on. She told me that she'd ditched the property developer. Too controlling. We had a rather meandering chat with a couple of friends of mine down the pub, before she said she had to get back to sort her flat out. I felt it had petered out already so sent an appreciative text back, which I assumed she'd take as valedictory.

But no; it got quite flirty again tonight. She was getting ready to go out dancing with her friend, a lapdancer -- another Wendy -- and described what she was planning to wear. "Hmmm -- that's a nice image to imagine", I said.

"Tee hee, the dancing or what I'm going to be wearing?"

"Both. I want it all Diane, all the time."

"Ha ha ha, a man after my own heart, or is that body lol."

"Need to get to know the former a bit more first, but the latter's alright x"

"Yeah I believe you looby thousands wouldn't [...]"

"It's all true. Inconveniently, I think you're pretty fit x"

I'm going to hers on Friday. My hopes of getting her on her own are dashed again, as she said that it might turn into a bit of a party, as her friend wants to come round at 11am.

I told her that it was quality to start a party at 11am and said I'd be there a bit after that. "Can't wait xxxxx", she said.

My gut instinct: Diane is another case of over-sexualisation as a result of maternal deprivation. After a brief period of sex -- almost certainly the kind I like, in which the woman is experienced, active but submissive -- I will be offered a role as a "supportive" male friend. I will refuse this role, and this time, it will be me who says goodbye. The ghost of Trish hangs over all this.

I cancelled my New Year's Eve party, ragged out after Kim being here. I put a coal fire in, snuggled up under a blanky with a bottle of port and Kitty's present of Margaret Drabble's collected short stories.

It was delicious, the fire plosively chatting to itself, and no-one here, in this tiringly, relentlessly sociable house. I missed Kim laying stretched out on the opposite sofa, as she has been for the three previous evenings, and our dozing, sleepy, silences. The fire went cold and I dragged myself and the blanky to bed, and woke up on New Year's Day at half past two in the afternoon.

I went straight away to girls' house, because I was "looking after them." I'd bought them a bottle of cava to take to their friend's New Year's Eve party. We all arrived back at Kirsty's within five minutes of each other, they with the unopened bottle of cava. I asked them how the party had gone and they said they'd sat around watching old Doctor Who episodes and had toasted the New Year in with a cup of tea.

We sat about, I started on the Madeira, and we chatted about Groovy Chick and other internet comicals. Middle daughter fretted about how we were going to pay for her to get to Bristol for her audition, and youngest fiddled with her bomber jacket before going upstairs to learn some chords from The Smiths.

Kirsty got back from her boyfriend's, and without me raising it, she once again mentioned the possibility of me moving in to Adelaide St if she went to live with boyf in Kirkby Lonsdale. Two of our daughters were still in the room; it was as if she were announcing this plan officially. To myself, I exult, in my stomach and in my bitten nails, when I imagine this happening. Outwardly, with her, I coolly discuss what might be its mutual advantages, turning my wrist on a pivot to indicate my calm, then pushing down my cuticle with the slant of a front incisor when she's not looking.

---

Kitty rang. She does this shit French where she addresses me as vous, and asks me what I am doing. Round at hers, it's me, her, Wendy, and The Little Dictator. Kitty does this game with The Little Dictator where she pretends, that she has a secret she wants to share, fuelling a six-year-old's curiosity to burning point. As she gives in and approaches to Kitty's ear, Kitty throws her forcibly back onto the sofa. We all laughed, all of us, adults and child conniving.

Wendy, for some reason, gives me an extra three or four seconds in our embrace. Usually, we have a production line, binary clamping, like having a label ("Friends Forever!") stamped and glued onto each other. Those extra couple of seconds, I make the most of, holding her and stroking her down from her shoulders, knowing I won't get as far as her waist before I'm called in, your time is up.

On Christmas Eve, my daughters turned eighteen. One of their cards read "Congratulations! You're eighteen. Now you can legally do what you've been doing since you were fifteen," but as much as I keep waiting for them to go off the rails, it hasn't happened.

There have been some cautious experiments with pot, and the youngest will have the odd tin of lager; middle daughter once brought home a sixth form boy from the Grammar School. There was some ceremony and I was warned not to say anything "too jokey". He told her afterwards that he enjoyed the muddle in Kirsty's house, and that he thought I was "cool". Meeting his precise, impeccably-mannered Dad as he came to pick his son up, I could imagine their house in the countryside, all spotless white walls and espadrilles at the door for visitors; two cars, both with stickers about green energy and cyclists.

In the afternoon Kirsty's boyfriend took them all out for afternoon tea. As neither Kitty nor I had finished our Christmas shopping, and the shops were going to close in a couple of hours, we thought the best plan was to call into the Sun for a couple of glasses of wine. Afterwards, I joined a small group of guilty-looking last-minute men in a jewellery shop.

Christmas Day, and no-one was up until 11am. Later I went round to Kitty's to see her and Wendy for a couple of drinks and to get stoned swap presents. They gave me books by Margaret Drabble and Bukowski, and these two charming little knitted creatures I was cooing over at a craft fair in October. I gave Wendy an anthology of poems called "Out of Fashion," poems about being dressed, and undoing that state.

Back at Kirsty's, we started making Christmas dinner. I felt giddy, and lucky to be with her and the girls; all day I kept having those little moments of happiness which still you for a moment and where the light becomes brighter.

---

It's midday and Kim's asleep upstairs. She came over on Boxing Day and it's been easy, long, hours of talking; up until 9am the first night and half past three yesterday, sustained by a healthy and varied diet of things you can't buy in a supermarket. As we were talking about sex -- the conversation always ends up there -- I was getting quite turned on (as was she). "Kim, I'm going to have to sort myself out in a minute," I said. She nodded and gave a little shrug, which I took as my licence to add some actions to our words. After I'd come we looked at each other, and I laughed at now normal we were making it.

She's in a relationship now, with someone she met on one of those social occasions well-known for crackling with sexual desire -- an organised dog walk. She showed me his picture, which was testament to the admirable tolerance most women have when considering a man's looks. He's older than her, but dresses older still, like a cellared local government official. She, in Kitty's words, is "dazzlingly gorgeous", and was looking so yesterday afternoon in the pub, in a black minidress and black boots. I had immense difficulty in keeping my eyes off her tits, and was quite looking forward to getting back to mine, putting the coal fire in, then "sorting myself out" with her again.

This afternoon, we are going to attempt an hour down the pub, where my three favourites will be together for the first time. There's always a risk that one's friends won't get on with each other, but all three of them play such important roles in my life, that I would like to risk a couple of bottles of Prosecco on it.

I was rather glumly looking back at my dating site stats for 2016. I've contacted thirty-seven women this year. Seven replied, all politely declining me. Two women contacted me, one with a dribble of inconsequential messages, and the other to give me a fortnight that was so thrilling that it felt my life was being renewed. It was sex-drenched from the outset, the first time since Seriouscrush in 2007 when I have felt the joyous liberation of being fancied; and bewildering in its sudden end, everything ripped up in one short phone call. Another unfortunate thing to come out of it was that I started dancing around my bedroom to Ce Ce Peniston's Finally, proving that being in lust ruins one's musical taste.

I still can't bear to delete her texts. No-one's ever spoken to me the way Trish did.

My venal motive for remaining on the site, of being able to silence the constant whine of my desire for Wendy, is hardly the right position from which to attempt a relationship. M / 52 / Lancaster, WLTM someone to help him get over a one-sided attraction. But I don't know what else to do.

---

The first of the girls' conditional offers for university are filtering through. My eldest has received ones from Nottingham for Modern European Studies, and Bristol for French and Politics. Middle one has acting auditions at LAMDA and the Royal Scottish Conservatoire; not sure about the youngest ("Dad, what is it about light that makes it light?") She enjoys her job in a record shop, where her duties include entertaining a little dog which scampers around the shelves all day, and where the owner lets her choose the music. She's applied for Popular Music at Liverpool, but her heart's not in it.

It's going to be a stomach-quivering day in October when we wave them off. I don't want my boos to be eighteen. I want to put them inside quilt covers and swing them around and throw them onto the settee in hazardous games. I'll be silently worried about them all day, every day, imagining all the little hurts and exclusions and slights and failures.

---

I've been in a village just over the border in North Yorkshire this afternoon, mystery shopping to see if the Post Office knew how to change a vehicle tax class. Never having driven in my life I was winging it a bit with answering their questions.

All I know about cars is that Olly's can go very fast, looks really stylish and is the kind of car you drive a new girlfriend up to a posh restaurant and appreciatively watch her short skirt riding up a bit as she gets into the passenger seat. However, as that is a sexist and vulgar thought of manly crudeness, I am glad it has never occurred to me.

Due to health and safety reasons, I had to call in on my way home for six pints, where I met my friend who's become a lot nicer a person after he had a heart attack and stopped being so fucking self-obsessed and talking about Northern fucking Soul all the time.

In walks this gorgeous woman. Early/mid 40s, with dyed dark blonde-going-on-red hair cut in one of those lovely sloping bobs, this fantastic bouclé purple top, (probably acrylic but made to look like wool) a black skirt ending just above the knee, black tights and black flatties.

My friend was being quite interesting for a change, but I had to go and talk to her. I mentally rehearsed what I'd say.

I went over to her -- and to my alarm she was sat with some ragged-haired younger bloke I hadn't noticed. "Hi -- sorry to interrupt -- but can I just say, with your combination of your haircut and top and that skirt" -- I am trembling at this point at having over-stepped the drunken mark -- , "you look absolutely gorgeous."

"What about me?" says the bloke, laughing. "Oh no, you're gorgeous too. You're meant for each other."

"I'm her son," he said.

"Well, thank you anyway," she said.

Well-intentioned, but I think that's classified as a fail.

It's half past one in the morning and I've just gone to get something from the living room. I turn the light on, to see two yoof asleep on the floor in a sprawl of improvised bedding. Sometimes, just occasionally, I do like living in a shared house. I like it that the lodgers think of it as collective temporary accommodation for their friends.

The woman in the Polski sklep is as tightly-jeaned as ever, bent double over something on the floor as I walk in. She says hello and apologises, her strokable arse pushed towards me. "Oh no, don't worry," I say. "The view's fine from here," I don't add.

---

Trina, chastened by the fact that I changed my mobile number in order to deracinate her drunken messages informing me that I am selfish and a fuckwit, invited me to Harrogate for a night; it's an unsaid apology. She was there for work and had booked a hotel room.

We spend nine hours in the Harrogate Tap, the splendidly restored bar on the station. Greying, precisely coiffured men sat together in couples in what appeared to be the gay drinkers' venue of choice in a most attractive Victorian spa town. What a beautiful county Yorkshire is. They have better fields than us.

Back at the hotel, in our twin beds, Trina was literally moaning with desire. She climbed into bed with me and then went back after fumbling around and finding only a soft cock. "Sorry love, I'm a bit drunk," I said. "I want Wendy, not you," I didn't add.

Twenty minutes into the drive back, I realised that I'd left a bag with a couple of grammes of speed in it in the room. Nothing has come of it so far, but we might have to chose a different hotel next time.

---

Thursday. What a day. Wendy said she could come round after walking the dog. I made some aggressively garlicked hummus and put some cheese and mini onions on cocktail sticks. We are both children of the seventies, after all.

We set to on the Prosecco, port, dope and speed. She was urging me to turn this blog into a set of short stories, the proceeds of which she imagines might release her and Kitty from their respective drudgeries. I agree that that would be a worthwhile project for 2017, but I think she has a very optimistic estimate of the likely income. It would involve me having to do some actual work, and you have no idea how gloomy a prospect that is for someone who entirely lacks the work ethic.

We talked and talked, the coal fire spitting and the salivating dog looking dolefully at the forbidden Stilton. She makes me feel giddy and almost out of control; my mouth runs away with itself and my sentences collapse upon themselves, until I turn off the auto-correct and give in to free association. And constant longing, constant desire, watching her hands, wishing they were rested on me. She is desirable and bewitching, heady, a drug in herself. I am completely in love with her. I wish I were not, because nothing but suffering will come of this.

She's anxious about what she dramatises, in our encyclopaedically over-informed period, as Korsakoff's Syndrome, which is an inflated name for a simple occasional loss of memory. I'm insouciant about this. We both drink a great deal -- me more than her -- and I think gaps in memory are to be welcomed. Who wants to remember everything? The gaps give others a chance to appear talented by being able to fill them in. And in the gaps, we have some of our best times, more enjoyable because they are of the moment, invulnerable to recall.

One such erased episode was what exactly led up to what happened at the end, and the preceding moments to such a lovely incident are lost. She's asked me not to mention it to anyone, so I won't, but I did say in my email that I wrote to her afterwards. "...You have got lovely tits though."

---

Went to bed for an hour or so, hard of cock and Wendyless, before the book group, to discuss Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, which I greatly enjoyed. I always enjoy book club. The conversation tumbles on and on, little of which is about the book. I told them that I was an alcoholic drug addict, something I regret saying. It looks like asking for attention, and besides, I doubt the statement's veracity. I would say I'm an alcoholic, were it not for the fact that publicly declaring oneself as such seems to have to be accompanied by a sense of regret and self-dislike. I have neither. I love drinking, I love taking drugs, and I daily luxuriate in the vistas that they both open for me.