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.

I'm in a pub in Leeds, where I am suddenly surrounded by a group of women. "We're one seat short," one of them says. "No we're not," says her friend, pointing at me. "I'm going to sit on this man's lap." "I love Leeds," I reply.

On the train here, I've been reading Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen. I'm tired of facts, I'm tired of speculations, I want to be consumed by unreason. I want to be swept along. I want to be covered with unspecific kisses. He was a novelist before he became a singer, and on hearing his voice, one wishes he might have stuck to his original career.

---

I got to the girls' house on Friday at 5ish and set to, making a potato, leek, and cheese and onion pie. It took till about half past seven, by which time they'd filled themelves up with beans on toast. My pie sat by itself.

Wendy rang, twice, from Kitty's house, drunkenly rambling. In the way that staring at objects can turn them into symbols for a feeling, I found myself leaning on my elbows looking at my unwanted pie, which stood for Wendy not wanting me; it was simultaneously comical and saddening. I rang my friend who wants me to write some lyrics to some music he's made, partly to get myself out of feeling like an Old Werther.

In bed, writhing with the lack of her. "I so wish you and me were wrapped around each other now and murmuring half-remembered rubbish to each other. I love you Wendy and it's now my main job to stop this. You're fab though." It is imperative that I follow my own advice here.

---

Next day I thought I'd better text Wendy to apologise. "Sorry. Drink and drugs again x"

She replies. "I loved 'half-remembered rubbish' and I know I subjected you to that during half-coherent phone calls. See you at the cafe later with Kitty? Xx"

Me, Kitty, Wendy and the Little Dictator met up at the yoghurt-knitters' bar in the macrame belt of Lancaster, a place where a specific type of middle class person goes to insulate themselves from the polluted manners and talk of the lower classes.

I won't mention Wendy's dark blue dress with a diagonal pattern of small white flowers repeated all over it, and the thin hem that veed to her cleavage, brown and strokable. Through our sentences, I imagine my cocked middle finger moving down through her tangled hair, down her tilted neck, along the hardness of her clavicle, down on to where her dress stops and her tits start, with the lightest, almost imperceptible, and slowest touch I can manage. None of this will ever happen. What will happen, and with whom? A fifty-two year-old experiencing what I gather most people experience in their twenties -- a sexless decade for me, in which I felt the victim of a silent Europe-wide conspiracy to exclude me from the customary enjoyments and adventures of a twentysomething man.

Wendy's dog was making friends with another. Wendy took against its rather supercilious owner, and lobbed a vicarious challenge at her through the dog. "Does her bottom smell nice then?"

At the bar I met someone who, unknown to me, had tried to look after me during my Dad of Three in Rave Drug Arrest Shame at the techno do in the old prison a few months ago. "Ah! Looby -- you'll be interested in this," and gave me a flyer for a techno night tomorrow. I can't go as I'm out dancing in St Annes. I started my usual effusive apologies to anyone who was unfortunate enough to cross my path that night.

"Don't worry about it. You were quite amusing. You kept saying 'I want girls.'" "Was I?" "Yes, and I told you weren't going to get any in the state you were in." It makes me wonder what other details might yet emerge to complete the picture of the spectacle I made of myself that night.

I told Kitty and Wendy about a meandering and now fizzled-out dating site correspondence with a nurse from Lancaster. I said that she talked about work a lot, and would send inconsequential, cheery little messages, as if writing to herself: "Oh well! Another early start for me! x".

I asked, rhetorically, whether we were going to have another drink. As I turned round to get some money out of my jacket, I saw Nursey sitting alone in the corner in her NHS uniform. She did a timid little smile; I heartlessly pretended I didn't recognise her.

"Oh no, looby, not your type at all," said Kitty. "Well, knocking about with you two sets the bar pretty high for any girlfriend. And no, she's not. I want a schedule like me and Donna had. First message on Thursday, in a hotel in Glasgow on Tuesday."

Later, and for the first time since I've known her, she appeared to admit the possibility of a relationship. "Oh Kitty! You on a dating site? Your looks and personality? You'd be fighting them off with a shitty stick." "Yes, I would. I'm good at sex, too," which was a delicious thought to turn over.

Instigating the new regime of dignity and restraint in my communications with Wendy, I texted her afterwards. "Oh God, I fucking fancy you." The one effective brake on such incontinence, is to remind myself that every time I send one of these futile, unwanted messages, I am lowering myself to Trina's level: talking to the beloved as a disguised self-pity, as if I only have to bellow the intensity of my feelings for her to make her fall in love with me.

Edit: apologies for the many errors of all sorts, in some earlier, more drunken, versions of this post.

---

I'm in a pub in Blackpool, where I've been mystery shopping in two other boozers this afternoon. Paid hardly more than the minimum wage employees I observe, I send detailed notes about any departures from the behaviour that middle management think is what customers like, human interaction scored to the extent it resembles an assembly line.

I like a day away from Lancaster and getting a few free drinks and my tea. I like the dissembling and making myself anonymous; I'm in my own theatre for half an hour. I have to clock details of state of outdoor seating area; of hair, appearance and build, replies to my requests, state of toilet roll dispensers, and note if the curse of the upsell is missed. I always try to give them good marks. I overlook transgressions, I polish their sentences for them.

---

Middle daughter went to see Primal Scream in Liverpool on Sunday and was driven home by a strange man.

There being no connection to Lancaster from the last train from Liverpool to Preston, Kirsty and I had forked out £45 for a taxi for her last leg home.

"Dad, do you still have to pay for a taxi if you cancel it?"

"I suppose not, but what about getting back from Preston?"

"I've met a man on the train and he says he's dropping his son off at Uni and could drop me at home."

I ascertained that he had his son with him and his car at Preston; and that they were all sat round the same table. Kirsty and I liaised and decided it was alright, so we cancelled the taxi. Melanie ended up at her front door, driven there by a man she'd known for forty-five minutes. He just dropped her off, Melanie said her thanks, and without waiting for Kirsty's, he drove the ten miles back to his home in Garstang. What an excellent form of Lancashire behaviour. Can you imagine such a thing happening in London?

---

Intermission: I've just asked a young couple sat at a table not far from me if I'm anywhere near Blackpool South station. False eyelashes, carefully arranged white vest top to reveal the scalloped top of a black bra, on the one hand; number one haircut, baseball cap, jeans, on the other. They point the way but we carry on a chat. I am called into adjudicate in a black-blue colour differentiation argument. She lays her jet-shiny black nails against her coat. Her coat, which I've described as "black", now seems like a strong version of blue, and my argument is weakened.

She's having a few drinks before she goes to work. She's a lap dancer. "Blackpool's a shithole," he says, straight after she's told us her job. At the same time, I think, "if that's your instinctive sense of protectiveness towards her, wishing that there could be something better as a job for her, good for you, you proto-feminist;" and, "let her do it if she doesn't come to any harm. We all sell our labour at various degrees of degradation."

---

Saturday night, and to Bury Town Hall for an all-nighter. It's mainly a Northern night but they've recently opened an anteroom for those of us who like that other line, of disco > house > techno. We went in Olly's BMW, which, like its owner, is a fast mover which can get out of problems by quickly disappearing for a while.

I'm the only one at these nights who uses poppers. It makes me a cynosure of others' eyes for a while, which is irritating -- watching people wait for me to erupt into some kind of uncontrollable butyl nitrite-inspired Brownian motion after having the bottle at my nostril -- but whose advantage is being interpellated as someone who goes a bit too far.

I liked the half hour DJ rotation, although one DJ seemed to have a different understanding of the meaning of "half an hour", the overtime of which he used to treat us to some James Brown remixes, which I am always glad to hear again, only having sat through them 9,487 times before. Karen was dancing well in her grey heels, and it was an amusement to see men flick their eyes away from her as soon they noticed themselves noticed. A young, slender girl in a boob-tipping bustier was dancing well and uncaringly; another of a similar age was smiling through her e.

I went back downstairs to the Northern Room, aware that Olly's wife had "suggested" we wind it up at about half past four, a woman who cannot go out without patrolling hers and others' pleasure. I was inducted into a circle of people they know with meaningless but good-natured handshakes.

We got back to Lancaster surprisingly quickly. The speedo was holding at a steady 100-105, but as Olly is a scrupulously law-abiding man, and BMWs are made in Germany where they use kilometres, it must have meant we travelled home at around 65mph.

---

Coda: I've just been saying my goodbyes to the young couple. A guess the age game. Got her -- nineteen -- and overestimated him by three years -- he's twenty-nine. They met on a dating website and have become friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend. I said that I was on that one too. He said that his mum would like to meet someone "on the level" like me. There's a bit of a standing up, about-to-go body language, testing whether we're serious.

"Oh fuck this -- give her my number. What's the worst that can happen?" I rip a page out of my diary. I'm already open-eyed curious about his mum. I hope she rings me, on the back of her son's vouch.