Sunday

It's 8.20am and I'm in Wetherspoons in Piccadilly in Manchester. I really enjoyed the techno night. I had my stash confiscated: emptying my bag at the door, they took my two bananas off me. It was a friendly crowd of mainly twenty- and thirtysomethings, one of whom came up to me, shook my hand and said "Hey! You're old school!" but that was the only instance of Well-Meaning But Slightly Patronising Young Raver Syndrome I encountered all night.

The "security" put a bit of a downer on things. Minutes after I arrived someone was bundled out of the club, and they'd wander onto the middle of the dancefloor and just stood there, spreading a testosteroned latent aggression.

Later on, a girl who'd slightly overdone it came with her friend to share the seats with me. Her friend was doing exactly the right thing, telling her to sit quietly for a bit, saying everything will be fine, and giving her some water. Up strides a female security guard who, instead of asking how she could help and whether she was OK, started going on at her, leaning over her and threatening to throw her out. When she was hardly in a state to defend herself, the poor girl had to apologise and deal with someone jabbing her finger at her. Eventually Little Miss Miserable stormed off, pointing to her own eyes and to the girl's, saying, "I'm watching you!"

Back on the dancefloor, almost everyone was on e. You can always tell when e is in the house, from the way people dance and the lovely atmosphere of calm and togetherness. We were harmless, and just wanted to be left alone.

I almost didn't make it. It was difficult finding everything I needed in complete darkness, as there wasn't any money in the gas and electricity meters. There was a big puddle on the kitchen floor from a seeping fridge.

Wendy texted me. "...and which girl are you taking tonight?"

"You over-estimate my allure. On me tod tonight. Surprisingly enough, I haven't been able to sell the idea of seven hours of Dutch techno to anyone." "Seven hours of Dutch techno sounds good to me."

I'm a bit wary of going dancing with Wendy. She'd look too desirable. We're going to the park in a couple of days, and I'll be able to tell her about my new personal best for Shortest Consumated Relationship: first date on Friday, second on Wednesday into Thursday, dumped on Friday.

I've very much been wanting to get in touch with Trish, but after such an unambiguous rejection, any further contact, however light in tone, is a form of pleading. It'd be demeaning for me, and disrespectful to her.

I still find what happened incredible. I can't make sense of it, her sudden volte-face after giving me every impression that she was becoming fond of me. She said that she's told me certain things about her past that she's never spoken properly about to anyone else. A couple of her sexual ideas have never been discussed with anyone before. She told me several times that she was falling for me. She told me I was "thrilling". Tuesday night, at 2am, she sent me a text saying that she was dying to see me. She said that she suspects I haven't had enough affection in my life and that she wanted to be the girl who provided it. The second, and last, time we saw each other, she made me stay with her until the last possible train I could get back.

If I think about it too much, it can still make my eyes gloss over that something so promising has been snatched away from me. She introduced me in the pub as her new boyfriend. She told her "visitor" that he'd have to stop coming round now, and she took her profile down from the dating site. And then, the very next day, she tells me that her feelings will not develop, that this is far as it will go, and that she wants to end it forthwith.

I was so stunned on hearing this that I didn't have the presence of mind to ask her what had prompted such a sudden decision. It is beyond me, and I'll never find out. Given that she feels the way she does, blame doesn't come into it, but surely we could have given it more than one week?

Anyway, it's 9am now, so time for a pint. I'll always think of her fondly, but it makes me sad that she didn't want to explore what appeared to be opening up for us.

---

Monday

I got back to Lancaster about 1ish. To my delight, I bumped into Wendy and Kitty. We went for a couple of drinks. They suggested that Trish might have regretted overdoing the drink and drugs, and that her knee-jerk reaction was to push me away. They said she might be repenting at leisure now, and might still ring. Wendy sent me a lovely text: "Petal, your resilience is astounding. You're behaving with dignity and integrity (despite a night out which would leave most people gibbering). When it comes, sleep well X"

Something good did come of it: they said I looked really good. I was wearing my nice dark blue cotton Italian trousers, a shirt with a sort of pale blue small repeated flower pattern on it (believe me, it looks better than that sounds) and a tailored short suede jacket. They said it made me look younger, and a bit like international beat music star, Brett Anderson.

---

Here is a shocking video of what went on inside that warehouse on Saturday night.

This will have to be done in parts because I've got to get the girls' tea ready, but Trish has just dumped me. You're fucnin dumped, indeed.

I am absolutely distraught. I feel like just crying and crying. I know how important the sex was but there really was something more to it for me, when I stared into her eyes after sex, wondering how I had ended up with a girl like her, thinking how wonderful it is to have feelings for her that went beyond her sexual attraction. I loved being introduced in her local as "my new boyfriend".

I texted her this afternoon. "I wish you were here. Failing that, I'm going to be in Manchester tomorrow. Do you think I could come round late afternoon? I'd have to get off at about half ten as this [techno night] is in Ancoats."

"No not tomorrow."

I waited as long as I could - fifteen minutes -- for her to elaborate on such a bald statement, but nothing arrived, so I texted her again. "OK that's a shame but OK," Eventually she replied "I've been really ill, still am."

I rang her. "Hiya, what's the matter petal?" "I'm really ill, I have been since yesterday. I don't ever want to touch that stuff again. I'm shaking." "Oh fuck." And then, a lurch I hadn't at all seen coming.

"Looby, this isn't a decision I've taken lightly, but I want to end it here. My feelings for you aren't going to develop beyond this. It's reached its limit. I'm not going to feel anything more than this for you, and it's not enough."

I was stunned. My breath became unreliable. When I'd gathered myself a little, I said that I appreciated her honesty. "I understand what you're saying. I just felt that there was a possibility for something good with us. I am absolutely distraught Trish and I'm going to off for a cry now, but I understand what you've said and appreciate you saying this now."

"Thank you looby."

"So, there's nothing more to say, is there? Trish, I will always think of you fondly, and I have loved every minute of us being together, and I will only ever feel fond of you in the future. I'm absolutely devastated Trish, but if you can't reciprocate feelings it's never going to go anywhere. I understand." I was on the point of tears.

Silence.

"So this is goodbye isn't it?"

"Mmm. Thank you for being like that looby. Yes. Goodbye."

"Bye."

I walked my bike back up to the girls' house. I felt, and still feel, like crying my eyes out. I'm a bit concerned about going to this techno night tomorrow because mdma makes what one feels inside more clear and apparent. Drugs are not escapism, they're about intensifying experience and self-knowledge, and I wish I could have a night dancing with the wordless joy Trish made me feel until this evening. When I arrived at hers on Thursday I gave her a card, which amongst other things said that there is this track I like called A Beautiful Beginning. "I hope this is ours."

And now the stew is ready and I'm going to serve it up for the girls and go upstairs for a sob. Kitty and Wendy will help me, I know.

Five o'clock and I'm in The Turk's Head in Victoria in Manchester. I've come here from the station bar where I ordered a pint of Jaipur and walked out after it had been poured when the barmaid asked me for £4.85.

I went to Trish's yesterday morning. A pub lunch made by someone who would be better off working in a coal mine. My "feta cheese salad" came in a colander with a kilo of lettuce and a small portion of grey sugar solution as the dressing. She was looking fuckable, and I told her that I'd like her to come out to a restaurant with some of my friends and to wear a dress and no knickers; we'd shift the table a few inches closer to ourselves to prevent any risky sightlines from our friends. Ten minutes in, I'd inch my hand onto her thigh and then up to her cunt and let it rest there for several minutes, before bending my middle finger inside her, and all the time she would have to talk decorously and give nothing away.

We drank constantly; brandy and rosé wine for breakfast. I fancied a little optical brightener. "If I ask for any of that stuff you've got to refuse me." After her fourth line -- I think -- a gentleman never makes an account of shared amphetamine -- she drove us to the offy for another bottle of brandy and some bottles of cider. "Use my card, but you'll have to go in. They know I'm a pisshead there."

The offy is next to a beautician where she has her nails and bikini line done. (Thank fuck she doesn't have The Modern Abomination -- what me, Kitty and Wendy call a shaved cunt. She's got the lovely soft, slippery cunt hair of a sixty-year-old. I love her cunt.) She said me that she'd told them about me. "Well, he takes care of himself, he smells nice, and he made an effort." As I returned to her car, clanking with drink, I saw one of the girls mouthing and gesturing to Trish "Is that him?" Back at hers, tea was abandoned. "Do you want to stay over?" she asked.

I love it beyond measure, that sex (and drinking, I suppose), is the central element in our relationship. I am fed up to the back teeth with meeting women who say we have "shared interests" -- as if I give a shit about anyone's taste in film -- or worse, suggest "going out for a walk." The only walk I'd be interested in with Trish is to some hidden dell where I could fuck her under a tree.

Today she had a prior engagement. "I'm supposed to be going to my Mum's to make these fucking curtains. You're good at lying, what could I say?" "Tell her that I stayed over last night and I want to take you to Rochdale Literature Festival." "I'm too drunk to say 'literature'."

I left hers an hour ago after a fucking good afternoon, literally, and sat on the train with that delicious fading delirium that you can only get from sex. I find her exciting and I fancy her. I think she's pretty and sexy at the same time. Like all reckless, educated, borderline bipolar women, the kind I always go for, she goes on and on about herself all the time. "Fucking hell you do witter on Trish. The only way I can shut you up is to fill your mouth with my cock so you can't actually talk, isn't it?" "You can do that whenever you want." "I will Trish, and don't think I'll ask your permission first either. Honestly love, you're going to get it." She says things more colourful than that that I would write as a fantasy script for the kind of adventurous but submissive sexual partner that she is turning out to be.

I texted her from Victoria. "I've just passed a poster for Rochdale Literature Festival. I'm so glad we skipped the talk on Themes in Modernist Danish Literature. P.S. I think you're a bit fabulous. Only a bit. I want to turn you into even more of a dirty slut than you already are, and to fu...er, I mean see you again very soon X"

I met Trish for the first time in Manchester on Friday. Afterwards I went to Wetherspoons and wrote a postcard to Kim (larger version if you click on it).

It is an absolute joy to be fancied. I have lost count of the times I tensed with frustration and the imperative to be accepting of it, on being told at the end of dates that I am "sweet", "clever", "funny", and the other sickening backhand translations of sexual rejection; then having to force a smile of un-meant thanks. I thought perhaps I had some strange deformation that everyone was afraid of telling me about, and that this was it, the permanent sexless friendzone, just at the time when whoever is controlling my brain in the vat seems to have deliberately turned up my Dionysian drive vexatiously, to see what would happen.

Trish fancies me. A gorgeous, well-dressed, funny, postgrad educated, foul-mouthed, sexy, desirable woman fancies me. At last, at the age of fifty-two, I am having long phone calls round midnight and making reckless suggestions about a future that hasn't started, with a woman I hardly know; talking a mixture of autobiography, comedy filth, softly spoken phone sex, drunken blather (she drinks as much as me and is often to be found abed at odd hours in the afternoon), and easy pauses whilst the sex circulates in my head.

She pays me barely believable compliments, without the off-the-shelf post-date clichés that most women bandy about. These lovely sentences of hers vary in their focus on my personality, my looks, and how I communicate with her. "You write beautifully" (I write postcards to her, photograph them, then email them to her), "but you talk like shit. It's great." I love her texts, and regret that my old phone has the storage capacity of a sheet of A5.

Fuckin sick of waiting for you text me. You're fucin dumped

You just want to Squeeze my nipples, you fucnin perve

I cant chat in drunk

Just seen your message.You shallow bastard!

can you imagine us together? We'd be pissed all the time

I can't speak my mouth is full of your cock

I'm a bit crap really. Like you, funny, intelligent. But lost my way

I've just woken up wishing you were [...]

In some ways it isn't very promising. She smokes, and lives too far away, in a town outside Manchester. She's said all along she wants someone close enough to call in at the drop of a hat, not someone at the end of a two hour train journey which costs £23 return. She seems a bit reluctant to travel, which is a particular pity at the moment as both the lodgers have moved out so we could have the house to ourselves.

I'd prefer someone closer too, but I've been through all the women in Lancaster on the site. Trina has been asking me for four years to take my profile down; I took it down the same evening I met Trish.

Time for another split-up with Trina. We had a drunken, sociable and dancey time at the house music weekender on the Fylde, but we ended up going home separately. She was very irritated at me telling some people that we were not together, which I suppose was a bit hardline of me, but I want to remain independent from her in others' eyes. That upset her and I was berated about it on the walk to the station, where I petulantly went and sat at the other end of the platform, telling her I'd see her at a unspecified later.

She sent me several texts that night, one of which reads "I'm so sorry your free jollies at my expense have ended. Walk out on me, treat me like shit, and expect me to treat you. More fool you. I dislike you now looby, in every sense of the word." The last sentence is a reference to the text I accidentally sent to her rather than Wendy, in which the words "love" and "Wendy" were used in place of "dislike" and "looby".

I've sent her a card, thanking her warmly for everything, expressing my gratitude for the way that she has made so many enjoyable nights out possible, and saying that those memories will be with me for the rest of my life. I apologised for this dogged insistence of mine on maintaining my discrete personal identity.

---

There is no better way to dispel an obsession with a woman than with another.

A month now since my first message from Trish. She has an effortless knack of turning me on, just by talking. Every conversation turns to sex eventually. We've spent three hours in two separate calls with each other today. In the more relaxed one this evening, after we'd both had a couple, we swapped sexual likes, and told each other about what unnerves us about our bodies when presented to another, a mutual attempt at pre-emptively quashing those anxieties, which I think only succeeds in drawing more attention to them.

I'm not complaining about anyone who tells me, "I love everything about you so far"; "Your talk is liberatingly crude"; "I wish I could be there now, and you could just give me a good servicing". Tonight I said I'd like to spend three days with her, sex mainly, in bed and all over the house. "I think I'm a bit unusual," she said, "for wanting sex so much," and proceeded to tell me about the first and last weekend she had with a previous boyfriend who couldn't get it up. She told me about her husband: together twelve years, and they only had oral sex once. "Oh no, that should be on page one of Tune A Day, shouldn't it?"

She drinks all the time. "I'm too pissed to answer you," she sent once -- at 4pm. In the long term, we'd be going to hell in a handcart together, each of us looking to the other to put the brake on our hedonism.

"What I'd like to do right now," she said yesterday, "is to drive to Lancaster, and you could give me a good seeing-to." Both of the lodgers have moved out, so we could have had the place to ourselves, but she'd already had a few. We're meeting in a pub in Preston on Friday. Snogging within the hour is the operational target.