Me, Wendy and the dog take a bottle of Prosecco into the sylvan edge of our city. There were no litter bins for a long time and I felt a bit self-conscious walking along with an empty bottle of Prosecco at midday, meeting all the other dog-walkers and their constant smiling efforts to maintain the bonhomie of their collective.

On Saturday me and Trina had planned to go to the house night I introduced her to a couple of years ago, but my punishment for the misdirected text in which I told Wendy that I loved her, was to have the offer of a lift and a hotel withdrawn.

I managed to get to St Annes on the train for nothing, then found a place to stay for 18 pounds. It was liberating not being with her, dancing and chatting with who I liked, and having conversations which push the friendship gently forward. Trina, meanwhile, in a pointless attempt to make me jealous, had arranged a date with a retired journalist. I offered to make the rescuing phone call if she needed it, so we agreed the code by which she could notify me.

At half past nine she texted to say that she didn't need rescuing, that he was "nice, but too nice." I keep my phone on but put it to silent and took to the dance floor.

I got in at about 3am. My host's BMW had had its back window put through. In St Annes, The Opal of the West, of all places.

Went through my phone before I went to bed.

2330: Let me down as usual. Luckily didn't need you. [A DJ] is playing. Probably not as good as St Annes but it's here.

0011: You are a total waste of space. If you want to come to Morecambe tomorrow [as we had arranged] you can make your own way there if you can be bothered. I'm really not bothered.

0024: You really are a complete bastard. Why say you'd be there for me tonight when you had no fucking intention of doing it. Grow up!!!

0036: It's half past midnight and you obviously didn't bother to check your phone as you promised. I'm going to sleep now and when you read this I have a message for you. Fuck off looby. I don't need people like you in my life to let me down and piss me off. Selfish, self obsessed bastard that you are. Fuck off.

0657: I rather over reacted last night to what was really something and nothing. I apologise for swearing at you and I hope you got home okay.

---

Further abject apologies followed through the morning. I didn't really want to miss our stay at the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, where rooms go up to over £200, so I told her that a couple of expensive cocktails would get her out of the mess.

We went to Morecambe, where, in a pub, I found an example of the altruism that we associate with cokeheads: someone had left a small line of coke on the top of the loo. I mixed it in with our bag of sparkledust, and got the credit card a-chopping. I gave the rest -- which was intended to last us both at least a couple of days -- to Trina. She came back from the loos saying how strong it was. No wonder. She'd done the entire lot.

I keep underestimating what a hopeless drinker she is, and on cue, after a bottle of white and two double Zubrowkas, I was informed that I am in denial about being an alcoholic and how I have been "damaged" by my childhood.

We got back to the Midland. It being Morecambe, even a £200 a night hotel doesn't get things quite right. The Prosecco is served in white wine glasses, not flutes, and at breakfast the fat-arsed staff stand with their polyester-clad buttocks inches away from the back of your head moaning about colleagues; canned music.

But it's a skilful restoration. They decided early on that a full-scale re-creation of a 30s hotel is both impossibly expensive and impractical, what with modern disabled legislation and fire and health and safety rules, so have preserved what they can and done the rest in a contemporary style. It's got this marvellous circular staircase which is a wonder of cantilevered engineering which must put an immense strain on the hidden steel skin of the hotel into which it is attached. It is made for silk dresses with trains.

We danced to the pianist in the foyer and shared a bottle of Prosecco with an entertainingly dodgy Glaswegian man. We got into our respective beds. She climbed into mine. "No, no Trina, I want to go to sleep." I got out and climbed into hers.

I slept well and woke up at 8am, to find she'd gone. She'd left a note thanking me for a "mostly" great time, and saying that she'd see me at wine club. I had a leisurely solo breakfast on the terrace, looking across Morecambe Bay, a gorgeous vista of greys and browns. Under the sands are dozens of skeletons of people and horses, drowned whilst trying to take the short cut to Furness at low tide.

I think Trina's going a bit mad. Looking after her demented mother is becoming such a burden for her that she overdoes it on the compensatory days that she spends with me.

Middle daughter, the actress, is, like me, uninterested in work she doesn't want to do or has to fake it in. I was on my my way home from the pub when she rang me and she wants to see me so that I can make up some bullshit on the phone to the restaurant owner about why she can't do her shift tomorrow on the waitressing job she's got.

I identify with that. I don't want to work. I've never wanted to. I just want to do what I like. I'm a drinker really, a professional drinker, and have a couple of friends who are handy to know for various pharmaceutical reasons, which means that everything I stick up my nose is free for me; and the value of the life that you lead as a result can't be measured in money.

The new lot of phet arrived last night and I'd give it a 6/10, not the 8 that I'm used to, but it still has the usual effect of making me talkative yet calm whilst out socially, then wanking on and off like a man possessed all night thinking about Wendy. And thank fuck, I managed not to text her at half past three in the morning, despite being hard-cocked and murmuring to myself and an imagined her. It's just a good job the difficulties of sexting on my phone makes me give up half way through.

Last night in the pub I met for the second time in my life this girl I met a year or so ago. She looks like a slut. She looks and speaks like a fucking dirty whore. She's got black hair. Twenty-eight. Her chavvy boyfriend was there, jealous at me and her chatting so well. He went on about getting us some coke -- a drug in which I have very little interest -- for 65 a gram. That's not realistic. It's 95, or 110 if you want to make a profit, but I don't want to get involved in coke. It makes stupid men too manly. I gave him my card and told him to ring me to discuss it and of course, he hasn't rung me. Lancaster wannabe drug dealers -- we have an endless stock of them here, all as thick as fuck.

I was talking to Slutgirl about my night at the casino in Manchester after the house music night last March and how much I enjoyed it, and she produced a membership card for the same casino and told me of a night she'd had there. Her borderline violent boyf went to the toilet. With the relief of him gone, we talked about the other time me and her had met. "I wish I'd gone home with you that night. I've done half of Lancaster, so I might as well have done you."

I wanted to reach over the table to snog her. Sometimes, you don't want to be special, you just want to be one amongst many, one of the half of Lancaster.

I told Kim about my housing situation. A couple of days later she sends me an email in which she suggested that I move in with her, for the extra costs it would incur, "maybe about £30 a week." It's difficult for an attractive, chatty woman like her to go out on her own "and you could help me with this."

Later, through a drunken phone call from me, we jointly get the better of that idea. I don't want to live so far from my children. I'd be living on the train, with all the expense that involves. And I didn't say it, but I've had enough of being the social worker.

Instead, we have planned a weekend at the Racing Commentator's flat in Leeds for next month. I'm looking forward to it. Don Paterson wrote (from memory, can't be bothered to gargle) "Women have taught me everything I know, but men have often taken me aside and told me things." Racing Commentator hesitates to tell me anything -- not because he's withholding valuable technical information -- but because he has a type of grace that I attribute to true intelligence.

---

I'm glad I got away with stealing the two bottles of cava from Marks and Sparks in The Strand the other day but shoplifting isn't a reliable business model. I don't want to do what everyone suggests to me -- proofreading for students -- partly because I think that people at a university like Lancaster ("world-leading", like all the others), should know how to write in English, but also because it's fucking boring work with no reward beyond the financial.

I was saying something similar the other week to Vic, who said that the bloke in the corner shop near him is looking for someone to do a few hours. I rang him and he asked if I could come round in twenty minutes. The Sri Lankan franchisee unnerved me with long pauses between questions to which I could give no more elaborate answers than that which I produced, while he stared at me; at my face.

He took me behind the counter to show me how modern tills work. I was then asked if I could come back the next day at four for my first shift. I was preparing to leave his stiflingly hot shop, when he said "So, what sort of wages are you expecting?" "Well, I suppose, the minimum wage. £7.20 an hour for someone my age." "Well, we pay £5, cash in hand."

I said that there would be no advantage to me working cash in hand for that amount, thanked him for his time, and said that I hoped that he will find some desperate Vietnamese person who is more suitable.

---

In a disinhibited moment, I text Wendy. "I love you Wendy. I love you in every sense of that word." With the improved fine motor control that comes from a few pints and a Lebanese cigarillo, I sent it to Wendy, Cilla my old Hungarian lodger, and Trina.

Wendy was easy to sort out. 6am next morning, awakening with the start of anxious worry that is the privilege of the heavy drinker, I texted Wendy seul. "I'm sorry Wendy. Please ignore last night. A friend and I hit the wacky baccy a bit and it went to my head. I value our friendship very much, like I know you do too. I apologise, and if we can just pretend I never said anything. See you soon! x

"No worries petal. You're in enough trouble I expect?"

We got into a conversation in which she asked if I could nip to the chemist for her. I replied "Hello, Dr Surname here. Yes, the prescription charge you guessed at is correct. However, I will have to examine your breasts first."

Trina was more difficult, an emailed shit storm, but like most depressions, you just have to wait for the worst of them to drift off towards Novoya Zemlya and, in words of the Shipping Forecast, "lose its identity".

As important as the drama with Trina is, it's the first day of the County Championship today and we are skittling out Nottinghamshire, 214 for 7 at tea, and I've made some forced jokes to her relating to fielding positions, to temper the heat. Alles klar.

To London, for a judicial review of a fracking decision. Went all that way, and got the day wrong.

I was going to get the coach down. I told Trina what I was doing and she invited herself along, which irritated me, but then she said that she would pay for a train back, as well as for somewhere to stay that wasn't someone else's settee. Here we go again, another night of her wriggling and huffing and puffing with sex on her mind.

The coach was leaving the university late afternoon. I told her that I was having a foursome beforehand -- the usual trio augmented by Kitty's daughter. Wendy called for me and we took the dog and a joint up to the park, before meeting the others to blow conversational poppers up the tight sphincter of the yoghurt-knitters' cafe. Three hours flew past, brightened by two bottles of red and one of Prosecco my relief that things are OK again with Wendy.

And then, in one of those times during which a mood can come tumbling down but where the tipping point for that change is difficult to isolate, I ended up going to London on my own.

We met in the library foyer. I was shocked compared to how I remember it; it struck me as an example of redundancies writ into interior design.

Trina told me I was pissed and that it was thoughtless and disrespectful of me to have got drunk first. I'm not having this.

"I'm so pissed Trina, yes, you're right, totally. Jeez, you should have seen me in the past three hours or so. Poor old Ingrid [Kitty's twelve-year-old daughter]. She put on such a convincing show of getting on very well with me, when inwardly she must have been dying to get away from me."

I wish I hadn't said that. Not because I regret its cruelty, but that answering back pours oil on the fire. I should have just ignored her snippyness and just talked about practical things.

A woman on a bus recently

I got on the bus alone and turned my phone to silent to blank out Trina's texts. I was hemmed in by four Nigerian twentysomething girls, who got out chocolate digestives, pineapple salad and tangerines, which they just shared straight away. When I told one of them that she looked like Patrice Rushen, her face lit up and she reverted to a teenager, giggling into her friend's shoulder; I smiled, inwardly and outwardly, at having for once complimented a woman successfully.

I apologised for not having anything to share. "Donn matta. We all famly now." I spread my tweed jacket over the knees of the girl sitting next to me, who was in direct line of an over-enthusiastic air-conditioning unit.

I got the tube (just -- I had hardly any money) to where I was staying. I went into the bathroom to have a shower and trod on a slug. "Wish you were here," I texted Wendy from my bed at midnight. "It's a rinky-dink little wooden chalet hidden in deepest suburbia. I promise not to go on, but I'd love to be snuggling up with you now here with this bottle of Verdicchio I've got." I deleted a bit about our legs being wrapped around each others'.

Next morning in Aldi, the security guard seemed to be circling me -- a red rag to a bull -- so I stole some plastic cheese. I paid for two citrus fruits which were described only as "Easy peelers", as my cover. As I was leaving, I found a tenner on the floor, which I picked up swiftly, as this could have led to a slippage accident and a health and safety issue.

I arrived at the hearing rather more perfumed than was my intention. The Verdicchio had been leaking into my bag and onto my jacket and trousers, which meant I made my entrance at England's highest court smelling only of the finest of wines. My bag went through the X-ray machine, but I was called back, and in front of a queue of sharply dressed legal types, I had to hand over the half-empty bottle.

The woman at the information desk couldn't find our case. She directed me to the Court Lists -- pinned notes in glassed cabinets of the cases for the day, which are written in such an arcane style that one can only look for some mention of the parties involved. They weren't there. Nowhere.

I claimed my wine back off the security guard, and wandered into a hot, sunny, Victoria Embankment Gardens and sat there all day, drinking and reading Knausgård and eating my stolen Playdough Cheddar. Around me, the legal and media and accounting types were eating Japanese food in cardboard boxes and saying how Florence is "awesome" and "actually this is really my transition dress." I finished the Verdicchio then went to Marks and Sparks, where I was pleased to find that cava was on a buy none, get one free offer.

By about five o'clock it was starting to get less cultured than I like, and when someone in the cheap seats behind me started asking me about my book, I knew it was time to go. I shut him and his mate up with a large glass of cava and went and shared a bottle of beer with a beggar on Marylebone Road.

My train got in an hour late. Someone had jumped in front of another one at Wigan, which is testament to the effect that Wigan can have on you.

---

Getting on alright with a woman from North Wales on the dating site. First exchange went like this.

Shite. Ruthin. That's a long way away. But not insurmountable. If you were more local and it were not half eleven, I'd ask you out for a drink. We could have a little virtual chat instead perhaps.
looby
P.S. I love dancing too.

Hahahaha!! yes I think we'd have a reasonably entertaining time getting pissed. I'm bloody knackered now and out overdoing the outdoors tomorrow as usual training for the High Tatras! Yes a shame you're not local.

Shall we do it then? This is terribly previous and jumping the gun. Liverpool's kind of half way though.

Liverpool may as well be Mars, I'm so lazy in all this! However I do absolutely love the place so you never know!

Well get off your arse and get there then. The Prosecco's on me. If all else fails, I'd go as far as Flint. Flint is so absolutely crap that I'd almost enjoy a first date in some rubbish cafe there.

I hate Prosecco. How the hell do you know Flint?!!

Well, alright, you can have what you like, up to £2. I am well-acquainted with the shitholes of North Wales. Queensferry is worse. Once we get to know each other a bit, we could go for a dirty weekend in a caravan in Towyn.

It would be dirty.

Good.

Minging if that's any clearer. And there was me thinking oh good not another creative type doing something useful on a ladder......

What do you mean "another" ? I'm the only person called looby who lives in Lancaster who has performed a piece involving a ladder in Brussels. Listen you sound pretty cool as fuck and I can bring a litre of petrol to improve your complexion [in-profile joke]. Let's meet somewhere crap. I'm off to bed now but iron that red dress and tell me when you're free.

I am cool as fuck. I haven't ironed anything for about 3 yrs! You drinking the litre of petrol could possibly improve my complexion granted. Night nutter.

That was last weekend. Gone similarly well since then.

Me and Erica arranged to meet down the pub "for an hour or two" in the afternoon. That was the plan anyway.

I've never had any sexual attraction to Erica, but as she sat down, in a tight cerise top and crossed her legs in tight black jeans, her angled hair just long enough to point over the top of her tits, and all her gestures, I had to suppress an illegal impulse. I wondered why such a fine difference in her appearance could provoke such unwonted feelings.

I used to be Erica's lodger. Life in her suburb has the characteristic shared by self-segregating working- and middle-class areas: the inhabitants can't handle situations and people with which they're not already familiar.

And now there's been a murder down there. Erica knows both the families and the people involved. She thought there might have been an element of self-defence. She's seen the murdered man standing over the murderer punching his fists together in front of the former's face. I said that perhaps he felt like the small man at the bottom of the hierarchy, year after year, and that you can't bottle that up for ever.

She said that they both used to drink at the murderer's house, which was a place "where drinkers used to go. It was really, drinker-y, not just people who drink a bit and do coke and speed, like the rest of us." I laughed out loud at the liberating idea that people like me and Erica don't pass the high bar of "really drinker-y people".

"Everyone's saying [the murdered] wasn't a bad lad. Well, he was. He was a nasty piece of work." The daughter of the murderer has been sacked from her job at a hairdresser's because it was all going round on Fackbook. Her employers found out about it and sacked her.

Such seriousness over, we proceeded to swap the bag of fairydust between us for another ten hours or so. Left the pub and went to another and saw a pretty good local jazz-funk band. I like that genre in any case, but they were good musicians, and I was nodding with my head and feet, and then there was the speed, but it disconcerted me that the bassist turned his bass a little way towards me and looked at me as though he was playing for me, or looking for my approval.

---

Walking home, I stopped in the car park to sext Wendy. Turned my phone off, went to sleep. In the morning I got a message. "One day that dick of yours is going to detach itself and make its own way in the world. Petal, can we concentrate on what's really important -- true friendship and comrardery. I only have that with you and Kitty. It's precious. Xx."

I felt tolerated, misjudging. I knew it was too good to last. I've got her a postcard of Marc Chagall's Lovers In Blue to give her tomorrow when we take her dog for a walk round the park before meeting Kitty for a drink. Why has it suddenly changed?

Wendy,

I would never do anything to damage one of the most precious relationships in my life, and for my over-sexed efforts to do that I abjectly apologise. See you soon I hope.

She values the static ecology of how me and her and Kitty function. Me and Wendy having a sexual relationship wouldn't damage our threesome in the slightest, but she's probably been brought up in an old-fashioned world where men claim women rather than love them, and put themselves as the controlling first person. I really am not like that. In my head, the most irritating voice of my shadow-self: Don't overreach yourself.