A couple of Sundays ago I cooked the girls a Pakistani recipe from the Guardian, a dish of herbed cream cheese in chapattis. Kirsty and boyf turned up, all unfocused eyes, and garrulous of their hedonistic weekend, of which they reveal precisely enough.

Chapatti dough takes some rolling out, and I was going at it with the rolling pin. "Look at him," said Kirsty's boyf. "He's really determined to impress us." "Fucking Pakis," I said back. "Why can't they eat ordinary bread?"

My girls asked them about their weekend. They'd been to Clitheroe, and had a trawl round the charity shops. "She got this great top that you can see her nipples through," said boyf, and we all laughed.

Later the same evening, there was half an hour when it was just me and Kirsty. Somehow the conversation got onto the way that all three of our daughters are constantly policing themselves into bisexuality. They comment all the time on the physical attractiveness of women athletes, TV presenters, and so on. I said that I thought that for their generation toying with bisexualism was perhaps a substitute for the lack of subcultures.

"Has Fiona ever told you she's gay?" I asked.

"Yes, well, that's what's she's said to me, although how you can say that without having had a sexual experience that involves someone else I don't know."

"Well, we'll see. It's a bit fluid, isn't it, all your life."

---

We were altogether again on Easter Sunday. The hopeful-looking cat had her usual gelatinated suspension but the rest of us had a vegetarian roast.

Afterwards, the girls drifted off to giggle online and exclusively, and me and Kirsty took the second bottle into the kitchen. She asked me about the house I rent.

In a slightly more censored form than what follows, I told her: I am behind with my rent; I don't like the confounding of the financial and the emotional that has arisen because Seriouscrush, a woman for whom I had an involuntary overwhelming passion, is now my landlady. I dislike never knowing who is in when I get back, and lodgers shitting and pissing and flushing and stair-clomping on a schedule that doesn't match mine. I don't like being interpellated into an overseer, the rentier. And I don't like living on a mainly Muslim street, with its nice apartheid.

Kirsty nodded through all this with her customary patience. What followed was a great surprise.

She said that her and boyf have long wished to live together, and suggested that I could rent the house in which the girls have been brought up and still live, for the now small mortgage and the bills, and as well it being my home, we could keep it on as a permanent homely refuge for my daughters.

The idea of regaining some more practical and fatherly link with my daughters, and perhaps also have a closer friendship with Kirsty, is a most attractive one. I would love -- even that strong word is too weak -- to be more a part of my family again, rather than having to cope with the necessary distance of social relations involved in sharing a house with strangers.

I discussed all this excitedly with Trina, who said I could live on her narrowboat in the meantime if I wished. It's looking a bit unloved at the moment and in a state of cold, slow decay from being uninhabited. Its upkeep would be cheap and it would preserve an asset for her.

I spent a long time composing an email to Seriouscrush about this. Putting the computer and myself to bed, I immediately felt a happy relief that my days here are numbered.

---

Wendy and Kitty took me out for my birthday to the yoghurt-knitters' cafe. We had a couple of Wendy's spacecakes and were feeling that unstable borderline delirium that that produces. Kitty went to the loo and Wendy and I were alone for a couple of minutes. "The problem with this stuff is," she said, "is that it makes you quite randy."

"It does me too. Especially in certain circumstances." I looked at her and she understood.

"You were keeping yourself busy last night as well," she said, which is a reference to a sex-laden text I sent her in the small hours.

"You know Wendy, you've only got to say a word and they'll stop immediately. "Looby. You know I like it."

We went back to hers, put some music on and had a dance, her putting her arms around me at times. Why can't we be lovers, Wendy?

On the train back from Grimsby, Trina fell asleep and snored as we trundled soporifically towards Manchester. I took the opportunity to write postcards to Kim and Wendy.

Wendy's ended "Trina has done her usual act of being amiable then turning on me if I speak to someone else. Still, one must manage one's benefactors. Any cost-benefit analysis in a relationship necessarily involves a cost. I'll see you Saturday when I will not be thinking about you walking down towards me on the train in the orange skirt which rides up over your thighs as cross your legs as you sit down next to me."

The A-line orange skirt, which is of stiff, thick cotton, just above knee-length, exists in the elaborate fantasy in which we go Manchester and I buy her clothes I'd like to fuck her in, take her out and show her off to my house music friends, watch her dance, take her back to the hotel and fuck her without asking.

I got my bank card out and scored through the lines treated in the same way above.

Last night:

From: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 17:14:37

Hi Petal. Thank you for the postcard and making me smile Xx

From: looby
To: Wendy
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:03:52

Thanks... I'm sorry about my compulsive sex addiction for you but a ruler can be very useful for retrospective regret. See you at the weekend Xx

From: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:05:45

But not really :) xxx

From: looby
To: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:13:37

You know me. No. To be honest. Xx

From: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:27:42

I do know you and I like every bit X

And then, with my almost genetically-driven gift for lowering the tone -- whilst I am open-mouthed, elated...

From: looby To: Wendy
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:36:53

Oh Wendy please don't say that. Actually do say it. Even just texting you makes my cock stiffen with wanting you. See you Saturday. Wear a dress if you have no other ideas X

I put some music on and danced around the room, gradually turning the lights ever lower as the drugs took hold.

From: looby
To: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 21:15:24

I have joy in my heart, and part of it is you xx

From: looby
To: Wendy
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 21:17:19

Only part of it. Don't get carried away like.

From: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: Grimsby
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2016 22:21:25

I won't. You are in my heart too -- in a big jumbled box of favourite fun things X

I couldn't think of a way of responding to that cooling last email, reminding me where I am, one "fun thing" amongst many.

Trina asked me where I'd most like to go -- within a budget -- for my birthday. Grimsby disappointed me slightly by being less shit that I was hoping it'd be, but it's the second sweariest place I know to Glasgow, and better than Glasgow in that respect, because there, you have to be aware of their fucked-up sectarian conversational boundaries.

We booked into the hotel. Muzak in the foyer, twentysomething facebookers in navy polyester costumes on reception.

We started in the Hope and Anchor. "You're not from round here." "No, you're right, we're not. I'm from Lancashire." "Yeah well I'm from Ireland, so fuck off." It's all ok though, give as good as you get and you're fine. They're sussing you out, guaging you through faux aggression. We talked about the floods, and dykes, and Trina told him about the arguments over who pays for the massive drainage pump near where she lives in the sodden flatlands of west Lancashire, which turns a marsh into a polder.

The Irishman suggested another pub, on a listing barge. There, a biker type tells us to hoover up the scran, residual chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches, from his next-door neighbour's wake. Like many metal/biker/leather pubs, it's a bit over-subcultural and small c- conservative. I ask directions to the next pub and a woman walks us out of the pub and points us over there.

In the Tivoli Tavern I immediately feel at home; that ragged-arsed air of people who have given up. I went to the bar and the bloke to my right said "Hey. Hey. Do you want to buy some deep heat?" "Deep heat?" I say. The barmaid, bantering, says "be careful with him." "Well I don't know," I say. "Are you offering to rub it in?" The man turns his head away from me then back to the barmaid, and says to her "you've fucking overstepped the mark now, giving the wrong impression."

Back at our table, I compliment a woman on her hat. She's got that giddy, unreliable air of the professional drinker but I feel we are classified with a thumbs up. Ten minutes later, four of her extended family walk in, and in a comment which I find so astounding that I have to check it with her, she says to me and Trina, "come over here."

We settle round a bigger table, and hear tales from retired trawlermen better than anything you'll hear from a history graduate in a heritage centre. A man in his forties turns up, plonks himself down. He's wearing a hi-vis jacket and is carrying a bike tyre. He murmurs a schwa as a greeting.

Next day, we went to Cleethorpes on the bus. We walked along the prom waiting for the pub to open. I was dying for a piss but the toilets were locked, but a Council employee turned up at the same time to clean it so let me and Trina in.

---

The next morning, my actual birthday, she gave me my presents, a razored set of knives which I had been turning over and over, admiringly, at her house a couple of weeks ago, and a book which I'd asked her for -- Jennifer Walshe's Historical Documents of the Irish Avantgarde which I heard about from this post from Simon Steen-Andersen's 5:4 blog. At first I wished that she hadn't given away the conceit in the foreword and on her website -- that is, that it's all made up, with the inevitable citing of Flann O'Brien. I'd have preferred to have been tricked first and find out later, but once you start reading it, you forget about all that, and relax into that surrealist delerium of fiction whose pleasure comes from the closeness to that on which it is based. It's more Borges, Pierre Menard, I would say, than O'Brien.

Back at mine, my actual birthday, one of my drinking pals got me a wind-up Dalek, four bottles of poppers, and some Brie, and we met up and he took me out for some Titanic Plum Porter and a couple of double Zubrowkas. We sat with this 91-y-o Scottish Communist I know who was telling me about his adventures in Bulgaria when he was young.

My present to myself arrived from Russia after I'd ordered it on 2nd March, The Blue Book of the Alcoholic, by Pavel Krusanov, a collection of true stories about his hard-drinking coterie in St Petersburg. It's in Russian, but I'm going to get it translated and published in English. Trina and me shared a bed, her wriggling with desire and me not interested. "Just have a wank," I was thinking.

I started reading Anita Brookner's A Closed Eye whilst I was in London last month; and as you'll know she passed away last week. I learned from the obituaries that her birth name is the same one as the great Austrian symphonist.

It's a treacly novel, and I stopped reading it after the phone call I had with Donna when she told me that her life "couldn't be better" with the boyfriend she met after me. It was an irrational sadness, since I only want Donna to be happy; I just had this pang that that couldn't be with me, the force of which was undampened by my rational knowledge that it'd never work with someone on 70K and 200 miles away. She was so lovely though. Fucking on the stairs, dancing, chatting, her colourful little house in Milton Keynes, her spindly chairs with their little felt feet, her sextalk, her slippery grey top, her witty, sceptical friends in the pub garden in Tring. "I love how you look at me. I feel adored," she said, the morning after I was worried that I'd overdone the staring at her the night before, with my cock rigid as she sat on my thighs facing me.

That morning, I went back to my table at the pub and joined the early drinkers at 9am and got into a good conversation, grateful to him for taking my mind off Donna. I couldn't face any more Brookner gloom. I closed it, bookmarked now with a railway ticket, a piece of card one could think designed deliberately for powdering your nose, with its slippery laminate face and rolled-up two-inch steeple.

I restarted it when I was on the train the other day to Liverpool, an appropriate setting: a train full of dehumanised commuters trafficked by gang bosses to their jobs.

You can get the whole thing from the opening of chapter ten: "On waking, those cold mornings, she had a cowering feeling of dismay, as if she had been ordered into a life not of her choosing."

So far, so rather trying. But then, she is a writer who only doles rewards. As she says herself of a character: "Like many difficult people, she was capable of occasional persuasive kindnesses." Of her best friend's daughter, she says "Her heart ached for Lizzie, so bleak, so composed." It's a depressed but ambivalent admiration.

I'm on page 137 of 251 but there are stirrings afoot. After her self-admonishing "Love is sometimes wasted on those who act upon it", she gets to a stage where she says "she saw herself as a restless dissatisfied woman, dissatisfied because of that very innocence that seemed her safeguard, and likely to be frustrated through the very timidity of her desires."

On the train today, I felt bigheaded, Brookner backhandedly flattering me with a sex drive that she didn't possess -- as if that's a moral advantage to anyone. Simultaneously, I like the jouissance, "the pleasure of the text" in reading a book like A Closed Eye. To flatter your readers is not something any serious novelist does, surely, but I like testing how the commentaries on her characters might apply to my own states. That's a better form of pleasure for me, and it makes this difficult but rewarding novel something something something I feel like a reviewer now and I will stop.

---

Down a reopened pub this afternoon. There's a shortage of proper, classless, boozers in Lancaster, and it's a pleasure to see one being added to its number. It's a mongrel of a city Lancaster. The working class is divided between a poor rump of heavy-drinking customer service serfs who attend to unknown items in the bagging area, a group like me who make a profession of not working, and a rich, retired and racist group who have benefited from the golden age of British social provision.

To my right, two local women, to my left, two women from Barrow. The man sat opposite interrupted my conversation with the latter by asking where they were were from. He asked for the younger woman's name, but ignored her older friend, which I thought was very rude. A man of my acquaintance came over to retrieve his jacket. "I were gonna give it to Oxfam, you'd been gone so long," I said. "That's where I got it from!"

Last night, I made two large bowls of what we call "square chips" -- centimetre-diced potatoes done as chips -- for me and the girls, at half ten, once Jenny got in from performing in The Crucible. There was this collective grunting, scoffing sound, mayonnaise and salt, as we woofed them down, which made me tilt my head towards my chest in a silent glee.

I am in Liverpool, drinking in the magnificent High Early Victorian station bar. The restoration falls frustratingly short: the windows are uPvC and the chandeliers are made of plastic, but the Titanic Plum Porter is first class, and only £2.49 a pint.

I am waiting for my middle daughter Jenny. Her agent secured her a "workshop and preliminary audition" for a part in a soap opera on TV. It's all quite exciting. We walked through a leafy, thirties suburb of Liverpool to get to the studios and I left her with a fellow auditionee, an undergrad from Chorley whom we met at the security gate. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it on the train back. Then at 4pm, she's straight into a dress rehearsal for her role in The Crucible at our local rep. I've no idea where she gets her drive and ambition from; neither me nor Kirsty possess any.

---

On Tuesday I spent an hour in the police station. A friend was called for what is misrepresented as a "voluntary" interview, after she overlooked a stage in the procedure involved in obtaining wine from a supermarket. She was almost crying down the phone, asking me repeatedly if she will go to prison, or get in the paper. If they decide to send it to the Magistrates' Court then she will indeed have her fifteen minutes of infamy.

She drinks heavily, and badly. Never was someone less suited to alcohol than her. My experience with such people is that drinking is a shroud over depression, which in hers and many others' cases, has its roots in maternal deprivation, its recent past in a violent marriage, and its present in catty, co-dependent and aggressive relationships with her daughter and her ex. Her life is stuck, her conversation a palimpsest of repeatedly overwritten miseries. I drift off when she is on that riff; I thought of the Frank Auerbach exhibition I saw whilst in London last month. He paints and wipes and repaints over and over again on the same canvas.

She has achievable wishes -- to lose weight, to be pretty, to stop drinking, to meet a cliché (it involves shining armour), to sell her house and move to France, and to sever all connections with her ex -- to reify which she does nothing.

But she's generous and kind and our friendship is indissoluble. I'm loyal to people I like. She's bailed me with out with money she hasn't got when my gas meter has run out, or I say "no I'm going, I'm spent up" many times. We do micro-loans to each other all the time. When you're in the shit, only the poor will ever help you.

On Saturday she point-blank refused to let me pay for our dinner. I'm honest with her and won't pussyfoot about telling her she's "beautiful all the time", as Trina does. "What's going to happen, looby?" "Well, in the long run, you're going to sit with me getting pissed, going round in circles, saying the same things you've said for years, and not doing anything to help yourself."

In a cheap pub we had a two for a tenner deal of mono- and di-glyceride esters of fatty acids. She's awaiting a summons now to go to the Magistrates' Court. She finished a bottle of wine (to add to the one she had before she got to the police station), at which point it is time for me to leave, before the slurred flirting with the young barman becomes embarrassing.

---

Getting Away With It: Exhibit 1

I have just remembered that last night (it had been a really long day) I somehow ended up with my friend's ten quid that he'd won on a scratchcard and then promptly spent it on buying this foxy friend of a friend a triple G&T.

But as they say, nothing ventured with other people's money, nothing gained.

---

Getting Away With It: Exhibit 2

Friday, an afternoon and evening with Wendy, supporting the sparkling wine producers of northern Italy. I told her about my weekend with Kim and the man who asked me if a boiled egg feels like sucking something else. Kitty came round in the evening and me and Wendy danced through the whole of Born Slippy. We arranged to meet again on Friday to make some more spacecakes.

The stark record of the e-mail client tells no lies.

From: looby
To: Wendy
Subject: You
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2016 02:56:02 +0000

Can I have one night off from the self-restraint? I love that red and white top you had on. You've got lovely tits and I wanted to tell you to take your bra off, because your tits would look lovely under that top. I would love you, appreciate you, laugh with you, and lust constantly for you, and I would always say what I mean.x

From: Wendy
To: looby
Subject: Re: You
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2016 15:40:13 +0000

Afternoon petal. I am staving off a rich, ripening headache with a beer. I loved our hedonistic day and looked forward to it all week. I've always thought you were more romantic than rake. Hope you got home without an enforced pickled egg in your mouth. See you Friday for our bake-off Xx

---

My eldest has urged Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle on me. She's already halfway through the second volume. No novel sequence sounds more apposite for the addictively self-disclosing blogger.