Thursday 1pm

I'm on a train to Newcastle, to spend a couple of days, and sexless nights -- in the same bed, as it has always been -- with Kim. The Racing Commentator is coming over from Leeds tomorrow as well.

It's going to be a good end-week, I can feel it in my bones. Having The Commentator there will dilute the intensity that Kim can sometimes bring to 3am. A couple of years ago, when it was announced that mephedrone was being made illegal, she maxed out her credit card buying it. She's still got plenty left, and I'm looking forward to the glittery, brightening sensation of meow-meow.

We're meeting in just over an hour's time. I am being taken for lunch and cocktails.

---

Midnight

I'm in Kim's spare room. I asked to sleep here, instead of with her, as I've had a bit of speed and will be a bit restless for a while.

I walked into the pub, where she was sitting cross-legged and looking gorgeous. Her dishevelled dark blonde hair fell kinked onto the collar of a red coat; she was wearing a polka dot black and white dress, a shiny thin red belt which was tied at that sexy distance somewhat above the waist. Black tights and black calf-length boots.

We chatted away, about her unwanted suitor in her local, me and Trina's no sex agreement and its benefits, and so on. "Oh, Kim, you do look very polka dottedly lovely," I said. "How the fuck do I get to hang about with girls like you?" A little later, she followed something I said with "yes, but you were probably looking at my tits at the time." "Well," I replied, "you have got quite nice tits, actually."

We finished our drinks. She linked her arm into mine, me feeling like the cat that's got the cream, and we walked up to the cocktail bar for our martini lunch -- cheese, figs, beetroot, olives and so on; I had a negroni (gin, Campari and red vermouth), and a Dutch mojito (made with Genever rather than rum).

We went to a sweary, slightly manky pub. The woman at the next table was asking me about Mother's Day. "Have you got a cord?" "Sorry?" "Have you got your mam a cord?" "Oh, a card? Yes, yes I have." Kim looked so, so, attractive, with her undone hair. As we sat silently in a reverie together, drinking electronic, overcold beer, our upper arms against each others', our legs nodding to the music, I slid into a despondent mood. I was longing to put my arm round her, to stroke her and kiss her, to run my hands through her hair, aching at the boundary, but allotted into amiable sexlessness.

I forced myself out of it. We got the train back to her Mum and Dad's house, where mum made us omelette and beans. It was that kind of centrally-heated, tea on your lap, talking-over-the-telly evening that was my childhood.

Sunday, 11.30am

On Friday, it was pouring down. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Miners' Strike, and she showed me a fascinating review of a book of photographs by Keith Pattison taken at the time in Easington, one of the hundreds of pit villages that Thatcher sacked. She took me out in the car to have a look at the place.

Josie Smith, a retired and disabled miner arrested outside his home. The police provoked more ill feeling as they insisted on walking strike-breakers through the village to and from the colliery. Frequent skirmishes ensued, in this one; Josie was arrested but later released to the relief of his distraught wife. (Photo and text © Keith Pattison 2015: permission applied for)

Houses that were once family homes are now armoured with metal grilles against individual vandalism rather than the massive programme of violent, state-organised, police-managed, vandalism of thirty years ago. Whole streets have been torn down and grassed over, and millions of pounds are still poured into places like Easington in ineffectual regeneration projects. I'm pleased that at that time I was getting up at 5am to get the TUC bus to Burnley colliery, where we aimed obloquy and the occasional half-brick at the buses bringing the scabs in.

Saturday, a late start, with sherry for breakfast, then into Durham for a few hours' boozing. Crowded into The Dun Cow, a man asked us if we'd agree that eating a hard-boiled egg is similar to the sensation of having a cock in your mouth. Another couple told us about how she extricated herself from a violent boyfriend. Someone asked me if Kim was my daughter. We fenced off the usual surprised reaction when we tell people we are not a couple. "No," she said. "We realised early on that we're not compatible that way." Did we? "She doesn't fancy me, that's what she means," I said.

Saturday, with Wendy, Kitty, and Wendy's child and the latter's auntie, started at a cafe in the heart of the macramé belt: adverts on the wall for hypnobirthing, shamanic drumming, and a "sling meet", for parents who carry their children in papooses.

Auntie Veronica's child died a few years ago, and conveniently for Wendy, she displaces her maternal instincts onto her niece. Whenever I am becoming irritated with her constant feminising compliments to her niece about her dress, hair, shoes, and so on, I rebuke myself for being so ungrateful about her endless patience with puzzles, colouring in, and the toilet.

After a couple of hours we adjourned, agreeing to meet later. I had an engagement, as my eldest had texted me a couple of days earlier. "England are playing Ireland [in the Six Nations] on Saturday!" That's her way of saying "I want us to spend some time together." Which we did, enjoyably.

Later that evening, Wendy texted. "Get your skinny arse round to mayhem." Mayhem is a half rhyme with the name of the street on which she lives. The inexhaustible Veronica sat in the front room watching Doctor Who with Niecy, until bringing us the glad tidings that she'd fallen asleep on the settee. "So -- are we going to have a game of dominoes?" asked Wendy.

At what seemed far too early, Kitty, who had only played a short form of the game, said she'd like to go. Well, you get in a taxi and I'll stay here dancing with Wendy, I didn't say. I tried gently to talk her round, but she does have the hardest job of all of us, in a rough school; and in a rare display of gallantry, I walked her home.

Then to my cold bedroom; mdma and longing coursing through me, a druggie on heat.

I'd left my diary at Wendy's. This morning, she dropped it off. It was enclosed with a card, another reproduction of an old Penguin book cover, this time of a novel called "The Horizontal Man". I texted her saying "The Horizontal Man sends many thanks and a kiss x".

"Ha ha, if ever a card had your name on it. I'm at my Dad's guzzling wine and snorting stuff. No lady Xx"

"Who'd fancy a lady? Have a lovely afternoon Xx"

"Oh, sweetheart... X"

It's very difficult not to feel something in addition to both lust and friendship for a girl you fancy and whose company can almost seem magical, who talks to you like that. But to entertain any hopes with Wendy will only ever lead to a pointless, circular sadness, born of that stupid form of vanity in which I spend nights wondering what I could change about myself to make her want me.

---

In literary news this week, I have managed to order the book which provides the first of the quotations over there on the right, Pavel Krusanov's tales from the lives of his coterie of heavy drinkers in St Petersburg. It's available only in print and in Russian, but I'd like to get it translated into English, and I know who I'm going to approach first despite him never replying to my appreciative and questioning email after I purchased his translation of some poems by Osip Madelstam. I've long wanted to read the whole thing myself, but I'm sure it would sell a few copies to English-speaking sots as well.

Wendy's just left, to pick up her daughter, although she said, and I believe her, that she'd rather stay and open the next bottle. She was wearing one of my favourite dresses of hers, a black and white one with a small dogtooth pattern. It fits her beautifully. She is fucking gorgeous.

We were talking about the floods, and I mentioned a really good clothes shop -- too expensive for me, but lovely clothes -- which is relocating to a drier location after a tide of sludge ran through the premises and all its stock. "That's where I get my dresses from," she said. That's where Seriouscrush used to get many of hers too. Clearly the buyer and I have very similar taste.

"I do have close friends, but there are very few people I can really say anything to. It's just you and Kitty really." A stab of sadness and distance in the stomach. It made me wonder whether she thinks us getting sexually involved would spoil that situation.

She was asking me about the weekend -- which I haven't told you about either yet. Me and Trina went to a weekender and stayed in Charnock Richard services. I love staying there. It feels artificial and wrong somehow, as if you're in a play about an imaginary hotel.

The man on the far right is not in the least bit envious
of another around his own age who is making a nice living
out of playing soul and house music in between
dancing with his gorgeous girlfriend.

We danced on and off for nine hours on the Friday, and a good three hours or so on Saturday. It's very sociable this scene, I love the music, and I love the flickers of flirtation on the dancefloor. I want to be looked at and to be found attractive. Part of my calculations with Trina is that I need to keep her on my side so that she can pay for it all and do the driving. Oh dear, the venality of it.

To my relief, there was not a scintilla of desire from her side, despite her dancing knickerless in my room the other night, and the sex-catalysing drugs we were on. I'm actually a little ashamed of ever having had sex with her. Looking back on it, the sex with Trina was more taking advantage of her; but on Saturday, it was twin beds, not even a hug, just a "night night." And this is correct.

About an hour after she left, Wendy rang. "Looby, I've been thinking..." I stopped my breath, wondering if she was going to say what I want to hear. But no, it was about a possible business opportunity.

---

Yesterday afternoon, the unhinged drugged-up man of latent violence was in the pub again. I ignored him, but a minute after I'd walked in he greeted me, all sweetness and light, and we exchanged the couplets of Lancashire's shorthand form of cordiality.

You might remember the episode during which Loveable But Uncool Friend and me were in a loo cubicle together, sharing the desiccated love, when, with his foghorn of a voice and lack of social awareness, he gave away what we were up to. A paranoid lunatic, a flotsam of maternal deprivation, barged into the cubicle -- fortunately, just as I was on my own, making a public sound of re-buckling my belt.

The loony was in the pub again this evening. He came over, stood over us without talking, trying to intimidate us. "You right fella, how you doing?" I said. He stood there, said nothing but pointed to his eyes whilst looking at me and Vic, before sitting down.

The whole pub noticed, but I resolutely carried on as though nothing untoward had happened. It was bothering Uncool Friend, who, becoming more uncool, stared at them and looked uneasy and twitchy, before leaving. I sympathise, but it would have been better to blank them.

My barman friend told me that one of the lunatic's company was a smackhead and had beaten up someone very badly outside the pub in which he had worked. "He's a fucking psychopath. He should have been banned from every pub round here."

Because I can drink most people under the table, I knew that all I had to do was to sit there and carry on drinking, until he slumps with the drunkard's mixture of self-pity and flaccid aggression, but it was his more sober-seeming psychopath friend I was more worried about. I also wished I hadn't inadvertently dragged my friends into this situation.

Cometh the hour, and they depart. I pretend I haven't noticed and don't join in the quiet relieved sigh of the rest of the pub. You never know who's watching.

As much as I like the pub in question, neither a principled complaint to management nor my cajoling cross-class verbal competence are going to be effective against a smackhead with a dangerous mate. I have decided therefore that I am not going to be in the same place as them again, and I'm going to tell my friends this.

If he walks in, I am going to finish my drink at my leisure, and give them the code phrase "oh well, peeps, I must be getting my train," which will be a signal for us all to meet up in ten minutes' time in a nearby pub which is posh enough for him to reject it by its invocation of his sense of class inferiority.

Never mind; I turned my thoughts to something much lovelier and slid into the sexiness of the text I got from Wendy this morning, who was wondering if I was free on Wednesday for a drink. "Of course I am Wendy, I'd love that, although you'd also be more than welcome round at mine and you could warm your cockles in front of my coal fire with a bottle of Prosecco."

"That sounds lovely. I'll bring a bottle. See you at 1?"

I clicked back and forth on my primitive phone, looking repeatedly at her message and my reply, leavening two simple texts with sex; and her command the other night: "Put your hands up my skirt", over and over again in my head.

Not for the first time, I get stuck in the kitchen with the husband of a woman I'm pursuing.

I had been in a pleasant state after having one of the special biscuits that me and Wendy made the other night. From bed, I texted her. "Got a bit peckish so have had one of those biscuits. Thank you for turning my hash into them, and for looking as sexy as fuck while you were doing it."

The next afternoon, I'm at Kitty's. She's been spending half term week wisely, by drinking, mainly. A couple of hours and a few bottles later, we decided it would be a merry jape to turn up unannounced at Wendy's.

We stopped at the off-licence then went round and knocked on the back door. Wendy, husband, and daughter are having tea but Wendy welcomes us in. She whispers to us that they've had a massive row.

Everyone has a drink, and me and Kitty repair to the front room, before somehow, the configuration is changed, and I am in the kitchen with the estranged husband. This calls for a degree of simulation. I fence around what I want to ask him, but eventually broach the subject as casually as I can.

"So, still looking forward to Japan then?"

There's a silence during which makes me worried that he's going to say that he's decided against it. It's quite a move for someone who isn't very curious about other cultures, despite his desultory employment as a part-time temporary Lecturer in Howsthatgoigntogetyouajob Studies at Ribbleside Cosmopolitan University.

At last, he says that his work permit has come through; but that he's still looking at other countries. I conceal my relief.

We move into the front room, and he plays with his daughter for half an hour or so, before doing one of the those elongated goodbyes that are quite eloquent in what is not spoken.

Eventually the front door closes. We all look at each other and sigh. "Was it OK, us coming round?" asks Kitty. "Yes, yes! It broke up the atmosphere. He was going on and on at me about me being still pissed the other morning. It's fucking half term! And even if it isn't it's none of his business."

Back at home, Trina arrives. We go to my room and put some house music on. She's staying overnight before we go out this weekend.

In a repeat of her bizarre behaviour of a couple of weeks ago, she takes her trousers and knickers off, and starts dancing bottomless. I gently ask her about this but she says she's alright. It's strange, even allowing for us having had a little bash at the old serotonergic N-benzyl derivative of the substituted phenethylamine 2C-I.

She gets a bit tearful and in this half-clothed state, hugs me and says repeatedly, "it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter." I am arching backwards slightly to avoid any contact with her cunt.

After a while, I say that I'm going to have a little nap. "Oh yes? A 'nap'? There's only reason why you want to go to bed."

"Pardon?"

She starts accusing me of wanting to take her to bed. That is the furthest thing from my my mind, but she won't have it, so, as I have done before, I say "OK, well you believe what you want. I'm telling you the truth about my motives, but if you want to believe something else, nothing I can say will stop you."

She won't let me sleep. "You could have saved up your tiredness for when I'm not around." I am laying there, being nagged and berated by someone who a few minutes earlier has told me she loves me.