"I hope I haven't fucked it up with you already, Lesley. It's just that I'm not really into that social media stuff. Autumn's a lovely season and a repeat of that walk in better shoes would be a good idea."

What the fuck am I saying? I don't like walking.

"And let me say it was a pleasure to meet a woman who spoke her mind for a change."

"Why do you think you fucked it up? We had a larf and talked bollocks. What more could one want. A walk up the Knott or similar would be nice if you fancy it."

---

On Friday I had bad hayfever, and in the evening the whole of the front of my face and teeth and jaw started hurting; I didn't sleep much. Histamine reaction because of too much drink. Another opportunity for a lesson to be ignored.

Saturday, and Kitty and Wendy were sparkling with the prospect of a child-free afternoon. "Oops, I'm sorry! Wrong house. Beg your pardon," I said, to Kitty's near-neighbour, a twentysomething girl who has twice opened the door to see a stranger with a bottle of Prosecco about to walk in.

We divided the optical brighteners up between us, and waited until the head-shaking, oyster-swallowing bit had passed. The pain in my face was dissolved, then saturated into pleasure. I stroked my jawline almost not believing it.

It was our annual Music Festival, a giddy air in the streets, and a hint of Bakhtinian carnivalesque. In the Borough, a trio of young men from Leeds were playing wistfully on muted trumpet, drums, and keyboards. Lesley was sitting a couple of yards away behind a pillar, on what looked like another date. I didn't say hello. Kitty and Wendy said he looked permed and made-up. "It's OK," I thought. "I'm never in competition with any other man."

---

Sunday was Wendy's daughter's birthday, a flabby ceilidh at the yoghurt-knitters' cafe. Wendy's ex shakes my hand with a mistrustful, palm-avoiding concave.

"And who'd have thought," said Kitty, who had had a short game of dominoes before she left the house, "she's a drug counsellor," and moved her eyes to two o'clock. We gathered a group of fifty to seventysomething women round the table. A subculture of two ex-pub landladies, a drug counsellor, Kitty and Wendy, and me. So many stories, if only people would listen to women.

I have been revolting again.

Teaching Practice Colleague asked me if she should book me a place on the coach to Manchester for the rally marking a General Expression of Disgust at our ruling party. She'd never been on anything like this before, and she texted me saying that she felt a bit nervous about the day ahead.

"Why are you getting in a tizz, lovely? I'm only getting myself into a slight one because of the thought of sitting next to you. I'll just want to kiss you all the time."

We flirt all the time, but I know my place.

On the coach -- Lancaster sent two coachloads of malcontents -- she told me about the worries that had kept her awake, which were only partially about the crowd and being arrested, and more to do with her husband's drinking. She made him promise to give up the drink as a condition of her agreeing to marry him. Women are tragic creatures sometimes, convinced that they can change their men.

She said that she didn't want to lose me in the crowd. "TPC, we will never be apart, not this afternoon, nor in the future." We started planning our economy honeymoon, a night in a tent in her back garden.

Sunday's most kissable leftie

We were hanging around for a long time before we set off; godawful "radical" music blaring out, all crashing guitars and assumed shared attitudes. Our diet was a sensible pre-pack of cherry tomatoes, cheese sandwiches and bottled water. How I wish I'd packed some beer into my bag. There's only so far I can go in a day under the grey pillow of sobriety.

Someone started a chant -- "we're not having it, we're not having it." After it died a natural death, I put my arm round Teaching Practice Colleague and shouted "we are having it." "But I'm a married woman!" she protested, and blushed with too much veracity.

When it finally ended I found a shite pub which served a cold pint for £3.40. The barman deftly changed my tenner for a fiver so it cost me £8.40. I'd done enough protesting by this time, and chatted with some people from Coventry instead.

---

I emailed Lesley."Hello Lesley -- I was just wondering if you were still up for tomorrow. It's just that I've been stood up more times than a Russian doll, and I could be on the verge of losing £2.40 here in train fare."

She assured me that she certainly is, and we swapped mobile numbers. She warned me she might be a bit late, "but don't panic." "That's fine Lesley. I'll have a novel I'll be pretending to be reading."

"Just make sure it's not upside down," she said. I took my current read -- Tom Jones -- into the pub and held it upside down.

She was attractive, and attractively opinionated. She's got a Fine Art degree and we talked about subjectivity in artistic judgements. She had an arsey side to her which I liked -- everything with Lesley would be short-term, today, now, just as I like it. But I was drilling myself into the friendzone, I could tell. We went for a mercifully short walk along the shore. I felt silly in my grey pure new wool jacket, Italian trousers and black court shoes.

At the end she said she'd enjoyed it, and asked me -- the second consecutive date that has ended this way -- if I'd like to "connect on Fuckbook," banging home the final nail in the sexless coffin.

It was Wine Club that night. When I got in, I sent her a text. "I don't want to connect on FB. Fuck all that. I'd rather see you again."

That was at half eleven last night, and I will be surprised if I hear from her again.

I was trying some trousers on in the charity shop the other day; they made me look like Max Wall. On pulling back the curtain, I was suprised to see Gaynor pulling her shirt off over her head. We walked up the hill together, past my house. "Well... yes. Yes. I do love him. I do." When you have to empathise it, there's a qualification coming.

"It's just... he's a smoker, and he drinks too much, and it's so difficult..." It's a reference to his lunatic Colombian wife who for five years now has put every spiteful obstacle in their path.

---

Had an evening with Kitty and Wendy, up to our knees in Prosecco and speed, trying to shunt the din of Wendy's child and the muzak which Kitty thinks improves an evening.

The day before, Wendy sent me a text. "I want you to sidle up to me on the train and offer me amphetamines." I had to pop back tio my house briefly and she kissed me on the lips outside. We (just me and her) arranged to have a trip in the park on Friday, but I'm at Manchester Crown Court that day as a couple of people I know are being prosecuted for chaining themselves to a barrel at a proposed fracking site.

---

Popped into the yoghurt-knitters' cafe (too remote to attract the violent nostalgia that has afflicted the Cereal Cafe recently) just to pinch their internet. Three people I know turned up and asked to share the table. Mandy, who sat next to me is gorgeous, a kink-haired clever high currency in the circles of left-wing men who fancy her and the derring-do she might provide.

"Yeah, not too bad," she said, starting on house removation, a safe topic in the conversation of the macrame belt of Lancaster. "I just feel I am spending a lot of money every day before I even put my clothes on." "I wouldn't have thought you'd have to pay for it," I said. I spent some of the night re-running an imagined conversation, in which I mouthed the words "I want to fuck you" at the threshold of her lip-reading perception.

Got to my girls' house. "Just been for a pint with Mandy. She's a foxy..." "Don't even think about it. Her boyfriend's younger, taller and funnier than you," said my youngest. "You're just so sad Dad."

Mid-Gogglebox, my eldest said she wanted to be in the police. "Which sort?" I asked. "The sort that batter down the door." This is a bit of a hardening of attitudes from a daughter who a few months ago was asking what grades you'd need to get into Durham to do Archaeology.

---

I'm stopping on Trina's narrowboat for a few days because the new lodger moved in a week earlier than I'd thought, so I had to rearrange the lodgers a bit and put the Chinese girl into my room, assuming that a Chinese will have least objection to sleeping on a futon. But that means I'm a bit homeless for a few days.

It's moored at Garstang, a lovely place in which to sleep. I've read every word of today's Guardian, even down to knowing that Brentford have sacked their manager and that squash has failed to be included in the Tokyo Olympic games. After a couple of small sherries last night I slipped and dropped my phone in the canal, as well as banging my arse really hard on the metal canal bank liner effort, which is making me walk around like I've got severe constipation.

I got the bus tonight back to internetted Lancaster, partly to pick up a conversation on the dating site. I told her that I'd like to meet in a pub whose name could have been used by a figure in our culture who evokes the sophistication to which the English can attain at their most refined -- Benny Hill -- and so we're meeting on Monday in The Fighting Cocks.

Got in this morning and saw the headmistress I had two dates with last year had reappeared on the dating site. After our second meeting she emailed me to say that she was sorry but she wasn't over her husband yet and apologised for any implication that she was leading me on. That is decent and honest.

Seeing that fifteen months has passed, I thought it might be worth contacting her again, so I sent a polite email, wondering if she remembered meeting me, telling her my girls had gone to Sixth Form, asking after her, and saying it would be a pleasure to hear from her again.

Yes of course I remember you! Thank you for the message.

[some boring shite about her children, because I mentioned mine so as not to appear too eager]

I dipped my toe cautiously back into this site a few weeks ago and saw you here – and of course I received your note in February,

It wasn't a "note", it was a Valentines card made from one inch by one inch post-it notes which she had to peel off to read the full message, which I delivered to the pub in which she's a regular, not knowing her address, on 14th February, a day on which I could hardly afford the bus fare.

which was very flattering, thank you. However, in both cases, I decided not to contact you. I really enjoy your company but don’t think it would work for me in a romantic sense. Which is why we’re both here isn’t it?

Good luck looby – you deserve it!

I would normally assume that that means "I don't fancy you," but at the end of our first date we were snogging at the bus stop, and while she was still on the bus she texted me to say "Lovely night. Can we start the next one how we ended it?" We met the following Tuesday. I said "Could I ask that you wear that blue dress again?"

I went to hers. Immediately I was inside her door we started snogging. She's taller than me and I found it a turn-on to have to tilt my head up slightly to kiss her as I pulled up the blue dress and ran my fingers across her knickers. She cooked me dinner and we went to bed and had as successful a fuck as you can have on the second date. I told her honestly that she's gorgeous, without mentioning the modern abomination of a shaved cunt.

So "romantically" can't mean "sexually." But women talk in code all the time. Another rejection. I don't what the fuck more I've got to do. Stick with Trina, and see relationships as a form of commerce, successful in a disabused way.

Trina's next wish for her birthday was to go on the Settle to Carlisle railway, a feat of Victorian engineering which cost at least a hundred lives, not only from accidents but also from a smallpox epidemic. "The terrain traversed is among the bleakest and wildest in England", says Wikipedia, but is also, even to someone to whom all fields and hills look the same, and whose idea of a country walk is a hike across a car park to the pub's entrance -- beautiful.

We stayed in Appleby in a £140 a night hotel -- something impossible for me by my own means. It's an 1830s pile with a creaky, listing staircase and a soporific wood-panelled bar with none of the din and artificial noise and strobing television with which British public spaces are saturated. I wanted to hibernate there and let drink-softened days of inaction happen to me.

We ordered our evening meal and I overheard the receptionist shouting down the phone to a deaf enquirer. "No, I'm afraid we haven't found Mr Thompson's plus-fours." We had one of the most delicious meals I've ever hand, crab cakes with roasted vegetables, squid in garlic and basil sauce, and Appleby cheese and leek cake in a batter made with the house bitter from Carlisle.

We found the best pub in town, full of swearing and tattoos. Three women walked in and went up to the old blokes at the next table. One of them opened their conversation with "Did you get your fat balls?"

But it was the railway we were there for. On the platform, the stationmaster came up to an infirm lady, addressed her by her name, and told her that he'd ring Leeds to make sure there was someone to help her get off there.

We went to Horton-in-Ribblesdale, over the border in Yorkshire. Neither of us are interested in walking, so we found the pub and had a meal which brought us back to the median of English food: generalised fishcakes and a bag of undressed leaves advertised as a salad. In what was to be a pattern for the village, the pub was full of hectoring notices. "No muddy boots, large rucksacks or wet clothes in this bar." "Dogs must be on a short lead and children must be accompanied at all times." "Please be aware these toilets are not changing rooms."

A couple of guests arrived to book in. Me and Trina, ploughing through the food, were inadvertently looking like the sort of people who were eyeing up the spirits bottles for a raid. The landlady said "Well, it's just I can't leave the bar. You'll have to wait until the girl's here."

The unwelcoming, admonishing mood continued elsewhere in the village. At the entrance to the road to the railway station, a sign with a crossed out camera and train said "No entry for trainspotters vehicles." Haughty, but no apostrophe. A sign in someone's window read "If you don't live here, don't park here." It's a village determined to maintain the mean-spirited stereotype of its county.

Back in a gentler Westmorland, we returned to the Hare and Hounds, where we chatted to a man who was born in the same hospital as Trina, and heard convincingly precise anecdotes of an ex-Marine who bought us a drink. There was nothing to eat, but the barmaid told us to get a pie from the shop next door and bring it back. Appleby is a one-horse town but its inhabitants advertise it well.

That is, except during the Horse Fair, when thousands of pikeys descend on the town with their horses. The landlady told us that whilst it's on, they have to hire a removal firm and carpet fitters, and a storage unit in Carlisle. They have to take out all the lightbulbs except those behind the bar, all the pictures, the TV, the fruit machine, the tables and chairs, the condiment bottles, and take the carpets up -- because they piss in the corner-- and remove all the glassware and replace it with plastic glasses.

Back at our lovely hotel, we chose from a six-page wine list that treated you with the respect of assuming some basic knowledge of grape varieties and regions, with no descriptions of the wine at all beyond what is on the label. I asked our waiter about the Horse Fair. "No, we don't really get that sort of trade here." I felt comfortably snobbish, and wriggled myself deeper into my armchair.