The bailiff came round again. Unfortunately, his visit coincided with the time the postman sometimes arrives, so I opened the door. He stood there with a clipboard and a recording device and managed to get me to sign up for £25 a month, but I'll write to them saying I can only afford a tenner. I've just started a subscription to a wine club for £20 a month, and it ill befits a gentleman to spend more on his debts than he does on his wine.

---

There isn't much to say about my date in Manchester last night with Sally. We met up in a proper old boozer down a side street near the Town Hall, where we pushed the conversation stiffly forward for an hour, about cats and our jobs and her house renovation, until she said that she was very tired and that she'd better go. She stood up to leave and said "I'm not really getting any connection, so..." "No, me neither," I said. It sounds a bit blunt but it was amicable enough and it's best to be straightforward at the outset.

Glad to have an hour to myself, I settled down with another beautiful pint of Mancunian from Brightside Brewery in Bury, and an essay about Larkin in the LRB, relieved not to be talking about window frames and cat litter trays. I rang Kim to tell her about it, and emailed Donna, who replied "You're lovely -- there's someone out there for you. I'm sure." I also texted Trina, just to quash any hopes she might still have.

On the train back I got talking to two girls from Preston, one of whom was an actress returning from an audition for a part in a West End show. They'd already told her she hadn't got the part, so she'd done what any sensible English girl would do in that situation -- gone out on the lash with her mate.

I have declared Winter; the first of the wood the neighbours have given me is spitting away in the fire, heating the room in a lopsided Victorian way: one side of your face glowing, the opposite leg stroked by a draught, against which all measures are naught. But infinitely better than the in-arrears, desiccated cloy of central heating.

---

Trina sent me an email which started by saying that she was pleased that she no longer feels any romantic feelings for me. That's a fucking relief. She then informed me that my behaviour towards Donna was "very unfeminist" and that I "treated/treat Donna like a sex object and a whore." The email then swerved back to say that "nevertheless", she is looking forward to our planned orchestrics.

I ignored it. I was more interested in inviting Wendy and her daughter out to the fireworks at Kirkby Londsale. They're better than ours: in Lancaster, Council lackeys go around with buckets of water, taking sparklers off children.

I accidentally sent the text to Trina, therefore lighting the blue touchpaper. I was told, in unambiguous language, that I hold Wendy in higher regard than her, and was twice invited to fuck off, one of which was spatially and affectively qualified with the phrase "out of my life." She also said that she'd read a letter from Mary-Ann (with whom I am in regular correspondence), but assured me that "I don't mind about Mary-Ann. All she goes on about is her [private problems]." I was silent over this as well, partly out of renewed shock at her egregious ignorance of how unacceptable it is to read other people's private letters.

In the morning, the usual abject apologies, urging us to take "little steps at a time" to "rebuild"; explanations involving drink, and thanks extended to me for being "fair and patient" -- and so on, and on, and cyclically, on.

She wanted to drive up and take me out for a pizza "to make this up to you." She proposed coming back to mine for a bop in the bedroom. I told her I thought it best if we called it a day after our tea. She did come back to mine for an hour or so, but eventually I did that prayer-like clasping of one's hands and a bright "Oh well...", which she understood as her cue.

Back at hers, probably deluding herself that we are rebuilding through pizza, she hit the Merry Tablets. In one of her texts, she looks back in detail upon an episode from our sexual past. Reading it, I turn my head away from the screen.

---

Donna rang tonight. She'd been on a successful first date with a man from Milton Keynes. After an hour down the pub, they went back to hers and they put up flatpack furniture in two hours of Carry on Screwing British DIY innuendo. I told her that I am not drinking in November. "I'm glad you're stopping drinking for a while, looby." "Oh dear," I laughed. "Was it that obvious?" And then she said the first of...

Three things I was skippety-happy to hear this week: 1) Donna: "I like you and I care about you." That was an eye-glistener. "I like you too Donna. Very, very much."

2) Overheard from the living room after I'd cooked the girls' tea on Saturday. "Mmm, roast potatoes. Dad's good at them."

3) Bumping into the former director of a performance space located in a higher education establishment not far from here: "Yes, you and A--- were the first people to really get what we were trying to do there."

---

I've got a date on Tuesday in Manchester. She's 5'11".

Trina drove my Mum back to Middlesbrough and collected me from there. Around Tebay we got a text from Chris wondering if we were out, and we had a testy couple of hours down the pub. It was easy to predict what would happen once the social brake of having Chris there was released. Chris is the wrong person for Trina to talk to about sex. Obliquely referring to the content of my steamy letter to Donna that she read the other day, she said "Yes but you just feel treated like a prostitute." "Oh yes please," replied Chris. Trina went to the loo and Chris said "She loves you." "Well, I can't help that."

Back at mine, we went searching again for something I'd dearly like to find. I deliberately set Trina to have a look through the kitchen shelves, on which is a jumble of letters, cards and paraphernalia.

It worked. She came up to my room waving a postcard Donna sent me from Paris, which she'd made from a picture of herself. "I know why," she said, about to lose control. "She looks like Kirsty. That's why -- she looks like Kirsty." I didn't look round, didn't look at the flapping picture of Donna. "Could you put that postcard back where it came from please?"

I heard her close the front door. An hour later, she sent a series of texts, one of which said "You are a cold-hearted, selfish perv." "I agree with your assessment of me. When you're sober let me know what we're going to do."

The following day she emailed saying that she'd still like to go dancing "as long as you haven't found anyone else by then." I replied saying that I was very pleased she'd said that and that I look forward to our Winter programme. As long as I manage her, she's fine.

Can't see us getting much of a swerve on at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, but we're also booked into a full afternoon in which the Arditti String Quartet play a demanding programme of the complete string quartets of James Dillon, with a two hour break in the middle in which I'm going to have a couple in one of the finest cities for real ale in the north. At the end, I want to feel fucked, by intense chamber music.

I'm going over the day before for a concert entitled EEEEE, which stands for Early English Experimentalism (played by the) Edges Ensemble. I am going to enter into the spirit of things by taking some e shortly before it starts.

---

When I got back from Middlesbrough there was a letter from the solicitors.

"Regrettably"?

My Dad recognised me straight away, but he's not coherent much of the time. He's on a lot of drugs and said he remembers Kirsty's fingers as being "very jerky, with those twelve-inch nails." He said that a cat got into the ward yesterday and was wandering about.

He started fiddling with his catheter and I had to say "that's probably alright as it is, Dad." He's already pulled out one cannula. I think he enjoyed me and Sam visiting though, listening to the chat between ourselves, because much of the time he can't respond. I collected a capitalised leaflet, "What To Do When You Think Someone Is Dying", on my way out.

At my sister's, I am relieved to be in the kitchen to avoid the cajoling and frazzled story reading of bedtime. I made us a chilli for dinner and a less successful tortilla (Spanish omelette) for tea. I managed to get away at 9.30 tonight to the newish Wethers. In the safety of his car, Sam expressed his disenchantment with it all, how he didn't realise how much like hard work it would be, and a weakly encrypted irritation with his girlfriend.

The Middlesbrough people I've met are accepting and friendly and easy to talk to. The man over there was telling me he's starting a new job on Monday, in a bookie's. I said I'd always fancied working in a bookies, since the smoking ban anyway. Middlesbrough has had one of these pointless EU-funded makeovers in which Poundland gets a new pavement and there are metalled signs to the last remaining public institutions, one of which is that reliable indication that a town is absolutely fucked -- a gallery of modern art.

---

Last night I got away to have a stopover with Kim. She'd been on an unsucessful date with a man whose moniker is Dreamweaver. "I suppose you find me a bit boring," he correctly suggested, at the end of their first and last date. She was wearing a grey thigh-length minidress under a black zip-up jacket; black tights, and little boots with a zip up the side and velcro straps across the top. "I can't even give it away on a plate," she said. I love it when she crosses her legs, forcing her dress to take the angled shorter route across her thighs.

I gabbled a bit to her about Donna, before she said we were going somewhere else. She took my hand and we left the pub out of the back way and down a pitch black steep-stepped alley, to this unmarked door to a flat above a shop. You had to ring to be let in. There was a makeshift bar in the front room and DJs in the back. We danced and I had a trophy wife feeling. It was that moneyed but well-intentioned arthouse crowd, bearded and bobbed -- but good, at least they're doing something with it. They've refused all funding and just run it from the proceeds of the bar.

Back at hers we danced some more and then slept chastely together. I noticed that often, when I was getting into that lovely space -- formless, optimistic -- of dance music, that she would snap me back down out of that, to her life, to add more details to her failed date. I don't want to speak when I'm dancing.

---

Edit The title is simply a spelling mistake, nothing cryptic.

I'm in Middlesbrough for a few days while my Mum is in Lancaster having a rest from my Dad. I was to be "looking after" him, which conjured up blanching images of flannels and genitalia, but I have had the jammiest stroke of luck.

Instead of having to endure his company twenty-four hours a day, my duties are now much abbreviated, as he is hospitalised in The Biffa Bacon General Hospital, having thankfully banged his head the other day, compounding his malingering and self-pitying attitude towards a broken leg. All I have to do then, is a couple of hours of hospital visiting a day. My Mum has warned me that he might not know who I am. One day he saw three goats at the end of his bed, and more recently was pleased to find himself on holiday in Margate.

---

I had my "voluntary" interview with the police yesterday. No matter how prepared you think you are, and how many times you've rehearsed your answers and their possible subversion, it's exacting being in a tiny, airless room with a copper, your solicitor, a tape recorder, and your guilt. My solicitor told me that they had very little on me and that Plod would be going on a fishing expedition, so in the words of the hectoring old ad, just say no.

An envelope destined for a former lodger of mine was intercepted at Gatwick. The airport's drug detection machines identified the "substance" as methamphetamine, and so the police came looking for a meth lab which might have been hidden between the Eurovision Song Contest CDs and the poetry of W N Herbert.

There was an air of wanting to get it over and done with. "No," I laughed with unwonted nervousness, "meth is one thing I've never tried." As soon as that was out I realised its implication that I'd tried other drugs, having previously answered "no" to the question "Have you ever been a drug user, Mr Looby?"

He clicked the tape recorder to a stop, and said "I'm not sending this file up. It won't go any further as there's insufficient evidence." I asked about getting the money back for the broken down door and having to change the locks. They said that as they'd been round four times to try to enter the house peaceably -- and we'd all been out -- they had been "left with no option" but to break in, so I'd be unlikely to get my money back. I still think that's wrong.

Outside, the light is all turned up. I am a little disappointed at the intensity of my elation, but taken by surprise at how wobbly my legs are. I am reminded of Kirsty's Dad, walking down The Strand after being released from the Old Bailey, quiet for some safe yards, before saying to his daughter, "That's a relief. Because I did it."

I texted Erica, Kim and Trina. Trina came down for a drink, as did fortuitously, Seth, a friend of mine I've been seeing quite a bit of lately. We agree not to talk about his interest in Healing With Coloured Torches and other middle class quackery, but we get on well and I like his attitude to money. He went off to pawn a couple of gold sovereigns, waving away my offer of a tenner loan.

Then Trina started to turn my afternoon into hers. "I've read that letter you sent to Donna," referring to a long letter I wrote -- but never sent -- whilst I was on holiday with Kirsty and the girls in Dieppe, a fragment of which I posted here. From friendly touristic beginnings it firms up into sex -- our sex, mine and hers sex, not anyone else's.

"So while I've been locked into an interview room at the police station, you've been riffling through my private letters?"

"No, no, I was was looking for something else." "Yes, and then you found the letter to Donna and read it all?"

I was determined not to let her spoil my afternoon, but told her that she had prodigiously overstepped the mark. She bulldozed on, more interested in discussing its content than apologising. "I don't know how you put up with me for two years; I must have seemed very tame." And then later, trying to sound jocular, she said "Men are strange. You're all pervs."

Thrown into my second involuntary quizzing of the day, I simply refused to answer and shook my head. Trina sees sex as either comical or dirty. Unable to let the subject go, but receiving no further response from me, she stood up with the drink in her eyes and announced her intention to have a lie down at mine -- something to which me and Seth assented without demur.

---

Back to Middlesbrough. I sit down with a discount ale, no obligations until about 7ish this evening. Opposite me, an elderly foursome, spending their pensions and house inflation. To my surprise, the letter's intended recipient, the girl with the filthiest name on my phone, texts me.

Donna is in "an important meeting" and is sending me secret texts. I am trying to keep my squirming from interfering with anyone's Two Meals for 7.19. I apologise by text to Donna for taking the seat next to her and accidentally allowing my fingers to stroke slowly up her skirt and pulling it up asymmetrically across her thighs so that my fingertips can rest on her stocking tops.

Donna, Donna, Donna. My slut, my always-want-you girl, my compliant, dressing-up, high-heeled, open-legged, stairs sex, cunt. I thought this was all over? I don't think anyone has ever turned me on like this.

"Oh dear, so now you've told me my imaginings are correct. I fancy you so fucking much Donna. I'll give you a ring when I'm calmer. But just to say... I LONG to fuck you."