I was attending to Trina in the kitchen, fascinated, as ever, by her outstanding front elevation, when we happened upon a structural failure. We were at the jumper removal stage of the procedure, when her bra pinged, releasing a bit of wire about four inches long that suddenly sprang up vertically between her cleavage. Considering that my face is often very close to her tits, it was fortunate that the wayward bit of scaffolding arose at a time when I was at a safe distance. I am as keen to acquire amusing bra-related anecdotes as the next man, but not at the cost of losing an eye.

The lack of the £263 that the lodger owes me is causing me great difficulty and I am now in the unpleasant situation of issuing a Notice to Quit. I can't rely on the income from lodgers any more. I need more money if I am to remain living here.

So, hours and hours on an application for a part-time job which pays 6.5K. Although I've tried to make it impossible for them not to interview me, I very much doubt I will be called. I have two fatal flaws which prevent me from entering unto the citadel of school administration: I am a man, and I am forty-nine years old. But you never know, perhaps they will choose an over-qualified bloke knocking on fifty over a pencil-skirted biddable young lassie.

I've had the girls all weekend while Kirsty's away. Last night I popped back to my house to put the recycling bins out, to find the lodger--who hasn't paid me any rent at all for a fortnight, and only some of it for the two weeks previous--merrily entertaining a friend in the kitchen.

I opened the front door and he sprang needlessly to attention. "What ho!" he ejaculated, like some matey Enid Blyton character. "I'm just having dinner with a friend." Yes, a dinner cooked with gas that I am paying for, and washed up with hot water I am paying for. It irritated me a great deal. I would expect a freeloader to show greater humility and circumspection.

Last Wednesday, he broke the kettle. Like most people, he fills the kettle to its capacity, leaving the unused rest to increase my electricity bills and ruin the habitat of rare Madagascan frogs. This time, he filled it so high that it toppled over in its boiling, pouring everywhere, fusing the element.

I returned to the girls' house; I carefully worded a polite but unequivocal email, setting out the amounts he owes, and saying that he's got until Friday to cough up, or move out. I pointed out that a Notice to Quit does not excuse him his liability for the rent. I've acquired his parents' phone number from my itemised phone bills and I'll lean on them to get them to stump up the £229 which is now due.

Living here is cheap. It's a long way short of a Direct Debit showhome of white-painted floorboards, glass bowls filled with grey speckled pebbles, tea plates and a fork next to a broken-crumbed homemade dainty suitable for an internet photograph, with the words "wonderful", "delightful" and "lovely" applied indifferently to one's friends or a cake. But don't abuse it.

Kim's been here for a couple of days; that is, of chronological time, which was both physically and psychically longer, since one never really sleeps properly --given the refreshments-- and the intense, pleasurable closeness of our time together.

We went to Morecambe and ran around on the beach and along the jetties and boulders, photographing each other amongst the various statuary on the prom, wandered around the formal gardens awash with turned-up colour, and formed a mutually protective closeness when we shrank from the rough boys. I noticed how men looked at her, and me.

The evening partly consisted of a conversation in which she said things which sometimes burned with the effect only her words can give, about how I conduct myself in relation to others, my moral and financial conduct--my life, really. As I lay next to her that night, my overcrowded mind was teeming with what she had said, occasionally frightened with its enormity. I don't want to summarise what she said here since I'd have to reduce it to generalities; suffice to say she has set in course, today, this morning, a new and practical change in all of the important aspects of my life.

The following day, both of us tacitly wanting to return to a more frolicsome way of being together, we went up to the park for some more silly photography, draping ourselves around trees and over rocks as Desdemona, Sisyphus and others. Watching the busy wind-shook trembling of a tree and the mutations of the sky. A strangely shaped horse ambled about ignobly in a field.

As quickly as I became close to Kim after meeting her four years ago, I understood that it was not to be a sexual relationship. Once this is demonstrated to me, I have an ability to turn my sexual response to that woman off, however attractive physically she might be. Kim, who is very attractive, is classifed thus.

This visit, I have never seen Kim looking so sexily well-dressed. When she went to Morecambe, she wore a tight black and white dress that curved round her figure in a way I could have just stared at for hours (yet without doing anything to alter the category to which she is allocated). As she got off the train, her arse curved in a paradaisical visual moment that is imprinted in my mind. In one of the many junk shops, she spotted a crude plastic pair of "busts", as their label said, of some stereotyped Roman figures, and asked me to photograph her as she pushed her tits out towards the figures.

In bed on our last night, my heart was pounding--half tachycardia, half something else. I turned away from her and almost said "I can't sleep in the same bed with you any more Kim; something's changed." I thought of the impossible effort of setting the sofa up in the living room.

A little later, I heard and felt her delicious wet, rapid movement of her hand and the quilt. It was exciting, secret yet shared, and I slowly shifted in the bed, hoping to indicate my awareness of what she was doing under a guise. Slowed by the synthetic cathinones, it took a gorgeously long time. After over two hours, it suddenly happened; I was forced to abandoning the pretence of secrecy, and I came and came with a shuddering orgasm that went on for ages, shaking uncontrollably with four years of affection and everything I feel towards Kim, expressed in this new way. Everything was understood silently; in the morning, it wasn't, and will never be, mentioned.

I inadvertently chose to go to Glasgow on the day when twenty thousand Scotland supporters were travelling home after watching their country add another chapter to its long history of footballing crapness. Scores of be-kilted, pissed up East Kilbriders were in my carriage; another party had come all the way from Arbroath, a town which I suspect actually doesn't exist now that James Alexander Gordon has died. It was all aimiable, if noisy.

Walking to the pub for my date with Muriel I saw a big poster for Shelly Nadashi's show at the CCA. I only found out recently that the show Shelley, Giles Bailey and I did together in Brussels was reviewed, somewhat non-committally, in the Belgian art magazine Le Salon.

I greeted Muriel with the one-cheek kiss which I'm glad to observe is becoming standard for meeting new women. She has a deep voice and a rather slow air about her, and as I went to the bar at the Blackfriars to get us a drink, I was wondering if she had concealed the fact that she had mental problems. Back at our table, I asked her to pronounce the name of the small Gordonesque town she's from. It bears only a slight correspondence to its spelling and I found it amusing.

The chat flowed easily and freely, both of us knowing quite early on that it's not going to be repeated. We commented on the excellent standard of beards sported by the arty set who seemed to be in the pub at 5pm. She looked to me to suggest somwhere to eat. I was inwardly alarmed, as that would have broken my budget, so I took her to the Brunswick Hotel and she had a tortilla and I had a glass of cava. She paid, to my relief. As we left, she gave me a kiss which was most peck-like, and jolted my head back a little with its perfunctory force.

On the train back I got moved up to first class by a former colleague on the railways. I drank, dozed, and tried unsuccessfully to read a bit more of Moby Dick, and generally thought it had been a waste of time and money. I thought longingly of Daniella's refusal to let me get home last week without a snog, and I started mentally composing a Valentines card for her which would consist of a series of notecards in envelopes of ever-diminishing sizes, with the messages getting filthier as she opens each one.

I lost my phone so I was unable to text her to thank Muriel for the evening. This morning, I went onto the website on which we met to find she'd deleted her account.

Trina and I are off on Saturday to Chemical Town in the northeast, as it's my Mum and Dad's golden wedding anniversary. My Dad, the worst possible advert for teetotalism you could see, daily zimmers his way into further thickets of infirmity; my Mum has the mischievous wit of an intelligent child, and handles my Dad's impossibly irascible and self-pitying behaviour adroitly, privately subverting his attempts to elicit special sympathy.

My sister is advertising this as a pre-death party, "probably the last time we'll all get together", bringing attention to what she sees as my Dad's imminent decease. If I were in my Dad's position, I'd want a party per se, not because people are smiling around me like valedictory vultures, holding glasses of lime and soda in a swirly-carpeted pub. We've bought them a bird table.

Trina and I are only staying for the day, then in the evening we're going camping in the Yorkshire Dales. Camping is a rare experience for me, combining two of my least favourite things: tents and fields. I dare say it might be fun, "sleeping" on a centimetre thick sheet of matting on top of a patch of sodden wet grass, in a spider-infested nylon bag, while yards away, in the adjoining hotel, lovers stretch out on white Egyptian cotton sheets on king size beds, leaning over to pour another couple of glasses of Prosecco, before indulging the hedonistic, selfish luxury that is being able to stand up.

On Sunday evening, Kim is coming over for a few days of malarkey. In a foolish spirit of openness, I told Trina about it. She went off on the usual Womanstrop. "Why don't you want to spend that time with me?," "You know we normally have Mondays together," "you always cast me aside when something more interesting comes along"--like a fucking stuck record, proving again, that when dealing with most women, dishonesty is the best policy.

After a couple of days of foot-stomping, to which I am indifferent, she went into reverse gear and said something far worse. "Yes, I've been thinking. I've got to get off on Sunday sometime, but I'd like to meet Kim. I know how important she is to you. Maybe we could have tea together before I left?"

Fuck, no.

Last night Kim rang. I said "Just one thing I need to tell you first--Trina's angling to meet you and wants us to have a jolly tea together when you arrive. Don't worry, it's not going to happen. I'll sort it out. I don't want you and Trina together. I just want just you and me to get going straight away on Sunday night."

"No," said Kim. "I'm not prepared to do that. I don't want to get mixed up in your emotional affairs."

"Don't worry pet, neither am I. You and Trina are not meeting. The only reason I mentioned it is that I might need you to be complicit in a white lie to get us out of it." It brought to mind the old Navy toast, "To wives and girfriends--that they never meet."

Before all that though, I'm off to Glasgow on Thursday for a date with an art teacher. She sounds a bit cooler than D---, but at worst, it's going to mean a few pints of Scottish real ale in one of the best pubs in Glasgow.