I had a chat with a young intern at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival about helping out there. HCMF is my Glastonbury. And my friend who I did a show with earlier this year has suggested we work together again at something called New Work Scotland. And we'd get paid. So good, it's all getting arty again. And it involves working with a witty, self-deprecating gorgeous Israeli woman.
Sunday afternoon I went down a former slave morgue (it says on the website) which is rapidly becoming my new favourite pub. I bumped into a man I snogged last year in similarly relaxed circumstances, and his female friend. I got a bit carried away and in front of both of them I said "Do you fancy him?" "'Cos I do."
We discussed a bit of work I could do for him, and he wrote out a contract on the back of a shopping list. We signed it with some gravitas on the bar. I like having a contract on the reverse side of which it says "pancetta, onion, carrot, garlic, parmesan..." It's serious though. It will make me a tiny amount of money.
Getting to slight panic stations with the MA. It'll be alright on the night, but it very soon will be the night.
Felicity rang the other morning, expressing a desire to take advantage of modern telecommunications technology for recreational purposes. She had to go after a few minutes because she didn't have enough hands. She emailed afterwards apologising for it. I told her it was absolutely fine and she should do it whenever she wants. She's coming round in about three hours. Despite the invigorating nature of the phone call, I'm not entirely sure what she has in mind. Ostensibly it's to bring me some cooking apples, but it's a long way to come to give a man an apple.
Update 2300: Felicity turned up in a tight-fitting low-cut blouse. I wondered whether this was a signal, but no. "I've got to be back by 11 and I'm not staying the night." I made a rather dull aubergine pilaf from a recipe of Nigel Slater's and now I've got half hundredweight of it left to eat myself.
It was a gloomy ninety minutes, all about how she feels trapped in her highly paid job, her responsibilities, how she doesn't like being grown-up and so on. At one point she asked me what I was thinking. I felt like saying "Do something about it then. You've got shedloads of money. What's the point of all these fucking barn conversions if you're not using the money? Start doing drugs or something. In the short term, I wish I'd bought cheaper wine."
But I didn't say that. I indicated a photograph of my daughter when she was two and we were on holiday in Sardinia and that I was thinking how happy and pretty I thought she looked.
It really is time now to draw a line underneath the Felicity episode. She was quite rude to Kitty the other weekend. Yes, she rescued me from a time when my physical loneliness felt unbearable, but both she and I need to find someone more in tune with each other.
