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It was British Archaeology Week last week. Oxford Archaeology North, who are based in Lancaster, put on a first class open day which I enjoyed as much as the girls did. A charming and understated woman, who, with her slightly old-fashioned clothes could do no other job than archaeology, brought me face to face with an old enemy, a great source of bother every summer, yet no more than two or three microns across. She talked us through the way that different types of pollen grains can help give an account of the changing vegetation over the centuries.

The same couple of dozen families who take their children to everything were there. A Dad made an excessive courtesy of stuttering apologies when crossing on the stairs; a Mum said "No Pippa, we're going to see the pottery kiln upstairs first and then you can make a Viking helmet."

I stumbled across an affair last week, both people I know. Normally I wouldn't give such a thing a second thought, but seeing the gorgeous female involved tipped me into a vortex of jealousy. Apart from being walk-into-lamppost good-looking, she has a magnetically louche air and an acerbic sense of humour rare amongst women, brought up as they are to be conciliatory and emollient.

I walked home talking to myself, cursing myself for not having made a move before him, massing a knot of sexual jealousy layered with a self-pity based on a partial interpretation of the evidence. I asked the pavement over and over again "Why do women always see me as a friend?" discounting the days in my diary which didn't confirm such a woeful idea.

Kim, to whom ideas of romantic love and sexual fidelity are as laughable as Limbo or Bishop Ussher's chronology, rang with excellent timing. I could hear her holding herself back, before she interrupted with level-headed disdain. That worked for a while. For as long as actual sex is held at bay, it's easy to cleave to the idea that "love", "desire" and all the rest of it are conventional expressions of psychological needs determined by our material conditions. But the Historical Materialist view of hanky-panky is less of a comfort when you're plagued with formless images of a very attractive woman doing it. With someone else.

Kim gave me something else to think about: a day at the Tate Modern in Liverpool, again through a chemical prism.

In the pub the other night, there was a slight uncertainty about whether an advertised discount on beer was applicable to cider too. The barman said "It's a de facto discount, but I think we'll make it de jure."

Lancaster: the city with the country's most literate bar staff.