Carmen round the mountain

To my surprise, a debt collection agency accepts my offer to reschedule a debt.

"Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of 14th October. We are prepared to accept your offer of £5 a month in respect of [a credit card]. Please find enclosed a standing order mandate which you should complete and return immediately to your bank."

The standing order instructs my bank to pay £5 on 10th November, "followed by 536 monthly payments of £5, and a final payment of £8.41". So that'll be paid off when I'm 91 then.

Someone was in the local paper this week for possession of The Chemical With the Unfeasibly Long Name. He was fined £65 which, to my relief, seems to indicate that the local magistrates have more important priorities than obscure "research chemicals".

I had a free ticket to see Carmen as my friend Neil is a reviewer but his boyfriend isn't into opera. It's a rather silly piece and I wonder how it ever became viewed as high art, but the singing was gorgeous, the girls were pretty, the costumes were excellent, and the theatre itself is a beautiful building of 1782, renovated and cantilevered in the early 1900s by the great theatre designer Frank Matcham.

It was an elderly audience and in the toilets at half time, a murmur of sighed schwas of relief accompanied the collective micturition. I had taken some of The Chemical With the Unfeasibly Long Name, and in the pub afterwards it suddenly came on and I was garrulously sociable, chatting to a couple of Neil's friends with what I hope didn't come across as tiring, one-sided energy.

Last night someone threw a party for the PhDers. The hostess, who has a policy of not buying any modern clothes at all, looked glamorous in red lipstick and a beautiful green vintage dress which few modern women could wear, unforgiving and requiring her rationing-era figure to carry it off. An international crowd from Eastern Europe mainly, bright, un-arsey, socially adept people in their 20s and 30s, and the hostess's boyfriend, very attractive in a rural poet kind of way, wearing what seemed like a dozen layers. We got to taste some pálinka, the renowned fruit-based firewater of Hungary which is served on the merest occasion and which my housemate's Dad, in common with many of his compatriots, has with breakfast. It was delicious, a hotly alcoholic taste of stewed apricots.

I left at 11.30 because me and Mary-Ann had arranged to talk on the phone. Her voice was intoxicating, sending me off into heady and bodily desire. I was pressing the phone hard against my ear wanting to catch everything, her breath even. How will it work when I see her, I constantly wonder.

This afternoon I'm meeting my beautiful friend and partner in sexting, Denise. The way I feel at the moment it's going to be all I can do not to lead her up to Vicarage Field to undress her. But the plan is for a coffee somewhere.