Uddersfield Contemporary Music Festival

To Huddersfield (silent h), for the Contemporary Music Festival.

On the train to Manchester, a Spanish family make a busy faff of sitting down at the table across the aisle. Suddenly, a pair of pink knickers is sprung onto my table. She grabs them back with a sorry. "That hasn't happened for a while," I say, to their incomprehension. A few seconds later I jokingly say "Here's my number," and I am instantly annoyed at myself for making too much of it. She explains what has happened to her family. The laughter spreads. As I get off at Piccadilly I tap their table and say "Gracias por las cuecas."

I arrive at Huddersfield and have to find an address in Slaithwaite, a strangely pronounced village in Yorkshire. It almost rhymes with "allow it" - a glottally stopped t, of course. A local on the bus refers to me as "love" and guides me to my stop through a black-windowed Gothic fog.

My host Ted is ominously dressed in clothes which suggest there won't be much drinking: a multi-pocketed "practical" green top, and khaki shorts which give of too much thigh and the forbidden area when he perches his ankle on his knee. Hospitable and kind: he had made a delicious spicy chicken and roast potatoes. "What would you like to drink?" Thought you'd never ask. "Beer?" I speculate. "Nope." "Wine?" "No, teetotal."

Ted says how much he likes Couchsurfing. He makes me momentarily open-mouthed with his unselfconscious statement that he likes it because of "the pleasure I give to others. And you can tell." I deflect a conversation about how he sympathises with Sepp Blatter.

Wondering a bit how this is going to go, I am won over by my accommodation. Breathing mist, we cross a communal lawn to a chalet available for collective use by the rectangle of council tenants to whom it is granted. It's the size of a classroom and smells of wood.

I revel at putting down the cushions from the settee, and unfurl my sleeping bag. I text Mary-Ann to tell her what a romantic setting I am in and how much of a her-wanting love nest it could be. The heater clicks noisily. I turn it off and I sleep poorly, a part of my upper back always cold; having to corral the independently minded cushions, but pleased to be there.

In the morning I go into Huddersfield with another couchsurfer, who is staying in Ted's house. He curls a thin red scarf around a necklace of square threaded beads (not gay then), wraps a very expensive coat round himself and sets a boxy hat with ties under his throat upon his head. He's from Sydney. He drips money but dodges the £2 fare from Slaithwaite to Huddersfield.

Bit of a dull year so far. Harrison Birtwistle's Oboe Concerto a disappointment; heard it all before. Hèctor Parra's work for Ensemble Recherce, Early Life, the highlight - a string trio, piano, and oboe, arguing between a constant wail of unfriendly glissandi and an impatient, percussive, crickets' leg-rubbing attack of bows on strings.

Many familiar faces, but the hierarchies of the festival, with the neglected audience at the bottom. Nowhere to socialise apart from a bleak "Juice Cafe" in a draughty corridor, a coffee machine's endless grinding, minimum wage employees routinely doing an empty performance of a type of care work.

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Tomorrow I'm doing my presentation about Contemporary Music and Social Identity at the Girls Grammar. It'll be a rehash of something I've already done but I haven't even started its revision yet, so I am deflecting the worry about not having done it by blogging about not having done it.

I'm going to get them to try to detect the tone rows (the bright ones), or at least to follow the score (the rest) of the first fifty-five seconds of Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maître, then present some outdated research about why analysis is implicated in the pleasure of listening to such music. The idea is that I catch them, being clever girls, in the act of the pleasure of analysis, to talk about whether the fact that they are even able to do this contributes to their enjoyment of the piece, before we end up in an asexual orgy of recursive self-examination, thus reflecting some of what doing music at PhD level is about.

After that it's straight back to Huddersfield for the rest of the week and hoping that it picks up a bit or I at least have a chat with a woman. Mary-Ann was talking a possibility of coming over on Sunday night and us staying there, to see if all this kissing in art galleries and overheated texting could translate into actual fucking.

Pierre Boulez, Le Marteau sans Maître, (1953-4), first movement