Pegging off

I'm supposed to be on a train to Huddersfield but I've cancelled my last day of duties at the Contemporary Music Festival. I feel that sense of naughty joy that one gets from pegging off school or throwing a sickie.

I'm a bit miffed with HCMF. The paid staff keep a professional distance from the volunteers by avoiding inappropriate language and phrases which suggest uncomfortable intimacy, such as "hello", "good morning", or "thank you". When they walk past me, I am made of glass. After seven days of this froideur I don't feel like making any more effort for them. Perhaps, being young and female, they feel uneasy around a 47-year-old man. Or perhaps they're just being fucking rude to people who give unpaid help to the festival year after year.

In a less cold moment, I met someone I know who finished his PhD a year ago and who once appeared to be on the cusp of a career in composition, having had a very good piece performed there last year. When I first met him he was working in Asda on the cold meats counter. "So, Mike, is it a glittering career in composition or are you still selling sausages?" "I've moved to the bakery section."

Afterwards I went to the Commercial Hotel, a noisy babble of miscegenation, palely dark babies swaddled deeply into pushchairs whilst mum had a couple of pints of Stella. An attractive creole rang around the place: "...tings fuh thu bare-beh": from Kingston to West Yorkshire in one sentence. A man who didn't like London said. "Here, we all one family. In London, even black people run away from black people. Dey doin' it to der own!"

A couple of men walked in who may as well have had neon signs coming out of their heads saying "We are gay and we are attending the Contemporary Music Festival". A curve of coloured flowery shirt left artfully hanging out of a pair of trousers.

Alarm crossed their faces as they walked in and registered black people. They went through a modern agony of that section of the metropolitan middle classes whose only encounter with black people is through adverts which solicit standing orders. They had to suppress their clear urge to escape for fear of being tainted with the brush of racism. If I hadn't been several yards away I'd have invited them over but they took their drinks and retreated into another room.

The final events of the University's outreach project went swimmingly well. I shivered and got rained on for four hours at our stall in Market Square, before a cosier two evening sessions of presentations. Everything was interesting. Plentiful wine and chat, and a bit of a glow at having done a small something that was civic and worthwhile, or at least from not having rain-soaked clothes. The paper I enjoyed most was called Death by Pixels and discussed what happens, or should happen, to our online presence when we die, exploring the clashes between digital storage and human grieving.

I am looking forward to tomorrow. I will be falling into pharmaceutical bliss with Kim, who is coming over for a couple of days with some supplies from The Special Cupboard.