Fractions

Fourth day off the drink. This means living with a background of daytime tiredness as vivid, unpleasant, violent dreams (Syria, swimming pools, electrocution, naked shame bravely born) occupy what feels like most of my night.

Yesterday David H--, Professor at my last university, came over to Lancaster to give a talk called The Value of Music, which was a rivetting hour of him trying to put some critical qualifications into the ways in which music is too simply valued as a noble cultural enrichment in the impoverished Philistine wasteland to which capital and its slave, the Government, are working to reduce this country. Not a single person there from Lancaster's Institute for the Contemporary Arts, the "department" into which all the arts subjects are subsumed.

Afterwards a general invitation was opened to dinner. I went home but said I'd join them for a soda water (literally) later.

At home I broached the subject of the imminent rent increase with Stefan. I suggested, I think very generously, that I bear half the increase, and Stefan and Csilla half. "Then we move out," he declared, his gauntlet-throwing swagger undermined by the Alice band on his head, which may well be à la mode in the resorts of the northern Adriatic but looks silly in Lancashire.

"I find flat in London, Manchester for 400. That is not room for 300. There is nothing in that room, no wardrobe, no TV..." "You selfish fucker," I thought. "You, your girlfriend and Bela stayed here rent-free for ten weeks when they were ripped off, and now you're complaining that my generosity doesn't extend to buying you a TV and a wardrobe."

Csilla will be home today sometime and might temper his arrogance, but if they move out they can repent at leisure as they discover that even in some saggy-curtained doss house in Morecambe, with free hiphop basslines till 5.00 every morning, they will be paying at least 60, 70 quid a month more than they are now.

A further compromise suggestion, of finding someone for the supposedly spare single room but which he has arrogated as his study, and getting the new lodger to pay the marginal increase, was rejected. "No, is too crowded. This house is only for three."

I was glad to get back to The Value of Music. In the Borough, gastro-pub of choice of the poorly socialised Lancaster academic, I walked into a scene in which The Sociologist was holding forth on Neo-Platonism. "The Judeo-Christian tradition posits an ontological separation..." I had hoped, by giving them an hour-and-a-half by themselves, that they'd have got all that out of their system. I glanced at my pint of soda and blackcurrant and wondered how fast I could decently drink it.

To my relief, The Philosopher adroitly guided us back to the topics of David's talk. We discussed how dreadful lyrics don't affect the pleasure derived from music you love. I argued, contra David, that Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing is overrated and banal, and The Neo-Platonist urged Portishead on us. "Not coming round to your house, not for the conversation nor the music", I thought.

A scream of shrieking women was becoming ear-splittingly empty. I wondered if everything everyone was saying was really that funny; or perhaps it's an exaggerated form of politeness. David announced his departure, and I, fearing a return of The Ontological Divide in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, made my excuses too.

Tonight, with daughter Fiona, in her new glittery dark blue braces, and a neighbour's daughter, to see a physical theatre piece called Alchemystorium. Love lost and found in a cafe, with exaggerated gestures. Behind me, someone I know and keep at arm's length, laughing over-loudly to assuage her discomfort at not being the centre of attraction, and her brat of a son kicking my seat.

Walking back home we found a torn up set of homework strewn all over the pavement. We began collecting it together. "You've missed a sheet there, in the middle of the road. Did you drop it?" asked Brat-Mother. "It's not ours," I said. "I don't know whose it is." "Oh well leave it there then." I said nothing and darted into the road to fetch a worksheet about converting fractions.