Unzip the package

I am laying flat on my back in the living room of my singing teacher's house. My feet are resting on a cradle thing which wobbles them from side to side, causing sympathetic, and, it is claimed, relaxing movements for those, like me, who spend too much of the day typing. As I involuntarily wriggle from side to side, I remember that the button at the top of my trousers is missing. I start worrying that my snaking movements will cause my zip to undo and slowly reveal my underpants, a spectacle which I think would have distracted us both from concentrating on the vowel patterns in Schumann's mid-period lieder.

On Friday I went with Marianna to see the University's film group present their short films. Several tight knee-length dresses in shiny artificial materials; high heels and scaffolded hair. They greet each other with that Americanised embrace which looks as though it is intended to demonstrate a warmth just short of intimacy, in which people keep their fingers from touching each other's backs, as if aware of the desirablity of retaining at least the lees of British decorum.

On Monday, when Trina was here, we went to see Après Mai (Something In The Air) and I'd forgotten I'd asked Marianna along, so when I saw her waving at us in the auditorium I worried for a moment about what the social outcome of Trina + Marianna would be, but no-one has to talk in a cinema.

I didn't like the film (my comments on the Guardian's review here) and we had only a short chat afterwards. Marianna's an acute and interesting film critic but she doesn't drink or enjoy social activity that much, especially with unfamiliar people. "She's quite intense, isn't she, your friend Marianna?" Perhaps, but I like her, and she's my friend, and I felt a ripple of defensive loyalty. "Well, I don't know--I've known her so long I don't notice her tics any more."

Trina and I went to Wetherspoons for a bit of tea. From Schumann's lieder to Two Meals for 6.49 in a few hours. We moved downstairs to avoid a meeting of the Lancaster Screaming Women's Club, and drank a fair bit, before we repaired to my house for humid and somewhat effortful sex.

I like many aspects of being with Trina. Sex, drinking, dancing, The Dictionary Game, chatting, cooking together. Unfortunately, she identifies these pleasures as things that exist within a "loving relationship." I have no fucking idea what love is, nor want to be in a "relationship" with its restrictive covenants and sub-paragraphed clauses, its timetables, its unbearable normative language and behaviour.

To tell her all this--to follow the most ridiculous bit of advice anyone can ever give anyone--to be honest--would mean that she would stop having anything to do with me, seeing it as a deception, and throwing out the delightful recreational baby with the sociological bathwater. I'm going to have to tread a somewhat delicate political line, avoiding the Three Little Words as far as I can.