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Someone I knew died recently. He was fine a couple of weeks ago but a very aggressive form of leukaemia got him. He discharged himself from hospital and died in his house.

This afternoon, I sat in the pub rehearsing my excuses to explain my absence at his funeral. I enjoyed his company but wasn't that close to him. He was a sociable man who played his cards quite close to his chest, never really letting you in. I tried to pay for a pint with my card and it was declined. I told them not to pour it away, went to the bank and was taken into a stifling office and had to confirm that the transactions were my own. "Two pounds fifteen, Wetherspoons?" The pint was still there when I got back.

I went along to the wake, held appropriately in a bikers' pub. The liitle slices of quiche looked a bit incongruous. The afternoon became quite sexual. Someone I've known since the girls were little was there, in a lovely tight green textured skirt. Her boyfriend foolishly acquired a conviction for possession of a Class A drug as he was writing (and I was rewriting) his dissertation. You have to try hard to get done for drugs in England nowadays, but Kev managed it, swaggering drunkenly down the street smoking a spliff whilst carrying some amphetamine in his pocket. I can hardly criticise drug usage, but he should certainly have been fined for Conduct Unbecoming A Gentleman. As a result, his so-called University--it's actually an arriviste HE college that trains Primary teachers and offers courses in Praying and Advanced Washing Machine Use--is prissily witholding his professional certification.

I turned round to see another friend, who started talking about hifi, a subject that interests me too, but not as much as the utterly lovely sight of Tightly-skirted Woman, who was now standing with her arse back to me. Hifi Man is the most sexless man I know, which meant I could talk about amplifiers and stare at her arse at the same time. I imagined drawing my fingers very slowly down along the side of her skirt, before moving them along the skirt's hem, slowing down when my fingertips touched her legs. "Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen any empirical evidence that all-copper cables have any appreciable effect on the sound." Very gently, I start pushing her skirt up. She arcs herself towards me. Her skirt is asymmetrically high now. "That's the thing, there's only a finite amount of valves in the world."

A few minutes later I was taken speechless by the appearance of someone I hadn't seen for for about twenty years. I was instantly

Every single day, I think of my own death. I don't want to be burnt, that's the main thing. I want to be buried in the natural death woodland in Dalton, and all the worms can eat me and I will have eternal life in the wings of dragonflies, as we all do, for matter can neither be destroyed nor created.

The wake was at a

We've got a new housemate, who seems sociable and unproblematic, and Trina has taken me on a surprise treat night out at the Midland Hotel, a Grade I listed Art Deco hotel. It would have normally been 190 quid a night but Trina got it for 80. Great architecture, modern Italian furniture, real wood, a miraculously spiralled cantilevered staircase which is really a miracle. How does it hold on? Concrete, again. It unnerves me that you like me to the extent of taking me here. I can't reciprocate this, you realise? Neither in hotel poshness or depth of feeling.

All my girls were in a thing tonight called Spotlight at their school, which inconveniently started two hours after a seminar at the Uni on "The Spectral Finance of New York." I roamed around the Uni, late as usual, confused by the endlessly rearranged departments, then espied the bloke who supervised me for the last term of my MA and who introduced me to a world of art theory that I wish I'd had time to pursue, sitting in an over-illuminated room with a couple of other people I vaguely know, so I scraped in through a brush-dampened door, late, made an apologetic nod, and sat down.

The seminar was brilliant. I loved how he veered from the quotidian to the literary in his language within long sentences that tilted from the empirical to the imagistic. By "loved" I mean, that delicious skin-stroking sensation of ideas that are almost, not quite, within my grasp, language shimmering iridescently.

I sat in the girls' Spotlight thing afterwards reliving the hot rush of speed-fuelled embarrassment I felt when I'd chimed in with the debate afterwards. Two things argued for precedence in my head: one, the tumbling sociable sense of wanting to talk, the other, my shadow self trying to control the chatty, public one unable to say anything that matched the tone of the evening. I threw a rambling comment out and left its soggy mess on the table for him to rearrange and make coherent. I stared at his glasses, over-keen, needy.

Teenage girls in leotards were dancing to Beyonce and Gloria Gaynor. It's OK, you're not as important to others as you imagine you are. And anyway, people sometimes like incoherent muddled burbling. It lowers the bar.

I was reminded

Only daughter at home has just gone to bed and the other two are at a sleepover. My camera with some of the images I wanted to use for this post is at another house but if I don't fucking write this now it'll never get done. I've been "busy"--a term I started treating with disdain once I became a parent. But it's all relative, and it feels like it.

Straight after swallowing not spitting in the South African High Commission (maybe someone had tipped them off?) it was up to Glasgow, for a couple of days of seeing a man about a dog, and more importantly to me, to wander about, have a few drinks, and to go to a performance of Stockhausen's Kontakte. I arrived there and went for a drink and discovered I'd left my cards at home and had to ring Trina to ask her to sub me £20.

I met my train driver pal and his distant, unapproachable younger Latino girlfriend at the concert. The music was exciting, great crashing armfuls on the piano, then some serialist-sounding bits. Just full of feeling and passion, an enfant terrible in destructive flight. Someone to my left was texting, her phone beaming into the dark of the Old Fruitmarket, but someone ahead of me was rocking slightly, trying to get the time signature. She should be strangled to the point of asphyxiation and then be strapped to a chair during a whole season of Viennese waltzes by Raymond Gubbay. I talked to the page turner slider afterwards.

We got the train back to Dalmuir and they bought a huge pizza for us. In the pitch dark, an ice cream van was doing its rounds; a polite-looking meeting in the local library was being held behind metal grilles. Back at home we talked about the degredation of Couchsurfing and La Gata got a bit more open. She sloped off to bed, in the way that Latinos can't take drink, and me and Train Driver worked our way through a little metal barrel of German beer. I wanted to go to sleep.

Next day, I went to an exhibition about concrete, which, I learned, has been used as a building material for at least ten thousand years. The assistant was one of those hyperattractive art-scene girls in their twenties--flared yellow above-the-knee skirt, fashionably retro green cardi, stark red lipstick. She was pleasant, keen to have something to do as she fetched me a trendily uncomfortable wooden stool for me to sit on, as I watched a film by The British Concrete Council from the 70s about the fucking awful Glasgow Inner Ring Road.

I was running short of money but had three hours to spare before the train. I was sitting in the Wetherspoons near the top of Hope St and calculated that I was 20p short of being able to afford two pints. I put my leaflet about the Literature of Concrete on the top of my pint and ran down to the Co-op outside Central Station and took two bottles of Freeminer off the shelves, tucked one under my jacket and paid for the other. A security guard smiled at me, which shat me up for a minute.

I put the beers between my legs and opened them with the bottle opener on my trade union keyring. A huge man a few feet away was there with what I supposed was his mum and dad. I couldn't make out what they were saying but it sounded like they were saying "He's alone...looks like a paedo." I was irritated at them for putting me to the effort of projecting my fear that I'd be discovered for opening bottled beer in a pub into misinterpreting their conversation.

On the train back a young woman sat opposite sat opposite me, got out an old computer which she said she was buying for eighty pounds and asked me if I thought it was worth it. She told me her brother had been done for rape and that her Dad disappears for years at a time and that when she was young she got fed mainly on chocolate. She went off to phone someone and I heard her saying "Yeah darling but I was hungry. It was three quid, yeah, but I was hungry." She stood up and went to get off. I noticed the big wood yards of Lockerbie and went down to the vestibule to fetch her back. "You're not getting off here," I said. "This is Lockerbie, not Carlisle." She came back and sat with me and rang the man again and told him.

---

I sat in the pub with Ned and Tess, the lodgers, and Helen, who was over from Norway at the end of a long journey from Norwich. I was a bit tired and I got a bit tetchy when I said I was going out next weekend, to soul music, and they started talking about Northern Soul which no fucker ever, ever differentiates between other types of soul or the kind of Modern, or soulful house that I like. This is how subcultures develop. Helen was saying she'd like to come over and how "wonderful" it is I go out dancing, which made me flare with anger. I hate that word "wonderful". It's only ever used by people who watch other people doing things.

"I've heard it all before Helen, it's not going to happen. You live in Norway. Well, OK, in that case, you could..." and I gave her the details of next weekend like a challenge. I was aware I was getting narky and excused myself. Everyone wanted me to stay, which only made me feel more like an amusement for other people. Tess and Helen chased me out of the pub. I kissed them both quickly and went home. They all went round to ---'s where they stayed till 7am and took loads of e.