Preston 1 Cambridge 1

Back home to mine, and as usual on a Sunday night when I've been away for a bit, the toilet bowl is speckled with shit and there's a smell of bleach. One of the first things you learn in a shared house is other people's schedules of micturition and defecation, and their personal rites of its elimination.

Trina came over as usual, on Monday, and perhaps because I felt I'd won the argument about her staying only one night at a time, we ended up fucking within five minutes. Then we went to Preston (still a shithole, as segregated a city as I've ever been in in the UK), because there was a guided talk at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery round the Bruce Nauman exhibition. Someone who probably has the word "accessibility" in her job title asked us if any of us needed the services of a lip-speaker or signer. She said nothing about the inaccessiblity of putting the tour on at 1pm on a weekday afternoon.

After the tour, we were nobbled at the door by somone--possibly a volunteer--who asked us if we'd enjoyed it. He allowed us the briefest of replies, but could hardly control his communicative urges. "That art like the one you've seen, a lot of people don't want to get it. I mean, you see, I don't know about you, but when I was at school we were taught that art, a picture, well, it had to be of something, take an apple for instance, if you seen an apple as a round green thing, well that's OK but it doesn't really do that now that things have changed, in more modern times and so when you see an apple in a gallery or in modern art you don't have to see it as something that looks like an apple but it could be just something that the artist---it's the thing, the thing is an apple and I think the more people understand that an apple, or I mean, not just an apple, ..."

I held my hand up apologetically and looked at Trina. "We're going to have to go.... Mum'll be waiting." "Yes, I'm sorry," I said to the man whose epiphany of non-representational art had rendered him incontinent with enthusiasm, "my mother's out there and we ought to go and pick her up. Thank you very much, it was very interesting."

In Wetherspoons, we found a sunny, glassy table in the corner. A man with very high-waisted trousers--often an indication of lunacy and the ambivalent consequences of the care in the community programme--came over. "Oh... oh. Are you sitting there? No-one's sat there for half an hour. No, not for half an hour." I talked to him with the amiability that one has to signal to that breed of lunatic for whom violent aggression is but a sliver of a wrongly-judged sentence away. Trina stepped in and deftly shooed him away, and we spent an afternoon under the greyed sun; more affectionate than it's been lately.

There was a group of sixtysomething women, locals, next to us. Trina said how much she likes the Preston accent; I do too. It has a softness missing from the Manchester and Liverpool ones in the south, as though everyone is thinking about adopting the rhotic "r". Ours here, more northerly, is sing-song and the most euphonious of them all.

Trina smiled and wagged her head girlishly, to indicate that she was about to ask something she knew would receive my assent. "Yes, stay tonight too," I said, waiving clause 1a) in our Agreement for a Harmonious Future. In bed, she wore this plastic mouthpiece effort that looked like an oversize set of dentures to try to stop herself snoring, and we had a laughing time with her pretending to scare me with it.

This weekend, I have mainly been stuffing my face. Fiona, my eldest, made some delicious cheese scones, and then today, a splendid Swiss roll. I'm glad I kept my mouth shut and didn't interfere; I thought it'd be technically beyond her and there'd be some teenage humpiness to deflect, but it turned out very well. I made a couple of types of bread, child's play in comparison with Fiona's production. When I went to bed last night I could smell the yeast in my urine.

Tonight I finished a proposal for a festival in Cambridge about text-based art called art:language:location. The piece is a performance and an installation, and it's about debt, using the fact that typography is used as a bullying weapon on debtors: red blocked ink and underlinings, cowing, graphical fists. It'll also be a chance to see me old pal from The London Years (in which Chris also figured), whose drum n'bass producer-cum-drug dealer sartorial image (he's missing his goldie looking chain in this pic) hasn't prevented him becoming a Research Fellow, or something, at the University there.

Here I am doing my approximation of a manly pose in June 2002, in which my elbow is more intrusive a visual element in the composition than was intended at the time. Those pints were poured at about 10.30am. England were playing Sweden in the World Cup and the pubs could open early. It ended 1-1. "Sweden hold drab England", said the BBC at the time. I tried chatting up this Scouse girl, despite not being, in those days, really sure what "chatting up" anyone meant or involved. I think I was partly doing it for my audience.