Detuned

Trina sent me a couple of emails and texts. It's no exaggeration to describe the most desperate one as "pleading" for one more chance.

I'm very sorry Trina but it's too much like work now. You'd be better off finding someone who can give you the stability and happiness you deserve. This cycle of breaking up and patching it up again will just go and on forever, so I think it's time we were brave enough to call an end to it.

I have no interest in making mine or someone else's life difficult and complicated, by outweighing the good times with hour upon hour of endless arguments and recriminations and pointless, circular, analysis and head-splittingly Godawful "discussion". Just at the moment I am only interested in simple, carefree, straightforward friendship, such as that I have with Kitty or Kim.

That's not quite true. I'd like friendship like Kim's and sex like Donna's.

'm sorry I can't offer you anything else, but that's all I have to offer anyone. If we do resume going out together as friends I don't want to mislead you into thinking that it might develop into something more. I have had it with "relationships" for the time being.

A couple of days later she was smiling hard by text again, hoping that we this can be the start of "a lovely new friendship."

I had told Trina I'd be in Manchester for this concert. She suggested we could meet up in the afternoon for a drink, under this new order. We met in the Lass O'Gowrie, a pub that always stops short of the greatness it could attain. Chilly, the radiators stone cold; intrusive Disco-Soul hits to pester you aurally, and flashing large screens of Ebola and unrealised terrorism to irritate you visually. Even looking outside didn't help: the sad sight of the clean-lined 70s BBC building razed to a crammed car park.

The conversation went well enough, in that way when things have changed and one is on one's best behaviour. We went somewhere else to warm up try to get a pint for less than three pounds. "Where are you taking me? Wetherspoons, in central Manchester? Oooh, it'll be rough, it'll be rough." Inside of course, the pub had the late afternoon stuffed fug of relieved workers untieing themselves, and all-day drinkers repeat-dosing.

She left at about half past six. I wrote a postcard to Kim, and meandered my way in a route I misremembered, to the concert venue, another chilly location. The vicar came on with a mic that spluttered like a broken internet connection, doing those jolly little apologies that the Church of England is reduced to nowadays.

The outstanding players performed a couple of noodlingly inconsequential pieces, but also one I liked a great deal, the Fitch, with its detunings for the cello, and a score that mixes tablature with conventional notation. I had an interesting chat with its composer afterwards, who looks like he considered becoming a tramp as a career at one point before turning into a fine composer instead. His piece was commissioned as a companion piece for a work by Brian Ferneyhough. I said I was at a conference on Ferneyhough about eighteen months ago. "Yes, I gave a paper there -- on his early music." "Small world," I clichéd.

"It's marvellous," he said. "So many composers here!" We huddled and smiled and stamped about, doing an enjoyable educated bonhomie, a subculture polishing itself in its own mirror.