Toilet encouters of the Modernist kind

As I have done, on and off, since I was a teenager, I went to Uddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. I could only attend three of its ten days, but I found a place on couchsurfing for a couple of days, then for a bonus day (and a welcome warm flat with a shower), I was hosted by Leeds' Singing Organ-Grinder; and as I don't pay train fare any more, I had only to find my drink.

I was picked up from the station by my host, who sported a woolly multi-layered couture that reminded me of my student days before universities were turned into businesses. It should have alerted me to the coldness of her house, which was in inverse proportion to the warmth with which I was received into it.

The house was down a cobbled lane near a mill, built for the "middling sort" -- neither shop floor workers nor management. Had it not been so cold I'd have stared at the pugnacious hills on the other side of the Colne Valley for longer. I was shown in, and sat down with my host's dad. His daughter said she had to go somewhere; that was the last I saw of her all weekend.

On the table, there was a photocopied extract from a technical manual with diagrams of exploded parts of a tractor, and instructions for its disassembly and repair, every tiny part named, its complexity the match of anything I've ever found in my musical studies. The two systems, I thought, tractors and music, have a necessary complexity, otherwise neither work.

It was her dad who entertained me. I thought he was a bit disappointed when I said I wasn't staying for tea, and I made going to a concert I was greatly looking forward to sound like an obligation, in order to assuage his feelings. I knew he was disappointed that I was treating the place like a hotel, and his daughter hasn't put any review in response to my appreciative one for them.

Mid-concert, in the toilet at UCMF, I turn round and see an elderly man in a wide-brimmed hat. "Oh! Is it Mr S---?" It was the founder of the festival.

We chatted a bit and then he took me under his wing for the evening, getting me into a reception on the basis of my true story about coming to UCMF when I was fourteen years old, when they gave bursaries to "people of limited means", and arranged accommodation with friends of the festival who had a spare room. I felt elevated, being on terms with the festival's founder. There was free wine, some of which ended up on my trousers. He gave me his card. I must follow this up rather than my usual approach of thinking all pleasant experiences are accidental and socially inconsequential.

I was unsuccessfully on top of Mel the other morning. "Maybe you should try Viagra," she said, not knowing that I already do, and was. "Yeah, that'd be interesting. See what happens." We laughed -- her honestly, me lying. Maybe I could try drinking less.