A couple of months ago I was thinking out loud at the wine club that "it'd be good if we could have something like this, but with beer." As I wandered home, Rosa Luxemburg's words came to me. "If not you, who? If not now, when?", although she was speaking about revolutionary action aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and I was talking about arranging a pissup in a pizzeria.

Bearing in mind Ms Luxemburg's chest-prodding challenge, I arranged the night with the Pizza Margherita, where I had one of my first jobs, scraping off the superglued remnants of lasagne after its eaters had discussed their difficulties in getting their children into a church school, or chatted about last week's conference in Norwich about sustainability and climate change with an interesting academic who'd made the effort to fly in from Mexico City.

My aims for the evening are to acquit myself with an informal, knowledgeable humour which will be maintained despite the disinhibiting effects of what we are to consume; to go home knowing that other people have enjoyed themselves; and to break even. Looking ahead, and if there's sufficient interest, it could become a regular series of beer explorations around Europe. It would force me to learn more about the beers of Germany, Czech Republic, Brittany, and so on.

This was the press release.

A STROLL THROUGH BELGIAN BEERS -- ON MOOR LANE

The practice of serving beer to Belgian children with their school dinners may have ended, but the Belgians still enjoy an outstanding range and quality of beer. On Tuesday 26th March at the Pizza Margherita in Lancaster, there will be a chance to sample nine of these, including a couple that will be unknown to all but the keenest of Belgian beer aficionados.

Tasty Belgian snacks will be provided in between bottles and the evening will finish up with another fine Belgian alcoholic drink, rarely encountered in the UK, which will send you home with a warm Flemish glow, if the beers, with their ABVs which will wander over 10%, haven't already done the job.

The event starts at 7.30 and tickets cost £14.50. There are only twenty places available, on a first come first served basis. To make sure you are there for an informative and sociable evening, [get in touch with me]. Op uw gezondheid!

The local paper has put it through its sub-editing mangle, but it's fetched a few reservations. I just hope we won't get anyone coming for the "tasty Belgian snacks", because all it is is shop-bought waffles.

Just in case you are local and are interested--get in touch via the email link on the right-hand side of this page.

To Glasgow, for Radio 3's live broadcast of Bruckner's Second Symphony with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

After an exhausting two hours dozing and reading my book on the train, I thought it best to repair to the Horseshoe Bar, for health and safety reasons. An old fellow came and sat next to me and started talking about how he only ever heats one room of his house. He gave me his newspaper. Inside there was a coupon for a free bet, so I placed it on Sol Whit in the 3.20 at Cheltenham because it sounds like Sol LeWitt. She (he? I don't know what sex horses are) came in at 17/2 and so I won £8.50.

Sol LeWitt, [no title]
from Straight Lines in Four Directions and All their Possible Combinations
(Set of 15+1), 1973

Back in the pub, a middleaged couple, affectionate and close and touchy. She said "I don't mind..." She paused. "Isolating people I don't need."

My host and his young Nicaraguan wife suggested meeting up in "Boteca de Brasil" in Trongate, which is about as Brazilian as my right buttock. Big flashing screens showed either football, or a looped film of young brown women in bikinis and men with curly hair dancing on beaches and fast close-ups of glittering cocktail glasses. Blaring music (music you don't like "blares"). The "profiteroles" were lumps of dough with squirty cream and melted dark chocolate slathered over them.

All of a sudden, there was a loud banging and clattering. I looked round and a lunatic had his anger-contorted face an inch away from mine. Two young members of staff girlhandled him out and apologised. "Probably Welsh," I said, surprised at my own calm. Such are the benefits of having a couple of extra pints in the afternoon when you've won on the horses.

At the City Halls, we didn't have much time to survey the audience as Radio 3, understandably, wanted us all quiet and drilled by 7.20. But there was a thirtysomething girl in green high heels and a lovely tight, below-the-knee skirt in the same colour--not hippy-feuillemort, but a glistering, reflective green. After that, her white shirt was a little bit of a let-down.

In the cheapest seats, front row, extreme stage left, my thigh was slowly resembling that of Oetzi, as it was next to an air vent. For the second half (the Bruckner), we managed to move a bit further back to avoid being cryogenically preserved in Glasgow City Halls.

Defrosted, we settled down for Bruckner 2. Thomas Dausgaard is perhaps the most irritating of a typically irritating occupational group. Keen to wrest the audience's attention from the music onto how intensely he is feeling it, he swaggers his baton towards the leader, inches away from her face. At one point he got so close to the violinist on the opposite side, with his silly dancing, that his baton touched the latter's music stand.

It was an enjoyable performance, even though I like my Bruckner slower than Dausgaard took it. Afterwards, there was to be a short "coda" of some piano pieces by Chopin. I certainly wanted to stay for it. Tim and his wife huddled together in one of those couply conflabs which suggest disharmony; she put her coat on in a challenging way. Fortunately, Tim resisted.

A few minutes later, safe that she'd left, he said "You know what women are like--always going on about something or the other. It's almost a relief when she goes off and does her own thing." She would have been a burden at the Blackfriars afterwards, where me and Tim drank Cromarty Bitter and talked about our respective experiences of Ukraine. We went through the programme for the forthcoming year. Could your wife not find something else to do if we go to Mahler 5?, I didn't say.

"For Mothers' Day," said Kirsty on Friday, "I'd like a clean house, and a nice meal." A reasonable request--with a sour edge.

She goes off to I-don't-care-where with Boyf for the weekend, planning to come back for the above around 5ish today. The girls and I make truffles, decorate little baskets with some old wrapping paper, in which to present them to her, and later this afternoon we'll start on the spaghetti alla puttanesca and I'll nip out to get her a nice bottle of wine.

The sour edge comes from the fact that it became clear, in the conversation in which she made that modest request, that I wasn't invited to the meal. I must have looked surprised, as she recanted and apologised and said that I could in fact stay, but I'm not doing so. There is nothing as bitter as an invitation that has to be solicited.

At what point do I leave? After I've finished making the meal (and the truffles, and the little boxes, and her card), but before dishing it up? Or does she expect me to serve the meal and then leave?

I get on with Boyf. I have no resentment towards him at all. But to be banished from my own daughters' attempts at giving Kirsty a nice Mothers' Day hurts me somewhat.

At the girls' house last night, me and Kirsty were ambling through a bottle of cheap plonk. Melanie, my youngest--by six minutes--said "I think self-esteem is too low in women and too high in men."

My mobile beeped. "Where are you? We're ready for you :)" I had completely forgotten a dinner engagement at Csilla and Stefan's, the former lodgers. I swigged my wine and rushed to the railway station, rang Csilla, and made up an excuse based on childcare. On the train I met an old friend, a Catholic priest now, who was telling me about bereavements in our former shared Department at the university--Religious Studies. I did Music and Philosophy, but dipped a toe into "C19th Protestant Revivalism in America", a course I expected to dislike but which I thoroughly enjoyed, our now deceased Texan professor, John Clayton (real name), leaning back on his chair with his feet on the table, giving seminars which I didn't want to end. Second to my parents, I am most grateful to my teachers, all of them, from primary school to my brilliant and attractive postgraduate supervisor.

Csilla and Stefan have a flat in a visually pleasing area in an otherwise ugly city--Preston. It's decorated in a Wilko stylee: pale yellow wallpaper with names of herbs in serif script, heavy curtains with the word "Renaissance" printed on to make it look like embroidery, bare bulbs poking from cheap Chinese black metal chandeliers.

As a greeting, Csilla gets out a plastic bottle and pours out the pálinka. It's made by her father on their dacha about 100km north of Budapest. and is delicious, a hot slide of sloes. "Egészségedre", we all say, the first word of Hungarian Csilla taught me. We get through several bottles of wine. "Seriouscrush," I gabble, with drunken emphasis, "is the most physically attractive woman I have ever, ever, met." Is she more attractive than Trina?" says Csilla. "Well..." I stammer. "Well, that's a.. a difficult question." "No, it's not a difficult question, just one you don't want to answer." I sleep on a voluptuously hard sofa bed. I sleep best on the floor. Beds are for sex, not sleeping.

They have to get up for work, so I leave the flat at half past seven. I arrive back in Lancaster shortly after eight o'clock and with a feeling of being naughty, I go to Wetherspoons, which serves from 8am. "Hiya how are you?" says the barman. "Yeah, just got off a night shift." "I think that deserves a pint then, what are you on?"

I sit down and turn my phone back on. Beep beep. It's a text from Erica. I was a bit nervous about what she would say as I sent her an amorous text in the early hours on Sunday morning after we'd been dancing at the --- Hotel at which we'd had a bit of Pepsi, saying how gorgeous and well-dressed she is. "I love you looby! Up at 6 for work. Not good!" I relaxed with relief and sat back with silent contemplation of nothing in particular, physically thrilled with the feeling of beer seeping into me, while outside, people busied about, presenting themselves with the harsh punctuality and the performance of commitment that low-paid work requires.

The magazine of the British Psychological Society arrives here every few weeks, an uncancelled subscription of a former tenant, and last month it carried an interesting feature about current research into psychological resource depletion--the phenomenon, experienced by everyone, of not having the strength to answer someone, or not being as kind as one could be, or of taking oneself off to the pub for a solitary hour of gazing. The first part of Tuesday felt as though I was in an unethical experiment to test how pleasant I could be to Trina.

Trina snores, and when we sleep together, I am waiting until I can sense her falling into a deep state of relaxation, upon which she will rasp and trumpet for hours. She wakes up refreshed, with an exhausted boyfriend next to her. On Tuesday, my tiredness veined the day. All I want to do is to go to sleep, without you. I was broke, irritated with myself at having no money and so having to rely on her financially, which means her setting my drinking schedule.

However, there is nothing more effective at lifting a man's mood than the delight of having to stop at a level crossing when the barriers are down. We went to Hest Bank, a fifteen minute bus ride north of Lancaster, where the West Coast main line makes its closest approach--just yards away--to the western edge of England, and the beginning, from almost sea level, of the climb to Shap Summit.

It is one of those rather stifling villages that England produces in such numbers, with an attractive unspoilt centre surrounded by the tasteless uPvC'd houses of recent decades, with prominent garages like shrines for the religiously car-owning classes. We were there to have a look at possible mooring places for Trina's narrowboat and to have a couple of pints in the supposedly posh pub there.

Wrong

But no pub can be posh with a fruit machine and staff who send you back to look for your table number. A relative of mine used to run a busy cafe in west London, and used to write insulting descriptions of the customers--"chavvy girl with saggy tits", "ugly blubber-arse and tarty bird in red"--to enable him to find people. They could have put "Attractive, curvy brunette mysteriously attached to raddled bloke dressed like a Geography lecturer at minor Welsh university."

Cementing our passage into middle age, we tuttingly picked up litter along our canalside walk and made a note to write to the Parish Council suggesting they put a bin in the picnic area. Later, we went to the university to see a video installation about "jumping", "[a] name applied in the 18th century to certain Calvinistic Methodists in Wales whose worship was characterized by violent convulsions."

The seven minute film shows people standing in a circle, walking round and smiling at each other, joining and unjoining hands, and then jumping about. It looked like one of those self-expression sessions that people who can't dance pay to go on. I've often thought that a way out of my dire financial straits would be to go somewhere where no-one knows me, hire a big old house and a slightly poofy-looking chef, and feed well-paid gullible people a hotchpotch of navel-gazing artistic activities and inspirational Facebook statuses for a weekend, and charge them £600 each for it.

At night, I woke up with an appreciative feeling that the bed was big enough to almost make it feel that Trina wasn't in it. Uncertainly, I felt about for her. The poor girl was sitting asleep in the armchair with a bobble hat on and a blanket wrapped around her. I called her back to bed. "What are you doing there?" I said, trying to remember what latest big-mouthed unloving thing I might have said. She said she had been determined to give me a good night's sleep, and doesn't snore when she's sat up. She snuggled up gratefully next to me. An hour later, she was providing her free service to vessels in Morecambe Bay and beyond, and I was glad to hear the sound.