You can easily do anthropology at home. There's no need to travel, Bruce Parry-ish, to some culturally and geographically remote corner of the world to find people who act in ways that test to the limit one's ability to adapt to the alien.

It's someone's birthday do in a noisy pub, midnight on a Saturday night; commercial dance music and twentysomething women wearing heels in which they can't properly walk. Men in jeans and logoed T-shirts. I don't know anyone, but they're mainly women so I was looking forward to it. I tried to make conversation with the girl sat to the right of me. I asked her how she knew our host. "We're friends," she said, looking away, to see if anything more interesting was happening. Trying to dredge something out of this unpromisingly brief and obvious answer, I followed up with "Do you go back a long way?" She refused to speak, but leant across me to speak to the woman on my left.

I left it a few minutes; perhaps she hadn't heard me. I sat looking around at the display of apparently sexualised dancing which is deracinated from any actual sexual intent. "Get me something!" a man yelled at the bar to his friend, his bum nudging into mine. "Two twenty, get a shot or something." I drank my pint as quickly as I could and left, feeling observed like a specimen. And here we have an exhibit of The Older Man. I wish I'd left the evening in the far happier condition it had been in a few hours earlier.

Kitty and Melissa were in the little room at the Whittle. I walked in and the barman was presenting his skinny arse in front of the fire, loading on more wood. Kitty, with her customary air of sexy, impatient debauchery. Melissa at last slinked her coat off her glamour model figure, and I settled into an old sofa next to her. The doleful-looking dog came and jumped up and curled himself next to us, while we chatted and chatted.

Kitty and I had had a bit of a tiff in the Sun Hotel--only hours after we'd been in the same bed. I wanted to make amends, so I wrapped up Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, about life on the minimum wage--which she'd spotted in my room and had been reading in bed--and gave it to her with a card and a message which ended with a resolution to be nicer to her.

It would distress me if Kitty and I were to fall out. I rang Trina and told her all about it. Trina said she misses me when I'm not there. I had to be a bit careful what I said, because I never miss her.

I left the tightly-skirted, unsexy women and uncool cool young men in Wetherspoons, and was delightedly surprised to bump into A Free Man in Preston and Girlonatrain, two blogpals who have more or less given it up now. Girlonatrain's archives are still there; as is AFMIP's library of infrequent but witty, imaginative posts about office life. It was just a couple of minutes in the street, but I enjoyed the lively little conversation. Girlonatrain, with her attractively wonky teeth, is still looking "quite fit", as a blogger described her. Free Man is doing a launch of his new album at the Gregson on Easter Sunday. I might go if I'm free, but I imagine it'll be guitar-based music with intelligent and thoughtful lyrics.

"You're a nicer person when you're not pissed," I say to Wilma. And then the thought occurs to me "What if you don't want to be a nicer person?" In her kitchen, you have to tiptoe carefully amongst the spilled bowls of cat food. I feel more relaxed in a dishevelled house; the people who keep stomach-knottingly tidy houses are the odd ones out, with their tense display of order, trying to prove something. We chatted, half-watching a recording of Ireland v someone in the rugby last weekend, getting through two or three bottles glasses of wine.

---

The eldest and I went orienteering on Saturday. Scratched legs, some impressive-looking blood smeared on the map from a grazed hand, my dodgy knee complaining, getting whipped in the face by branches, clambering up and down slippery moss-covered rock-strewn banks...all against the clock -- it was exhilerating fun, with the fine drizzle making everything a bit more dangerous. And I am particularly proud that we managed to get to control 104, about which the organiser said, seeing as we were complete novices, "I wouldn't go down there if I were you." We were on a simplified version of the course for beginners, but in our group we came 8th out of 18. We're going again next month, up on the crags near Silverdale.

---

"Are you wearing a bit of eye-liner?" I ask my middle daughter, trying not to sound argumentative, who looks stylish in an orange woollen knee-length dress, black tights and patent leather shoes. The eyeliner looks dreadful to me. She's got the beautiful uncreased eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl. Why darken and hollow them? They all go off to a party with one of their friends, who is wearing narrow red jeans, baseball pumps, and one of those hats that looks like a bear.

Kirsty and boyf turned up at 7ish last night after their weekend away. Kirsty is wired, twitching in a way I recognise, and wants to go down the pub with boyf to slake the drugs. "Don't rush," I say, and we three know what has been going on, and how it's an implied offer to have the girls for another night if they need more time to apply the brakes.

But they don't, and I come back here and miss Trina's strokable, kissable, sexy body. She's in a pub in Llansomewhere, in Wales, out with her ex husband and their son and his fiancée. I write sex to her on the phone, concluding "[...] Realise this might not be the best time to send you this but I can't resist. I fancy you like fuck."

I know this is a lesson that most men don't take almost fifty years to realise, but you've got to want to fuck the girl you're going out with. I love how she makes me feel, putting sex at the core of who I am.

There are many ways in which academe can contribute to the pressing social, environmental and political problems of the day, from climate change to water shortages in the Third World, but I think most people would agree that the best use of public money for research in the United Kingdom today would be to spend it refining the conceptual framework in which Social Network Analysis can be applied to the study of music.

The University of Manchester hosted a conference on this subject last week. The grub was good, but the quality of academic conference bags is slipping at Manchester. Plastic! And no pen drive, keyring, or branded pen. What a swizz.

I was pleased that the arrestingly attractive early career academic at whom I look for a fraction too long, who is sent round to every conference in the social sciences, managed to make it through the snow. Clever women are sexy, and she was fucking sexy, in her below the knee grey square-necked wool-ish dress, small, unbuttoned black top pushed fractionally aside by her lovely tits, black tights and flat black shoes. I love understated monochrome clothes on women.

I chimed in with a couple of comments, about the lack of a qualitatitive dimension in some of the relationships being proposed, and an anecdote about coming across, in the Modern Soul scene, the practice of covering up records. This occurred when DJs, working in collaboration with a cartel of record dealers, would paste over the label and lie publicly about the title and the artist's name. In this way they created both create both scarcity (economic capital) and boundaries of social distinction (social capital, albeit of an unpleasant kind). My comment was provoked by his discussion of the same practice amongst the DJs and sound systems run by Calypso and Mento musicians who arrived in London, Liverpool and elsewhere in the late 50s.

I was couchsurfing and I navigated my way to a grotty south Manchester suburb and a gloomy-looking flat, guided there by a most helpful reformed alcoholic who took me under his wing somewhat on the bus. Inside, the flat was a large library, with living quarters appended. Classical poetry, literary theory, modern British novels, a yard of Marxism, and much more. The plates were balanced finely on the top of the gas fire, ready for a delicious sausage casserole. We chatted into midnight with out of date Guinness. In the morning, far earlier than he'd normally get up, he'd set out a breakfast table that was better than some of the hotels Trina and I have stayed in lately.

Back in the ivory towers, the bus was getting a bit lost, with one person's bonkers autobiographical ramble through dreams, telepathy and "Heaven", half a therapeutic hour of an elderly person worrying out loud about dying. She was received with an overstated laughter at anything funny--at a homeopathic degree of funniness--that she said. It's meant to be kind, but had a tinge of ageist condescension about it, as though someone who is losing her marbles after having written some foundational texts should now be exempt from the pettifogging suggestion that your paper actually relates to the topic of the conference.

We ushered her off with the loud applause that signals "You can go now, thanks", and moved on to an infinitely better plenary in which the presenter explained (with a necessary bit of squiggly maths) a new way of analysing data to help in cross-referencing individuals' privileged and rejected objects of taste. I thought it breathed a promising impetus into a decades old problem in the field which has been stagnating for some time.

But then we got a nudge forward in the direction of the pub. We eschewed our previous night's pub, the Lass O'Gowrie, as the heating (never wonderful there, in my experience) had broken down completely and the bar staff were wearing wooly gloves and hats. In The Molly House, the breathtaking prices (3.90 for bitter) were offset by the cosiness of the venue and the quality of the ale; but mainly, by the excellent company--both academic and bloggy.

I met up with Crinklybee, one of my longest-standing blogpals, who manfully came out on a school night and effortlessly joined the party; I like friends you don't have to worry about. I'm not sure whether I was looking a bit unstable by the end, but I did appreciate him gently insisting that we leave the pub, based on his flimsy reasoning that the last train to Lancaster was departing in about ten minutes. We swapped a couple of blog names which we thought the other should read, and J showed me the bit of paper from a while ago, on which he'd noted my urgent pointing to Letters Concerning.

Back here, I had a day to get ready for my own couchsurfing guests, a beautiful ginger-haired green-eyed Italian girl wearing a tight white, green and red check shirt, and a mustachioed young Frenchman. I made up a coal fire in order to impress them with my authentic English rusticity. I'm not sure what the relationship was between them, but they slept in the same bed while I bedded down on my living room floor on the old sofa cushion that used to be my bed before I met Trina, hoping that the coal fire wouldn't spit into my hair. This morning, at breakfast, they poked suspiciously at the crumpets as though they were some exotic specimen of fauna.

Their last letter had "Final Notice" stamped across it, so I don't know why they are sending me any more.

At the ---- Hotel, it's the Northern Soul Night. M and I discuss preparations. "Bring what you've got and I'll exchange it for something better," he says. Very Pretty Woman in Black Dress is there with Older Boyfriend, who wears pressed trousers that look like old British Rail uniform, and large round black specs. Everyone wonders.

The drugs do work and we are talking and talking, doing that hand gesture that indicates exasperation with something we understand and that should be common sense, but isn't. M is a bit shy about dancing, not knowing what distance to give us.

---

Trina and I are in the living room with a bottle of wine, in front of a radiantly glowing coal fire. My desire for comfort and my lust are arguing with each other, knowing it's freezing cold in my bedroom, but we repair upstairs and get into bed without time to make sex out of taking our clothes off.

"I was having horrible dreams last night," she said, "about you talking to your friend and saying how difficult it was dancing with that woman at the Soul Night and kissing her at the same time. And then there was a kitten in the bed and I crushed it by rolling on it." "You just hadn't had enough cock, darling," I said, pushing her legs open. You hadn't been fucked enough. You just needed more cock, that's all." "You can fuck me any time," she said.

As we were getting dressed there was a loud knock at the door. In my underpants and T-shirt, I am immobilised with worry before I move myself slowly out of sight and away from the window. Trina is chatting away, unaware of what this might mean. "Shhh," I said. "We'd better talk quietly. I'm not answering that."

I wait until I think he might have gone away, praying that the lodger doesn't open the door. I peer carefully from the window to see a man tapping something into a handheld gadget. Downstairs, there's put a card on the mat. "Oh bugger, it was just the meter reader."

---

I suggest Trina and I could go to Clapham--the pretty one owned by one man, just over the border in North Yorkshire. We get off the train and have just started walking the mile and a bit to the village when someone stops and asks us if we'd like a lift. We tell her we're going to have a drink in The Old Manor House. "Oh, that was mine. Yes, I did it up and put the accomodation in upstairs." She drops us off outside. I have the blandest "curry" I have ever had, before we move into the bar and order our drinks in what was the kitchen, with its fireplace ten feet wide, now occupied by a woodburner.

"I must warn you," says the landlady, "the Knit and Natter group will be arriving soon."

As Trina is standing by the fire, one of their number moves her coat, her bag and her chair. Trina points it out to her and she is apologetic, to some extent. We move on to the main pub in the village, the New Inn. The landlord fiddles ineffectually with a fire. His tales about the collusion between the police and the editor of the local paper he used to work on are interesting, but it's too cold to relax.

Froz

We go back to the Old Manor House, where we report all our conversations to the landlady, including what the landlord of the New Inn had said about her place. Without meaning to, I have become a conduit of internecine rural Yorkshire conversation. "The dry stone wallers will be in soon," says our commentating landlady. They're dressed in beaver hats, high pale yellow boots, and layers of green and brown outer clothes.

The Lancaster Amber beer is so tame as to be undrinkable, and we give our pints to the dry stone wallers, as the last train to Lancaster goes in half an hour. As we walk back to the station, they pull up in their car and offer us a lift. We squeeze in amongst the bags of kindling on the back seat. At the station, a cat does a mannered walk along one of the rails, into the blackness.

The train's headlights poke into the dark. I pull up my trouser leg and start thumbing. The driver puts his head out of the window. "With a leg like that, I wasn't going to stop." On the train, students are buried in laptops and I feel a flare of irritation with them for not being on the same level of sociability as me. "Come on, it's the last train. Put your work away you miserable fuckers."

I say goodbye to Trina and start walking home. Kirsty texts me wondering if I was coming round. At her house I set about the largest pile of washing up existing that evening in any kitchen west of the Oder-Neisse line.

Back at my house, we had a few drinks (I couldn't fuck her, which I think was her plan), and then to my relief and pleasure, she suggested going out.

We walked into the [pub] and I realised I'd forgotten that it was the launch night of the Dark and Winter Ales Festival, which brightens Lancaster every February. We stood at the bar all night chatting to various of my friends and a couple we know from the wine club, the woman of which was wearing a grey wool-ish dress with a red hem. Her dress stretched over her black-tighted thighs as she sat cross-legged next to me. Trina wanted something light and blonde, then decided to join l'esprit du soir and had a half of the Old School Brewery's Governers' Porter. "Oh," she said. "that's delicious," and went on to have three pints of it.

One of the librarians at the Uni came up to us. I introduced Trina as my girlfriend. The Librarian said "I've never seen you so happy," which struck me as unfounded and possibly ingratiating. It was well-meant, but she'd only had a couple of minutes to assess the extent of my "happiness". I'm not interested in being happy, or being in love. Both feel like a form of work.

The Librarian was being uncharacteristically open, perhaps enjoying Trina's assumed womanly sympathy, in saying that she hadn't enjoyed much of the past decade being alone. We both urged internet dating on her. "I got her off the internet," I said, jerking a sexist thumb at Trina. I like being sexist in my language when talking to people who aren't close to me.

"Your article's been published in the [local real ale magazine], you know," said the Librarian. I'd forgotten I'd submitted it and was selfishly eager to see it. I've posted my copy of the actual magazine to Kim, with a note attached saying "Page 9, second paragraph X"

Newcastle: In the beautiful station bar, a pub held back from greatness because of the canned music and TV screens, they've moved the real ale pumps to the fringes of the bar, promoting the lagers to centre stage. But still, it's somewhere where they don't mind my children. My girls are civilised teenagers (it's their Dad you need to keep an eye on), yet we are barred from socialising as a family in Ember Inns, Wetherspoons, John Barras and many other chains without ordering "food", as if a reheated ping-ping oven meal might turn me into a more conscientious father.

Durham: I struggle with a bus driver's accent, and follow his directions to the pub more from his gestures than his words. She walked into The Colpitts looking as tall, confident, sexy and dangerous as she ever was, wearing a red and white check cotton thigh-length dress with little bows on the sleeves and at the back of her waist. The lone middle-aged men looked almost shyly down when she clonked erectly to the bar to ask the barmaid if she could close the window. The Sam Smith's Stout is refreshing, and the conversation flows with a sociability that many pubs claim without possessing.

Ormskirk: A town which doesn't know whether it wants to be posh or common, seems to be aiming at that specialised niche market of visitors who like to be drenched in canned music. It's in the café where we have lunch, it's in the precinct, and The Buck I'Th' Vine, an old pub built for sociability, is now run by someone who pumps rock music into every room and into the garden. Urgent but silent bulletins of destruction, death and mendacity (i.e., "the news") glare from TV screens. In the Queen's Head, the men round the bar display the most distinctive characteristic of Scousers after their accent: thinking their banter funnier than it is. Even in the farthest corner of the garden, someone informs us repeatedly that he is nark nark narking on heaven's door, while we try to enjoy the Pheonix beer.

Burscough: The place oozes Conservatism. Wooden signs in the gardens of detached houses built on what was a green belt complain about the threat to the green belt. Of course, the homeowners wouldn't vote for any party interested in the things they are complaining about. Plumply busty middle-aged women in billowing blouses get out of the car before men in beige slacks, both beaming like a couple glad to have found each other: clothes by Ethel Austin, politics by Margaret Thatcher. In the Hop and Vine, the Burscough beers are the best of the day, and in the garden, we find the first place without canned music.

In Lancaster, I sat outside the White Cross (for reasons you might now guess) with a gorgeous Lytham Dark, glad to see that at least one pub knows that a Stout is not just for Christmas.