A glass of your fancy please ladies and gentlemen, to our New Jersey correspondent, who has survived the hurricane with nothing more unbearable than a loss of power and the subsequent inability to turn the various electronic attention hoovers on.

In a recent comment he claims Italian and Polish ancestry. Well, if his first sentence before the hurricane crashed into NJ is anything to go by--""We're going to have a little rain"--there must be an admixture of English blood in there somewhere. Exactly--sixty people are dead and eight million are without electricity; don't make a song and dance of it. Well done fellah, and well done girls and Mrs Banish.

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I am postponing attending to the financial quicksand that is enveloping me once again, which requires awkward explanations I am using blogging to postpone giving; but also, for a more interesting reason.

My mum arrived last night just as the girls' Halloween party was getting going. They put a great deal of effort into it. Their costumes were entirely hand made, nothing shop-bought. Eight teenage girls in the living room, corpse brides, bloodied surgeons, victims of botched murder attempts. I made butternut squash soup, they made trifle and put plastic spiders in the custard.

While they went out trick or treating, Kirsty and I greeted visitors with spooky organ music and a spider which leapt out at you when the door was opened. Kirsty cackled behind a stuffed model torso of a headless woman as I slowly opened the door. Highlight of the evening was a little girl running frightened down the street before we dispelled the illusion to fetch her back.

Afterwards we all sat round and Mum was being entertainingly funny, although as I drank more cider, it was an effort to control my language. My mum allows no oath stronger than "blimey" or "flip" and I was constantly switching my lexical choices. Piss/urine, fucking/very, pissed off/annoyed, for fuck's sake/I mean.

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A few nights ago I was waiting for a call from Trina. She was driving back from a girly weekend in Elgar country and we were going to the boat for a simple night of eating, drinking, talking and fucking. She texted me from a traffic jam. "Two hours at least."

So I did what anyone would do in the circumstances. In the pub, I bumped into a friend of mine and Erica's, who has been offered the chance to run a karaoke night. There's money, and a fairly generous amount of it.

We started by laughing at the idea, since it's being offered in the roughest pub in Lancaster, a place which although officially named after a rectilinear shape, is more often referred to by its former name, the surname of a Lancaster doctor who murdered his wife on suspicion of her having an affair. He chopped her body up and wrapped it in sheets of newspaper and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of it in a river near Moffat. That is, after murdering the witness, his maid.

Talking herself round with double gins, she moved on to asking me if I'd like to be involved. 50/50 less expenses. There are several practical obstacles about the screen and the lyrics and the fact that the pub doesn't have a proper PA or lights, and many others. I'll have to download the cellarload of shite that is popular musical taste.

Gerry rang the landlady and said we can't get a full karaoke together in 48 hours. The landlady suggested a disco instead. A disco disco. Not rave, she said. Well, that's a bit easier. Disco is my first love, and like all things one cares about that have a popular appropriation, the latter feels like a travesty. I don't consider the Bee Gees "disco" and I realise with sadness that I will have to playYMCA, deracinated from its gayly promiscuous significance.

So tomorrow night, me and Gerry, winging it majorly. Rubbish music, shit light show, dodgy customers, 12/1 that there'll be a fight at some point and 7/2 there'll be a laughably antique bit of squaring up involving working class males and their imagined ownership of women. I'm not going to put the pub's name because I don't want it googling, but if you're local you'll know where I mean. Kicks off (I hope not) at 7.00 and I hope I will survive till 1am.

In the pub, Friday night, a sixtysomething woman was distractedly playing with her glass on a table by herself. I was reading the LRB, a tiring review of a book about one of my favourite novels, The Portrait of A Lady, one of those times when you feel both your enjoyment of and distance from, analysis. You're reading too much into it. She shuffled her chair towards my table and said "I'll just join you here if you don't mind," and introduced herself. "Of course you can, please do."

An acquaintance a couple of yards away nodded at me, tilting his head towards me and her. "You've pulled there," was the tittering suggestion, as if men and women can't just chat in a pub, with the added implication that our age difference meant I should shun her. Yeah well I don't envy you sitting there with your mute, suppliant wife.

We chatted about how people in Lancaster are unfriendly (as I think they can be), how Thatcher changed this country, and our mutual dislike of spiders. And then New Business Colleague walked in with two swollen heavy canvas bags and was heading to the bar. "NBC!" I shouted, and got him a chair at our table. "Sit down there. What do you want?"

Dorothy went to the loo. I said to NBC "Don't be unkind, I've just met her. I don't know her. She's alright." He sat down and looked at me then away with the unconcern that you would have from a fortnight of exhausting work. "Lager," he said. "Stella." He's so much nicer a person when he's not pretending to big himself up. I talked about about being arty farty in Walsall (he's from not far from there), his dangerous, vertiginous work, and how I know him because his sexy wife is an old classmate of mine. He went to leave and I put my arm round his waist. "I need to have a chat with you, you know."

Dorothy wanted to buy me another but I had to get home, which is where I am now, because a relative of Kirsty's is arriving from the shallow heart of the deep South in half an hour, to stay with her for three days, bringing her noisy sons and her self-obsession and never asking us any questions about ourselves. It's hard work for Kirsty and the girls. Can you not try to show a bit of interest in someone else for a change?, except that she would do for a minute, reminded of a dimly remembered moral obligation and highly profitable conversational gambit, and then carry on in exactly the same vein.

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Trina wriggled and snored. I'm tired in the morning after a night constantly awoken by her fidgeting and her low frequency roaring through which she sleeps in unawareness. But we'll work it out. She's got a nice arse which she presents to me curvily at night. I like fucking her, and we've only just started.

I like walking round with her in the hedonistic gleam of Booths in Garstang, the fundamental pleasure of food arrayed in tidy aisles and glossy cabinets. I was flat after being with Kim and our sex wasn't as good as it can be, but I like the evenings of wine on the boat, letting my eyes drift into soft focus at the candlelight in the way you do with a coal fire, and chatting with her without having to think.

Kim left this afternoon and the real comedown, of her not being here, is added to the pharmaceutical one, after three days fuelled by plant food and the poor man's Pepsi.

On the first night we finally stopped taking anything at about 11am, dozed for an hour or so, then dragged ourselves out round the pound shops and into a pub, her and my holiday venues of choice. We bought some sherry and blanketed ourselves up in the living room, a cosy bundle of her crocheting and me reading the LRB as best as I could with my weakened eyes, which were mixing text up as a plea for a few hours off.

I broached the sleeping arrangements and she said what I'd hope she'd say, which saved some effort on my part. In the middle of the night I looked across at her, one arm squared behind her head, the other symmetrically arrayed across her stomach, her beautiful eyes and mouth and lips and face lifting and sighing.

Next day, we moved downstairs and resumed our positions in our bedded camp in the living room. Serendipitously, an email arrived from a previous occupant of that bed. "Bit of a long shot", she ventured, and said she was coming up from Manchester to see a band in Lancaster who were supporting Hazel O'Connor. I googled for them, didn't like them, rang her to tell her so, and asked her what she was doing before or after. She said she'd skip the main act if I fancied coming out.

Kim was fading and didn't want to come out. Bryony was waiting outside the theatre and I pinched her bum as a greeting. We went for a pizza and wine. The conviviality, the light, the clear perspex chairs, the feeling of familiarity of a place in which I was employed as the washer-up thirty years ago. Everything felt bright.

I talked about the Walsall project and Trina in a way that I'd normally censor as too voluble and "big". I told her about my misgivings about me and Trina living together. She said that "sometimes one must compromise," something I can't agree with in this context.

I kissed her goodbye and bought more sherry and came back home. Kim was already in bed. I was soon fast asleep. Today, we linked arms and walked into town to buy postcards and a reviving Lancashire hotpot in a pub before she left.

I went to work at Really Late, then went round to Kirsty's to have a chat with her and my daughters. They've been to their set's co-ordinator to complain about disruptive members of their class. We planned Halloween a bit. I've got a lab coat for Fiona to be the evil doctor.

Now, by myself, there's a pile of demands for money I haven't got and threats of court action, and one from my mum enclosing a fiver, money she hasn't got either.

Walsall
In the hotel there is a German family having breakfast. I am curious about them but don't want to quiz them, and I have no German. The woman serving breakfast tells me "Yes, they only tend to stay a day or two. I mean, you wouldn't come to Walsall on holiday would you?" The brochure in the room contains a warning for the adventurous ones who do: "A word to the wise. There are many bars in Walsall which can be a bit intimidating and there is sometimes trouble in and around the town centre." Our room had prints of cherubs on every wall as an emollient.

At the New Art Gallery, we spent some time reading a contemporary account of the bomb plot around which we were to do our pieces. It was entirely manufactured by the police, whose agent, Coulon, was only uncovered late in the day. When questioned about his apparent lack of resources, he declared "I am a true Anarchist! I live by plunder."

We went on a trip to some of the sites associated with the plot. We were shown the protagonist's old home, now a nail parlour, a Walsall District Council blue plaque signalling its safety and remoteness. Walsall Socialist Club, where the anarchists met, is now a female-only gym. One of our number met the owner, who said it had been a good business idea because most Muslim women aren't allowed to exercise with men.

I felt awkward and apologetic about abandoning Trina during the days, and included her as much as possible, at lunch times and in the evening boozing. She helped me with my contribution, which was an in situ spoken word piece, recorded outdoors and in a pub. At other times she took herself round the only other attraction of Walsall, an arboretum, which looks like any old park where some unusual species of trees are looked after.

We took a stroll to a suburb which was recommended for Indian food and wandered amidst its distinctive architecture.

We decided against it and went to the local CAMRA Pub of the Year, the Black Country Arms, instead, where a fine menu awaited us.

Trina said it was obvious which beer was choosing me: number seven.

We had some more drinks in the kitschy pub attached to the hotel, before a lovely, slow sex. Adrenaline, I suppose; relief and satisfaction that the quality of my work had vindicated the organisation's decision to give me a place on the weekend, and glad to have Trina around, grateful that she'd come with me to fucking Walsall, of all places.

North Wales
We left the noisiest hotel in the West Midlands, and took a journey that would have been difficult to plan and harder to execute before the satnav era. Asking for the shortest route, we were taken along wooded avenues of minor roads and through tiny villages, in one of which, Llandegla, we found Rosie's cider farm. The feeble little farm dogs were in cages the size of living rooms, excited at visitors.

In a village outside Llangollen, we saw an elderly man struggling up the steep hill with some heavy shopping. "Shall we give him a lift?" she said. "Hang on, that's my Uncle Ninian!" Her 81-year-old uncle got in and directed us on a tour of some almost impossibly narrow farm tracks he used to go sledding down as a lad. In the cafe in town, we made room on our table for a party of Chicagoans. Such a fucked-up country, such friendly people.

On to Prestatyn, to meet her son and his fiancée, in one of those "country" pubs which have been decorated from remaindered fittings formerly sold in Wilko when Saddam Hussein briefly acted as Artistic Director. Black and silver flowery embossed flock wallpaper, large, encrusted mirrors and even larger TV screens, chrome chandeliers with tubes of hexagonal glass; inescapable music. The company was pleasant enough, jokey and a little distant; her son keen, I suppose, to keep things light, trying not to imagine his mother having sex.

Wigan
Back on the boat, we de-spidered the shower and windows, lit a fire and opened a sharp, foul, red wine. It was a relief to be away from the noise of traffic and loud wallpaper and canned music, with just the ducks laughing their heads off at us.

Next day we went to Wigan for a Chinese buffet lunch with her old work colleagues. We walked up to a machine-ventilated uPvc'd office, where we were welcomed by the Director of Management Solutions Delivery, a well-scrubbed, camp, hypochrondriac I took to immediately. "He'll like you," Trina had predicted. "He goes for slim younger men."

My competence in handling the meeting was thrown by the overwhelmingly attractive new girl who emerged from her office to introduce herself. Mid 30s, shoulder length dark brown hair, silver coloured square glasses, a long necklace of silver carrying small rectangles in the same colour hanging irresistibly over a black silky blouse; black and white dogtooth skirt to just above her knee and black tights and zip-up black boots to just below it. Conscious of the need to give a good impression, I deliberately looked at her to conceal my embarrassment at how attractive I found her, yet giving it away when I did so.

Liverpool
I fell asleep in the car and couldn't fuck her when we got back to the boat, when I knew that was her plan for the afternoon. In the evening we went to Liverpool to meet her friends from her uni days, where I was to be tested and evaluated. In the back room of a Victorian pub, a group of men opposite us were playing poker seriously, with chips. An older, grizzled man seemed to be in charge, dealing, but I understood little of what was going on through the thick glass of their accents.

One girl was quizzing me in a way that made me feel a little uncomfortable, making a joke out of something she found serious, distancing herself from the directness I'd have preferred. But then, that's concern for one's friend, and women have good reason to feel concerned about new men. It soon loosened up (oh blessed alcohol) and I drew Kieran's attention to the TV, where the referee in the Poland v England game was kicking a ball to demonstate the uselessness of playing on the rain-sodden pitch, and Northern Ireland came within ten minutes of beating the mighty Portugal, in Portugal.

Whilst in Prestatyn, we walked along the beach and found a lone chair, exported perhaps from a hotel, for the industrial view with the miraculously staked masts of a wind farm.

We replaced the seat, set the camera's timer, and ran away.

Lesson 1: The Proposal

Why I'd like to take part in this project

I've been interested (despite having a resolutely apolitical family background) in Anarchism since I was a teenager. At the age of 14 I was reading Malatesta and Ricardo Flores Magon, and taking part in anarchist conferences organised through South London Press, sleeping on the floor of 121 Railton Road.

As a school leaver, feeling a little alienated from the dominant ideology of finding identity and personal fulfilment through work, I was very interested in that branch of Anarchism that aimed at the supersession of work. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was a revelatory, Damascene text to me, whose liberating refusal to knuckle down is resonant at all times since.

To be able to meld this interest with performance is an exciting prospect. The historical continuities of the absolute fear of Anarchism felt by the State, however small its active followers are in number, are something that lends itself to artistic re-presentation. I'm confident I would find it stimulating to be explore [sic] this in a practical live art context, as well as to connect with other artists interested in the general area of politicised live art.

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I am retrospectively embarrassed about almost everything I write, including my application to go cavorting in a project run by the Live Art Development Agency. The reference to reading leftwing authors during my teenage years sounds like the ingratiating, winking gesture of the outsider wanting to be let in; the distancing introduction of the phrase "dominant ideology" works to give a retrospective intellectual shine to my adolescent reading; the way that the redundant "Damascene" is used as an intensifer--are only a few of the offences against style, and simple errors, that look so ugly now.

But it was successful, and with six others, I'm off on Thursday to Walsall. 82% of experts surveyed agreed that Walsall is a shithole; it was also the scene of a somewhat unruly demonstration by the far-right English Defence League last week. It needs the love.

Led by Sean Burn and Mike Layward, we are going to make a piece to be presented at the New Art Gallery, and in the town centre. It'll be based on an Anarchist bomb plot there in 1882, which involved agents provocateurs and the kind of paranoid confusion about who is and isn't a police agent that G K Chesterton extended to surreal, comic lengths in The Man Who Was Thursday.

I sent an email round to the other participants suggesting a drink before it gets going. Exploring their websites I find the photographs of young women laying on their backs in fields of grass which all funders of performance art insist upon before the money is released.

Trina's coming down on the Friday; on the same day, my Head of Pisstaking, my confidante, my little friend who steals with me through the doors of perception, Kim, will arrive in Birmingham with a girlfriend. I told Trina this, and suggested a night of one man-three girl drinky action, to which she merrily consented.

I want her to meet my friends, especially Kim, with her sexiness, low boredom threshold and bright wit. I'm proud of my girlfriends. Men look at me and Kitty walking down the street with a look that shoots envy, trying to scope her beautiful tits before looking away. Or was that me?