On Thursday Kirsty went off with boyf for the weekend. It was raining heavily, something so ordinary now I don't give it much attention.

On the following morning I thought we'd have to get the Ordnance Survey in to add a feature to the map of Lancaster. A small pond had arisen in Kirsty's back yard, from the blocked drain against the wall of her kitchen, extending almost to her back door three yards away, and fingering towards Much Older but Fanciable Next Door Neighbour's yard. Everything sent down the kitchen sink came belching back up, making Lake Kirsty bigger.

Middle daughter Jenny set to bailing us out with a bucket and a cup, shovelling the water into a recycling bin, which we dragged out and along the road to pour it down the drain, repeatedly.

This morning I tried caustic soda as a lazy chemical solution. To unblock drains, it said, put 100ml down, so I put 500ml down. Still nothing shifted. After a couple of hours I stuck my hand down as far as it would go and removed several handfuls of clumps of hair and dripping black, viscous slime, and I think, the main culprit, a stone, two inches long by an inch wide. The drain has a kink in it and it was difficult getting my arm around the bend and my skin was scraping against the edge of the drain. But I cleared it, water running freely in a test.

Next time, get a man in

I went for a shower. My forearm was suppurating with a clear liquid over dark red patches of what looked like subcutaneous blood which wept onto my skin through hundreds of pinpricks; the hot water stung. Afterwards my arm still smelt of drain, and was still oozing. I imagined a terrible infection and an amputation at the elbow and being in the local paper for being brave. I went down the pub where Neil and Kev gave me some of their prescription-only cream for irritated skin. It helped a great deal. Neil and Kev asked to borrow a tenner and we spent it all on drink.

A man whom I try not to talk to since he's a bullshitter, saying he was at a Ronnie McNeir gig with me at Warrington in the mid 80s when he wasn't, who unnerves me with his attempts at insinuating himself with me, looked admiringly at my alkaline scars and asked me how I'd done it, reading a manly labour of dirt, graft, injury. But I don't want to appear good in your eyes.

A much better man, a shaggy-haired boyfriend of someone I know, told me not to do it like that again but to ring him up and I could borrow his drain-clearing rods, for free, as he's a groundworker. I don't know what a groundworker is. He said he was only popping in for one but I think I misjudged it in taking that at face value and patting him on his waist as a farewell instead of inviting him over to our table. Courteous, self-effacing people sometimes say the opposite of what they mean and it's up to you to read that.

At home I rang Trina, and we had a conversation which was too enjoyable for me to broach my worry: I don't want to live with you. Then I turned the lights down and played some music and tried to drain the last weak effect from an enfeebled bottle of poppers. I must replenish my stock: cheap but effective thrills.

Round about this time of the year, Steph and Tom email me asking me if anything interests me in Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival's programme. Well, of course it does.

I met Steph almost thirty years ago, when I was a research assistant and she, a lecturer in Educational Research, had the office opposite. I have a bit of a crush on both of them and secretly want to be their friends. I love their parties, from the moment when I open the invite--always handwritten, always by post--a bit ashamed that I'm so delighted to receive it. They took me out last year during HCMF to a Lebanese restuarant and paid for the whole thing and the pint afterwards, knowing I was very hard up. With sophisticated manners they created an evening in which we all wordlessly refused turning my poverty and their graciousness into a relation of largesse and gratitude.

I've volunteered at HCMF for more than ten years. The hardness of the contemporary music scene becomes more obvious as one becomes less tolerant or more aware of it. I use the word "hardness" to suggest two things: the rigidity of its social hierarchies, and the coldness of its social life. Every year I go there (fourteenth year now) I am newly made aware of this hardness.

As a volunteer, I have stood in black with my tray of chilled wine in receptions for the Danish cultural attaché, sat doing the box office at a table in the draughtiest bit of St Paul's Church, or, my least glamorous gig--although the one in which I heard the music best--stood outside a toilet to tell people not to flush it lest it disturb a piece by Bent Sørensen.

In all of these, and during all the rest of the festival, I, like the other volunteers, was like glass to the salariat of HCMF. Once the music stops, and you've done your job, you're expected to fuck off with your own sort. It's not what I'm used to. In the subcultures I circulate in, unless you're a knob, which I am not, you're always invited, included, asked down the pub, and no-one gives a shit who you are or what your role in the evening was.

On this, and other evidence which would make this post too long, I conjectured this froideur might be functionally relevant to the production of contemporary music. I started a PhD to explore this before I exhausted a credit card for the fees and realised that I'm too selfish a person and a writer to argue for a point of view with the degree of patience required in a PhD.

I kissed Trina passionately; breathless, we sighed as we pulled away from each other. She looked down. "My goodness," she exclaimed. "I didn't realise you had such a big one!" "Do you want to sit on it for a minute, see what it feels like?" I suggested. She took the rest of her clothes off and stroked her fingers along some of its length. "It looks lovely," she said. She eased herself down onto it and took a small gasp of breath. "Oooh... it's firm--but comfortable too."

For the first time this century I will be sleeping regularly in something that is neither a children's bunk bed (my last cohabitational hide), nor a foam settee cushion. I have a double bed. That is, I have a mattress on the floor, and an unassembled bed base. They won't fit, since the mattress is queen size and the frame is standard, so the mattress will overhang a bit, thereby offering a comic dimension to coitus interruptus.

Trina came to the wine club on Tuesday in a pretty black and white check dress with wide straps and a square cut neck, although I had to dissuade her from ruining the ensemble by wearing a cardi over it, encouraging her into a thin grey jacket instead, despite the cutting rain and wind.

We had a presentation and tutored tasting by an airline pilot turned wine importer, who specialises in South Africa. Looking at his leaflet beforehand I had my doubts. We were to start with a Chenin Blanc, a Sauvignon Blanc, and a Chardonnay, all of which have supplied some of the worst wines I've ever had.

But no. The Sauvignon Blanc had an intoxicating bouquet--amyl nitrate, or petrol, or a cheap vinyl suite on a hot day; a rich, changing flavour, and an aftertaste that appeared to have signed a tenancy agreement with your mouth. (Uva Mira Sauvignon Blanc 2009, £11). Trina took so effusive a delight in the same vineyard's simply named Chardonnay 2010 that she spent £25 on a bottle of it. Conveniently, I liked the cheapest bottle of the entire evening the best, a JP Bredell Shiraz 2003 (£8.75) (how often do you get to taste a Shiraz nearly a decade old?) It would have cost almost double that a few years ago but the firm is going out of business and they just want to clear the cellars.

Towards the end of the evening, over the port--well, OK, "over the port-style fortified wine" then--the club turned into a cabal. People wandered around tilting their heads towards each other, scrabbling for pens and cards, passing on details of unadvertised wine tastings and closed events. Someone invited us to the Borough for a pint, but I wanted to take Trina back and get her in my new big bed. "That's a lovely offer, but we don't see each other very often, so I'm going to decline it just on this occasion."

The following morning we went to her boat and got into a chilly, damp bed. Over some more wine with a late lunch, Trina started talking about us living together. For the first time in the entire course of our relationship, the pings of an alarm bell punctuated her sentences in my head.

Erica texts, asks me what I'm doing. "Going down the pub with you. What else?" In the pub, she and Hubby are synthetically brightened. A fortysomething blonde wanders over to our table and makes an apologetic gesture. "No, no, park yourself here," I say.

Erica passes it to me with the usual clumsy attempt at sleight of hand that we all do; I go to the loo, and then come downstairs and chat to Blondy about our respective daughters, and schools. Unconsciously, I take a pint from the other side of the table. "Er... that's my partner's." Partner. So neutral, settled, unexciting. I apologise.

A man who could only be English--bald, fat, with a logoed T shirt pushed out to cover inadequately a beetling stomach--walks over and gives me a suspicious look; no attempt at conversation and there are no introductions, so I carry on talking to Blondy. We get on to the fact that daughters of both of us want to be actresses. Baldy breaks his silence to chime in with a pessimistic assessment of the likelihood of either child finding a place at stage school. Clearly, socially incompetent men who look like a sack of porridge in a football top are experts on the allocation of places for acting training in the Northwest. I have lost count of the times that a Lancaster man seems to take no other delight in speech than to dispel any optimism that threatens his customary and preferred state of immiseration.

Blondy and Baldy go off somewhere. Erica, Hubby and I get more and more sweary, lifted with a refresher. A friend who is finding it very diffcult to cope a couple of years after the death of his longstanding girlfriend joins us, and I'm aware of my selfishness about not really including him, a silent challenge to him to join in sufficiently forcefully. I can't tax Erica's hospitality any more so I say I'm going home to fetch my own provisions to share.

Half an hour later, Erica and hubby and my bereaved friend are nowhere to be seen. Instead, Blondy is still there, with a friend, and Slightly Coarse Man has turned up. Her friend takes against me almost immediately. "He's posh," she says to Slightly Coarse Man. "I prefer you," and we rearrange ourselves so that the two more compatible couples are together.

While Rude Friend is in the loo, Blondy alludes to herself and Baldy "having had words" but the sudden drop in her volume suggests I ought not to pursue the matter. "How's your night been?" she asks. "Yeah not bad--we're a bit, you know, speeded up." "Why, have you got some ----?" "No, not that. The poor man's version." She's confused. "What?" I spell it out. "Can I have some?" We conduct another hamfisted legerdemain. Blondy is drunk, telling me over and over again that one should never regret anything, as everything's a learning experience and that she's been living in Majorca for ten years.

As with many a poor drinker, the solipsism unleashed by alcohol is expressed in a self-regarding question. "What did you think of me, when you first met me?" "Chatty, friendly, short attention span. Thought you might be from Bury; your accent." She seemed happy enough with that, because we must never regret anything, as we can always learn from everything. She's only just moved back to England as she's been living in Majorca for ten years.

Blondy's friend starts talking about marriage. I say I don't understand it and how it seems a reckless thing to do and say to someone, although it's sometimes worth it for a good party; which, like almost everything I have said all night, she doesn't like. I try mollifying it, something she doesn't deserve, saying "Well, perhaps if you really believe it at that time, well, yes," and it thaws a little at the end.

Blondy thanks me profusely as though I'm a social worker. "You've really helped me, you really have." A big sigh and she changes direction suddenly. "All I want is a relationship--a close relationship, with trust." Oh fucking hell, we're not going to have tears now are we? I've really helped her, she's very grateful to me. I really have helped her, really. She doesn't know many people here because she's been living in Majorca for ten years.

They say they're going, which commences the protracted farewells of the drunk, every sleeve, every bag strap, every flappable thing, a puzzle. Blondy kisses me on the lips, turns in frustration at the intractability of her coat; she kisses me again. I go to Rude Friend and kiss her cooly on the cheek.

We watch them leave, look at each other, and sigh. "They'd be fucking hard work, them two," says Slightly Coarse Man.

At home, an email exchange with Trina is like a purifying draught. It starts when I ask her for some help with a couple of words I didn't know from a poem by Herrick, ("trasy" and "to mich") before she raises the game to a deliberately sesquipedalian pitch, serving some difficult backhands: "callipygean" defeats me, but I can see it coming in handy.

Locals! University Challenge, BBC2, 8.00 tonight. Lancaster v Pembroke College, Cambridge

The Muslims in the street are running about to each others' houses, ninja turtle women and kameezed men in and out through the house opposite. I am suspicious of them; they keep their cards too close to their chests. The men's politeness is a formula, and the niqabed women never return my good mornings, which makes me repeat them, every day. Come on love, grind it out. We've got to live together. The man next door but one speaks only Gujerati. He's lived in that house for forty-seven years. The hope rests with the late teen girls next door, who don't wear even a headscarf and will chat if I'm out hanging my washing.