I ventured into the Empty Quarter yesterday--the silent flatlands between Leyland and Southport--and had a too short afternoon with Trina in Croston, a village which is still pretty even with its lines of sandbags along the streets. I phoned ahead to make sure the Yarrow hadn't broken its banks again, but the landlady of the Grapes assured me that rubberwear was entirely optional.

I was glad when the train arrived at Croston; it meant I could stop reading this month's book club choice, Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, with its colourless prose and Radio 4-in-the-afternoon humour. "He had tried zipping the dog inside his jacket but it made him look as if he was pregnant. Not a good look. Not on a man anyway." It's like reading a digest of Facebook comments.

On the pavement of the main road, a stray hen pecked her way through some rotting windfallen pears. In the last of the pubs, after Trina had left, there was merry craic and some speculation about why I'd come to Croston to do my courting. As one of the inquisitive blokes was leaving, he bid farewell to each of us, and extended his hand towards me.

"Where are you from anyway?"

"Lancaster."

"What are you doing here?"

"Seeing my bird."

"Who is she?"

"I'm not fucking telling you that!"

"We'll find out--it's a village!"

On the deserted single platform at Croston station, a beautiful gunmetal dusk over the saturated flat fields, a gloss of sunset on the long crystal palaces of nurseries; busy avian chatter. I texted Trina to tell her that I think she's beautiful. In the far distance, the headlights of the train glossed closer.

At the moment, Trina and I should be roughly here

on this romantically-named ship, the Ben-my-chree, or "Girl of My Heart"

and trying not to waste good Prosecco by vomiting it into the Irish Sea on what would have been a bit of a lively crossing, as it's wet and windy here today, even ashore.

At 7.40 this morning I got a text. "Very bad news I'm afraid." The relative who was due to look after Trina's mum in her absence has bad diarrhoea which he contracted in Granada at the weekend. First they come and walk five abreast with rucksacks, speaking their bastard version of Portuguese; now they send us their colds. I feel flat, free time which I'd rather not have. All my problems come back now.

Trina, noticing that I was moistened in parts after the Cross Bay Walk, bought me a brand new, proper, outdoor jacket off ebay. I've never had such a thing before, as my flânerie from bar opening to poetry reading to gallery preview requires only my pure new wool grey jacket, £15 from Tatty Bon in Glasgow. But for breasting heavy Manx rain, I need my pressie from Trina, with its little drawing of a jagged mountain and the word "titanium" on the inside label.

So, instead of pictures from Ben-my-chree and Ellan Vannin, I will leave you with a two-part miscellany.

I work as a receptionist at Really Late. I find that I know, on an acquaintance level, about two-thirds of the people who seek counselling. I have been trained in this and I know I must behave exactly towards such people as I did before I started working for Really Late. That's easier said than done for someone like me with his relentless personal curiosity.

I like working at Really Late. I empathise with its aims and I have a silent compassion for the clients. The counsellors are political, aiming to change behaviour with words and ideas, but with a sense of their limits, where other agencies might need to get involved; but they play no part in the economy of Narcissism that exists in an over-educated city like Lancaster, where unqualified Merry-Andrews leech on people with no material problems, in order to talk vicariously about themselves. Unlike bloggers, of course.

So as I sit here drinking the poor man's champagne, and missing Trina very much, wishing I could nuzzle her, wanting her fingers curling round the back of my ear, she turning me feline as she strokes the nape of my neck, and wishing we could half-shout down the prom against a hooded soundtrack of spattered raindrops, and have a mediocre meal in a pub in Douglas with swirly carpets and bored staff--I will leave you with what I think is the best joke, or perhaps, piece of English self-commentary, of the year so far.

An amateur group of Islamic filmmakers have posted a video on YouTube which mocks Christianity and Jesus Christ. It is believed to be so offensive that St Peter's church in Shrewsbury have postponed their tea and cake morning until Wednesday week, and Dorothy Green from Margate has written in to Points of View. When will the madness end?

My 70-year-old acting teacher and friend died suddenly this week. A heart attack in Market Square, which sent him lurching back for a fatal bang on the head. He was forever young, and went without the indiginity of tubes up the nose and other instances of the pointless prolongation of life that is misnamed "care". "'Get up, find a space, and stand in it'," started one of his close friends in her tribute.

In the car coming back from the wake, I wondered aloud why Christianity has to stick its oar into funerals all the time. A surprisingly short day: I joined a couple of stragglers who, like me, were back in Lancaster three hours after it had started. A funeral, surely, lasts all day.

As soon as I found out his funeral arrangements, I rang Kirsty. To tell her that a friend had died and that the girls might have to get their own tea and be on their own for two or three hours. "Yeah, it's David, my old acting teacher. The funeral's on Friday at 1.15 and then we're all going up to Bolton-le-Sands for the wake, so I'll probably be back at about six or seven."

Although I know Kirsty better than to receive anything like sympathy, I wondered whether I might receive a brief expression of regret at my loss, or a suggestion that she could get any of the numerous reliable neighbours round here to look in on the girls whilst she's entertaining her boyfriend in Kendal.

She hardly paused. "Well, you had the the other weekend off for the cricket." I felt a hot flare of anger at her lack of empathy. "Yeah, but I've got to go to his funeral haven't I?", challenging her to oppose it so that I could let loose the volley of indignation I was repressing.

The funeral reminded me that I should circulate to my daughters, to Kirsty, and Kim, (who would be good in a crisis) my wishes; the most important amongst which are that, after my body has been plundered for anything that might be useful to anyone else, I want to be buried, not cremated; and I do not want the slightest mention of Christianity nor its secular equivalent, "spirituality", at my funeral. I find cremation repellent, a violent, disrespectful act made even more odious by its inevitable recall of events of the past century. How we have normalised the burning of our deceased loved ones is incomprehensible.

When I am dead, my body will be lowered into the ground in a cheap, flimsy cardboard coffin, into a grave at Scotforth Cemetery in Lancaster. Worms will consume my body and I will be recycled into the wings of flies and the legs of fleas.

Avast me hearties and ye landlubbers! Had a rollicking night with me Welsh wench aboard Ye Black Pig, a-moored on ye Lancaster Canal. We spent all our tin on ye olde English zoider and downed mugs o' red we plundered from Van Diemens Land. But alas! Aft I took ye busty buccaneer to ye fo'c'sle to splice her midships, me main mast wouldn't go up her rigging!

She were set for sendin' me to th' gang plank but, ah haa! On th' morn I greased her sails and set me prow for a course up her fore porthole. I came aground like an able seaman! Haaah!

A fabulous weekend in St Annes with one of the oldest--I mean, longest-standing--readers of this blog, who made the long journey up from Hampshire, as it was time to give our snazziest slacks an airing at the Soulful Dance Weekender. It was a pleasure to have your company T and I'm honoured and grateful that you're prepared to schlep up all that way.

It's a very enjoyable musical culture to be involved with, more collective and openly friendly than any other I've been involved with. I found rave music promised more togetherness than I encountered, and contemporary classical music's mannered and regimented sociability perhaps reflects the high value placed on privacy in middle class culture.

On Saturday lunchtime, while T went to join the Cod Army, the name given to the supporters of Fleetwood FC, I spent what was intended to be an hour, which turned into two, down the pub. St Annes is a very friendly place and the ease with which people chat to you down there made me think that Alan Bennett might have a point in his unfavourable assessment of the sociability of Lancaster folk in his Untold Stories.

I conceived a dislike of Lancaster I’ve never since lost. Having seen madness on that ward [in the asylum to which his mother was committed], I saw it echoed in face after face in the town. Though it’s a pleasant enough place I find the people there less amiable and appealing than elsewhere in Lancashire, with the possible exception of Liverpool. There’s an openness and generosity in Blackburn, Preston and Rochdale, maybe because these were virtues fostered in the mills; Lancaster, commercial, agricultural and (like Liverpool) once a port, seems sullen, tight-fisted and at night raw and violent.

In the pub in Lancaster, a few weeks ago a man in a local pub walked off, muttering "You are a selfish man". I had asked him if a seat on his table for four which he was occupying alone, was taken. With the effusive warmth Bennett noticed in the locals, he gave me a black look and said nothing, which I took as consent. In Glasgow, or the places I go anyway, you just ask someone if they'd mind budging up a bit.

Back in the hotel, after one of the restorative afternoon naps that we require at our age, we danced till 4am, surrounded by some lovely scenery.

Yesterday morning the cleaning lady came into my room and said (I quote verbatim): "Oh, it's alright, I'll come back later. I was just going to do a strip."

On Sunday afternoon T went off to catch his train. I had just missed one so hung around in the pub. Again I had the feeling that the town loves to talk, and the next table and I had a conversation about heart attacks which was funnier than the subject matter might suggest.

The same people are doing another night there in December, to which Trina is coming. I'm very pleased that I am reviving her interest in dancing which was drummed out of her by her husband. When she was married, she used to have to buy CDs in secret and hide them, since her husband, who liked Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and so on, was very critical of her tastes, which he thought frivolous.

Track of the Weekend was Sean Smith's Paradise. Over such a good system, it did indeed sound like Paradise's soundtrack.