The Ninja Turtle Muslim women outside are strolling around, gabbling in Gujerati (according to my friend, who speaks a little of it). I like how they add to the life of the street, whilst not enjoying the separatism. I deliberately say good morning to them when they're in their niqabs. They never reply.

Erica asks me if I'm out and we end up in the Ring O'Bells' beer garden with some mutual friends and a new man, who is being attentive to G's irritating fussing over her food in that solicitious way which suggests they haven't been together long. "Is that G's boyf?" I ask Erica, when they're outside. "Yes, she says. He's been through everyone in their band and now he's going through her." His sexual appetite has riven the band, which has fallen apart in acrimony.

Our group accretes until we're edging out some people at the next table. They offer to move, an offer I thought we should decline. "I feel really bad about this," says a gaudily adorned young woman with a glistening greased terracotta face. Well, no, if you felt "really bad" about it you'd refuse their offer to move and arrange the seating to your own inconvenience.

It's enjoyable for about two hours, but then I've run out of things to say, and everyone, without exception, is smoking.

I leave and bump into another set of people in another pub where we have a more interesting conversation about musical subcultures and chavdom. In the tiny back yard, a woman with a huge coffee stain on her white cotton trousers sits next to us. Her phone dings repeatedly and she laps texts up as a protection; and contributes cautious, occasional remarks.

A stranger is there, who bridles at my use of the word "chav" and presents the liberal case for it being classified as taboo. An attractive man from Edinburgh I vaguely know pulls the rug from both of our fixed positions, and someone leaning a yard away chimes in with an unrelated sentence, a pessimistic view of social life that he wants to generalise from his own. None of us can see that, and we offer reasons why that is wrong. "Are you a psychologist?" he asks me.

I get home and I am momentarily unbelieving to hear that I've been selected to take part in a performance art project sponsored by the Live Art Development Agency. It's about an anarchist bomb plot in 1882, and will take place at the New Art Gallery in Walsall in October. Looking back at my application, I realised that my short bio doesn't actually look that bad; but it's still exciting to be chosen.

looby read Music and Philosophy at Lancaster and completed an MA there in Contemporary Arts Research in 2010. His one man show "John Cage's Disco Classics" was described after its presentation at Oxford Playhouse as "inspired and highly original." He has collaborated with Israeli filmmaker and performance artist Shelly Nadashi in shows at the Glasgow Festival of DIY Art, Glasgow International, and at L'Etablissement d'en Face in Brussels. His new piece, "Spank Your Blank Blank", will be premiered on the site of a demolished primary school later this year.

In the evening, my friend and I are at the Northern Soul night, where we are able to adhere befittingly to its protocols. He calls me away from the music and hands me a triangular wrap of greaseproof paper. It's Ritalin. I'd never had it before. It was most enjoyable, but it falls some way short of the simple, crude, breathtaking, acceleration of the common illegal member of its family.

A Gueuze beer yesterday

Trina couldn't, as it turned out, come to the wine club on Tuesday, so her formal début in Lancaster society will have to wait for a while. At the end of our oeneological perambulation around Sicily (did you know that two-thirds of wine production there is white?) I started thinking out loud about whether anyone would be interested in a special one-off--that I could lead--on Belgian beer. The organiser emails this morning, favourable to the idea. Oh the ardours of the research that that would entail!

She's a sexy woman but what a chatterbox. You can't shut her up. Four hours and I had to constantly seize my chance.

We went to the cashpoint so that she could get some money. A familiar message came up: "You have insufficient funds for this transaction." "You have that problem too!" I said, and bent her head towards me and kissed her, partly in sympathy, partly in relief that we are hammocked in the same financial nadir.

We sunned ourselves in the Ring O'Bells's beer garden, until another of the endless fronts of rain arrived. An intoxicated regular started an erudite slurring about the Higgs Boson particle, drunkely pleased that its apparent discovery is consistent with a wider body of knowledge. "Z fantastic. Uniff... Fied theory. My tutor will be happy!" He then graciously realised what he was interrupting. "No, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for interrupting you."

She shook her head after him. "In Liverpool you'd never have anyone coming up to you pissed at 1pm talking about physics." "You're in Lancaster now Trina. We have intelligent drunks here." We umbrellad to the Sun and chatted about living abroad and her kind but undemonstrative ex. Looby 1 Ex 0, I thought. I'll never be "undemonstrative". Except perhaps when people walked past our table: she laughed at my moving apart from her when they did so. "You've got a ridiculous 'demure' face," she said, and mimicked my polite hands.

The more or less hidden bit behind the timetables on Platform three at Lancaster Station confirmed its special position in our erotic life thus far. "Too many clothes," she said, in between kissing.

"I'm really starting to fancy you now," I said, and the rain drilled onto the roof and an endless freight train shouted and banged through the station. She is a slow, withdrawing kisser. I have to resist greedly pulling her head towards me to make her kiss me harder, knowing that to do that would lessen the taunting, sexual, pleasure. As Trina got on the train, a woman in her twenties gave me a knowing, sympathetic smile.

At the far back of the pub made from the old wine cellars, with Trina. The cosy copper-clad lamps of the Merchants, a party of Dutch people steaming an evaporating drench. "I would too Trina. I'm not holding back, honest. I mean, you're probably wondering why I never invite you up to my house. It's just that there's a bit of a problem. I haven't got a double bed."

"Could be cosy?"

"Hmm. Thing is, I haven't got a bed at all. I use this sort of cushion thing."

"There's a three-quarter bed on the boat."

What a delight--on a canal boat, the perfume of oil lamps and diesel, birdsong; a night black dark, like her hair. She sent me an email worrying about her body and how it would go. "Oh no, don't talk like that, don't let's make it anything off a continuum of what there already is," I didn't reply. I didn't reply at all. It's always awkward learning sex with someone new, but certain things are best left undiscussed.

New Business Colleague sends me an angry text. I jump with alarm. "I'm really sorry NBC, I'd never fuck you about. It's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's OK I've got it. No prob I'll take it round to Christine's this aft."

He's away doing manly things with perilous sheets of glass, so I have to go round to their flat. Me and Christine, alone.

This is potentially a dangerous situation. I was at school with Christine, and when we're together, without him, the air is stuttered with sex. ("I'm going to have to go now looby, because otherwise I'm going to end up sleeping with you.") She's a hairdresser, and she looks after herself; red painted nails I momentarily think I want to feel scraping hard against my neck. I love being scraped by fingernails, very hard. If New Business Colleague thought that I was mucking about with Christine, I'd be lucky to escape without a coma. Of course, this adds to its excitement and her attractiveness.

In her flat she gives me a bottle of terrible beer and we chat volubly. It's a swish canalside flat, empty of anything most people consider life. She's proud of what he does for a living and I'm interested in it. A man's supposed to be good at something. What am I good at? She talks about her hairdressing, how when she showers, she washes off several other people's hair from her body.

I like that me and Trina don't share everything. "I don't believe in coming clean," said Bruce Chatwin. "Honesty", "authenticity": roads to confessional ruin.

For the last few days the washing machine hasn't been working, and I haven't had any money with which to repair it. Finally, I got the man round this afternoon. He took one look at what I had reported as a "broken knob", and pressed it. It sprang out with all the program letters reappearing. He fastracked it through a cycle and there's nothing wrong with it.

"God, I feel absolutely stupid," I said. He charged me a fiver but the greater cost was my manly humiliation. I really haven't a clue about anything mechanical. What do I have a clue about?

Something awkward has been looming with Trina, so after the washing machine incident, I thought I could further clear my Desk of Embarrassment by tackling an difficult subject head on.

[Petname]. As you know very well by now, I really want this to work out, in whatever way it does, and to give it the very best chance we can.

In order to do this, I want to make sure that I am as open and honest with you about things which we may have to approach as possible obstacles.

So, because the thing in question has reared its head about an hour ago, I wanted to tell you something before I see you again and just see what you thought about it.

I like cricket. The first One Day International against Australia began at 11am today and there's a very good chance (if the rain holds off) I'll be dashing away throughout the day to see how we're getting on against the convicts, sheep rustlers, handkerchief thieves and daytime TV soap actors.

I hope this won't stand in our way Trina. It was the way that you were so open about your liking for tennis that gave me the courage to say this.

She replied with a comment about ball tampering. I like this one.

Oooh, this'll be interesting. I've just seen a couple of Christian evangelists appear on our street, of which this end is about two-thirds Muslim. What a fucking insult. Some of my neighbours have that Arabic script, the meaning of which I don't know, but which clearly indicates their religion, over the front door. I'm going downstairs to tell them to piss off. They'll like that. Adds to their feeling of victimhood.

A noisy and what felt like a largely sleepless night: the taxi driver who lives opposite snapping me into wakefulness with his car starting at 4.30. Someone locked out, banging a letterbox. Students coming noisily home.

Today we held the auditions for our--mainly Neil's--Dickens night. I was pacing my room at lunchtime, nervous about how it would go.

Me to Trina:

Bit nervous about it to be honest--do you ever get that knot in your stomach when you're about to do something for which you're not competent? We've got to present a professional face and I (I'm not sure about the others) certainly haven't auditioned anyone before. But I suppose the thing is to *appear* as though you know what you're doing.

I went round to Neil and Kev's house to await the arrival of an academic who's taking part. She arrived in black heels, a slender thick-fabricked grey V-necked shift dress, her curving wave of blonde hair swept aside from a far-displaced parting. It was impossible not to flirt with her. She referred to her husband as "the current Mr T". "'Current Mr T'? Why, do you get through them a bit?" I asked.

Neil struck an excessively formal note. "Thank you for coming, Dr T----," he said. "You've introduced a civilised note into the proceedings." I looked at Dr T. "Why, are you particularly debauched?" she asked. "Yes, you'll have to excuse me," I said, "if I start chopping a couple of lines up on the table halfway through. I get a bit tired in the afternoons."

We sat in the gallery of the Dukes Theatre and auditioned a grand total of the one person who turned up. Dr T dealt with it with aplomb. She bought me a coffee, a solecism I had to swallow, lacking any money at all. Neil, understandably pleased to have a Dickens scholar captive, spent tiring time on metatalk about background and context and editors and editions; but, I thought, not nearly enough about the details of the performance. It'll be alright on the night, but I've worked with people like this before: auteurs who are enamoured of their own idea at the expense of the practicalities of its realisation.

The girl who came round the other day to look at the house texts, saying she'd like the double room. I lie in response, saying it's already gone. She was too tense and guarded. She'd be better off living in a household of overweight young men with straggly ponytails and big black T-shirts who are doing Maths or Computer Science, who don't cook much but take their computers down Wetherspoons to talk subjunctively in RP in a style which sounds like a commentary on the conversation they could be having.

The Enviromental Science graduate and future teacher I met the other day, a much more welcome candidate, sends an email asking when he could come round and sort out "the deposit and keys and stuff." Thank fuck for that. I'm seeing him tomorrow evening. I hope it's cash.

Trina is off out this evening with some of her fellow librarians. I like it that it's not all-consuming. But the thought of her is a frequent one, and I want to talk to her, or better, say nothing, in bed. If I had a bed.