New Business Partner rings me up and invites me down the pub. Can't really refuse. He's had too much to drink. "You're brilliant you are," he says, pulling my head towards his with the overt homosociality common to men who are publicly homophobic. Our heads friction with our short hair. "Are you gay? No, tell me, are you gay?" As if I am being forgiven, magnanimously, for something.

Then, tonight, I bump into him and his girlfriend. I have 61p in my bank account. I say "No I can't" but foolishly instead of elaborating on that I drill into my pockets looking for sympathy and a pint. "Take that," he says, giving me a tenner, "and give it me back on Monday." Fuck. Indebted.

Me and girlf talk about a girl I used to fancy at school, Esther Boniface. The mention of her name conjures up a mist of half-remembered desire. With admirable decision, she leaves when he orders, without consulting her, the third bottle of wine.

We have a testy twenty minutes in which he tells me that me and Neil's proposed culinary and literary night of Dickens is "fucking shit". I try to be patient, but get irritated and tell him "I don't like being attacked for my aesthetic choices." He relents a bit, seeing me getting annoyed, and then gets a bit maudlin, saying "I think I'm stupid." I finish my drink and follow his girlfriend's example. I go to an expensive pub to breath a long sigh. I get on far better with her than him.

At home I google for Esther. There she is, even our pasts retrospectively captured by the internet.

I found a note I wrote to myself before meeting Mary-Ann for the first time. The context is that I had just finished Northanger Abbey

Don't try to engineer anything.
Don't talk telelologically or tendentiously. [FFS, someone's spent too long at Uni].
Aim at the impression that Isabella Thorpe gives: Her manners shewed good sense and good breeding; they were neither shy, nor affectedly open."

Looks like it'll be Liverpool now, not Nottingham; and tomorrow, not today. I'm relieved. I'm not bothered about consorting with murderers. It's being in a car for six hours that frightens me. Liverpool's a lot nearer.

I spent the last of my money for the time being in fine poor Romantic artist style, on a ticket for a concert based around Schumann's exquisitely lovely Dichterliebe, held in Lancaster University's lumpen concert hall, with its stark lighting and the constant creaking of its various mechanical clutter.

Mark Padmore's mannerisms took a little getting used to. The jauntier rhythms caused him to bounce onto his toes; and after holding his hands like Jonny Wilkinson preparing to take a penalty (which is fine: that betokens seriousness and concentration, in chamber music as in rugby), he then leant back to take hold of the side of the piano. The appearance of being casual irritated me: it was the stance of a man about to tell you about his progress through a diversion they've put in near Wigan because of the new gas main. But he and pianist Andrew West produced a concert that I simply wanted to have all over again. I felt as though I were being stroked.

Although the Lancaster audience is well trained with mobile phones now, someone's digital watch alarm beeped the hours, jerking me out of the intoxicating bed of Heine and Schumann back to an unwanted sense of regimented time.

I met my pals Steph and her husband, who noisily rattled and shook his sheets with the lyrics and their translations. "I'm practising for the quiet bits." Five minutes before the end of the interval someone had left an almost vulgarly large glass of white on the table so I smoothly appropriated it and took it back in with me.

And as befits the morning after one has been taken away with love poetry set to beautiful music, Mary-Ann writes an almost painfully kind adieu.

Schumann: Dichterliebe, Op. 48, nr. 1, [1840], Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai.

If you've nothing constructive to say about it TSB, please leave it for those of us whose lives are enriched by finding this beautiful.

To the University last night, to see a show by Mandy Romero, a man whose unconvincing demonstration of being a woman would be helped if he learned to walk like a woman rather than stooping forward with the clumping walk of a stevedore.

It was called Stevenage. I was attracted to the fact that someone else is fascinated by New Towns, by town planning, centralism, the "we know what's best" attitude of planners who would conduct others into New Towns then go home to live in polished tiled Victorian houses with cremeware vases of imported tulips on the windowsill.

We went into the theatre and wandered around a big black box, looking at what looked like original scale models of the first New Town in England.

Mandy, wandering about in cerise high heels and a mini-dress, delivered a dense but very interesting text, interspersed with extracts from 70s "naughty" films, starring the show's protatoginst Barry Evans -- Church Rave and The Girls amongst them -- and bits of John Clare's arresting poetry, on slides.

Both Evans and Clare had turned the act of escape into art, prompted by certain places in present day Leicestershire and Hertfordshire. With her slightly garbled, wet-mouthed diction, I wish she could have slowed down to let us drink in Walter Benjamin's lines (from memory), "Memory is not the method by which to discover the past. It is the medium in which it is contained, like interred bodies."

Today, as Roger Hill, he led an "artists' workshop". We had to talk to our partners, trying to elict the words "I'd never thought about that until now". An impossible task, but its very impossibility was the point. We walked about in the space and were asked to practice a movement which would convey in five seconds a pivotal moment of our past. Everyone was too embarrassed to do it with much gusto.

It ended. Roger gathered up his things, looking behind him, ostensibly for his belongings. "Well I'm going for lunch," he said. "Would you like any company?" I said. I extended the offer to a former MA colleague of mine. She didn't know how to say no. "Well...I've got lots of emails." We went for the kind of poor food that counts for lunch in modern England, tuna "mayo" sandwich and chips, and talked in a way that didn't really get beyond self-affirming re-statements of common political ground. I was hoping to get on to sex more.

---

In the evening, I met Neil and Keith. Keith produced a most interesting book he'd found, written by Dickens' wife, of the recipes she'd recorded from their many nights of entertaining. Neil wants me to take part in a night of readings of Dickens' writings, from the latter's various lives as a journalist, novelist, and recorder of American mores.

It will be an evening for twenty-five invited people in the Cathedral's sumptuous Bishop's Dining Room, with a supper using Kate Dickens's recipes. For some reason I will never fathom, Neil, a gay man, is a practising Catholic. It provides a theological cloak for his occasional misogyny, but he mentally brackets out the child abuse and the homophobia.

Went round to see Kirsty and the girls, the latter of whom proudly presented me with a filled up double sided page of sponsors for Sport Relief, in which they are going to run for three miles in a three-legged race. Lots of wine, all of us talking at the TV, trying to persuade some gullible woman not marry a selfish ignorant man who ignored all of her wishes for the wedding. But it makes me uneasy to join in with the way that popular television invites us to look down at the practices of people who are presented as more stupid than us. Even when they are.