Rain hurls itself against the windows. Inside, tealights are twinkling in their purple and rose glass containers. Kim is stretched out on the sofa opposite with a blanket over her. She's knitting and reading the Guardian. A companiable silence, the white lines of last night still in us; almost enough to gloss my eyes at our shared stillness. We're working our way gently through a bottle of dry sherry. If certain things were altered, things which can't be altered, she'd make a loveable girlfriend. Sex-talking and delighted oh crikey chemicals through rolled-up railway tickets by night; sherry and the clock tick-like needle-clack of knitting by day.

Lew Kirton - Heaven In The Afternoon

I'm supposed to be on a train to Huddersfield but I've cancelled my last day of duties at the Contemporary Music Festival. I feel that sense of naughty joy that one gets from pegging off school or throwing a sickie.

I'm a bit miffed with HCMF. The paid staff keep a professional distance from the volunteers by avoiding inappropriate language and phrases which suggest uncomfortable intimacy, such as "hello", "good morning", or "thank you". When they walk past me, I am made of glass. After seven days of this froideur I don't feel like making any more effort for them. Perhaps, being young and female, they feel uneasy around a 47-year-old man. Or perhaps they're just being fucking rude to people who give unpaid help to the festival year after year.

In a less cold moment, I met someone I know who finished his PhD a year ago and who once appeared to be on the cusp of a career in composition, having had a very good piece performed there last year. When I first met him he was working in Asda on the cold meats counter. "So, Mike, is it a glittering career in composition or are you still selling sausages?" "I've moved to the bakery section."

Afterwards I went to the Commercial Hotel, a noisy babble of miscegenation, palely dark babies swaddled deeply into pushchairs whilst mum had a couple of pints of Stella. An attractive creole rang around the place: "...tings fuh thu bare-beh": from Kingston to West Yorkshire in one sentence. A man who didn't like London said. "Here, we all one family. In London, even black people run away from black people. Dey doin' it to der own!"

A couple of men walked in who may as well have had neon signs coming out of their heads saying "We are gay and we are attending the Contemporary Music Festival". A curve of coloured flowery shirt left artfully hanging out of a pair of trousers.

Alarm crossed their faces as they walked in and registered black people. They went through a modern agony of that section of the metropolitan middle classes whose only encounter with black people is through adverts which solicit standing orders. They had to suppress their clear urge to escape for fear of being tainted with the brush of racism. If I hadn't been several yards away I'd have invited them over but they took their drinks and retreated into another room.

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The final events of the University's outreach project went swimmingly well. I shivered and got rained on for four hours at our stall in Market Square, before a cosier two evening sessions of presentations. Everything was interesting. Plentiful wine and chat, and a bit of a glow at having done a small something that was civic and worthwhile, or at least from not having rain-soaked clothes. The paper I enjoyed most was called Death by Pixels and discussed what happens, or should happen, to our online presence when we die, exploring the clashes between digital storage and human grieving.

I am looking forward to tomorrow. I will be falling into pharmaceutical bliss with Kim, who is coming over for a couple of days with some supplies from The Special Cupboard.

To Huddersfield (silent h), for the Contemporary Music Festival.

On the train to Manchester, a Spanish family make a busy faff of sitting down at the table across the aisle. Suddenly, a pair of pink knickers is sprung onto my table. She grabs them back with a sorry. "That hasn't happened for a while," I say, to their incomprehension. A few seconds later I jokingly say "Here's my number," and I am instantly annoyed at myself for making too much of it. She explains what has happened to her family. The laughter spreads. As I get off at Piccadilly I tap their table and say "Gracias por las cuecas."

I arrive at Huddersfield and have to find an address in Slaithwaite, a strangely pronounced village in Yorkshire. It almost rhymes with "allow it" - a glottally stopped t, of course. A local on the bus refers to me as "love" and guides me to my stop through a black-windowed Gothic fog.

My host Ted is ominously dressed in clothes which suggest there won't be much drinking: a multi-pocketed "practical" green top, and khaki shorts which give of too much thigh and the forbidden area when he perches his ankle on his knee. Hospitable and kind: he had made a delicious spicy chicken and roast potatoes. "What would you like to drink?" Thought you'd never ask. "Beer?" I speculate. "Nope." "Wine?" "No, teetotal."

Ted says how much he likes Couchsurfing. He makes me momentarily open-mouthed with his unselfconscious statement that he likes it because of "the pleasure I give to others. And you can tell." I deflect a conversation about how he sympathises with Sepp Blatter.

Wondering a bit how this is going to go, I am won over by my accommodation. Breathing mist, we cross a communal lawn to a chalet available for collective use by the rectangle of council tenants to whom it is granted. It's the size of a classroom and smells of wood.

I revel at putting down the cushions from the settee, and unfurl my sleeping bag. I text Mary-Ann to tell her what a romantic setting I am in and how much of a her-wanting love nest it could be. The heater clicks noisily. I turn it off and I sleep poorly, a part of my upper back always cold; having to corral the independently minded cushions, but pleased to be there.

In the morning I go into Huddersfield with another couchsurfer, who is staying in Ted's house. He curls a thin red scarf around a necklace of square threaded beads (not gay then), wraps a very expensive coat round himself and sets a boxy hat with ties under his throat upon his head. He's from Sydney. He drips money but dodges the £2 fare from Slaithwaite to Huddersfield.

Bit of a dull year so far. Harrison Birtwistle's Oboe Concerto a disappointment; heard it all before. Hèctor Parra's work for Ensemble Recherce, Early Life, the highlight - a string trio, piano, and oboe, arguing between a constant wail of unfriendly glissandi and an impatient, percussive, crickets' leg-rubbing attack of bows on strings.

Many familiar faces, but the hierarchies of the festival, with the neglected audience at the bottom. Nowhere to socialise apart from a bleak "Juice Cafe" in a draughty corridor, a coffee machine's endless grinding, minimum wage employees routinely doing an empty performance of a type of care work.

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Tomorrow I'm doing my presentation about Contemporary Music and Social Identity at the Girls Grammar. It'll be a rehash of something I've already done but I haven't even started its revision yet, so I am deflecting the worry about not having done it by blogging about not having done it.

I'm going to get them to try to detect the tone rows (the bright ones), or at least to follow the score (the rest) of the first fifty-five seconds of Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maître, then present some outdated research about why analysis is implicated in the pleasure of listening to such music. The idea is that I catch them, being clever girls, in the act of the pleasure of analysis, to talk about whether the fact that they are even able to do this contributes to their enjoyment of the piece, before we end up in an asexual orgy of recursive self-examination, thus reflecting some of what doing music at PhD level is about.

After that it's straight back to Huddersfield for the rest of the week and hoping that it picks up a bit or I at least have a chat with a woman. Mary-Ann was talking a possibility of coming over on Sunday night and us staying there, to see if all this kissing in art galleries and overheated texting could translate into actual fucking.

Pierre Boulez, Le Marteau sans Maître, (1953-4), first movement

To the Girls' Grammar School. I'm helping organise this thing where some PhDers talk about our research. It's called the New Ideas Festival, which is a bit unnerving as I never feel I have any new ideas. I went there to meet the Head of Sixth Form. The observation of door-opening etiquette and how even 12- and 13-year old girls looked behind themselves before releasing a door.

On a noticeboard, they'd printed all our talk titles and their précis (whatever the plural of précis is). The girls have had to sign up to whatever talk they find most interesting. I suppressed any expression of my delight in seeing that my talk is amongst the most popular.

My title is "'Why are you listening to that din?' Avant-garde music and social identity." Then, next to the title, they have your précis, which in my case is

When I was a teenager, listening to what my Dad called "way out" music on Radio Three, he used to sometimes yell at me up the stairs, "Turn that racket off! Why are you listening to that din?" It's a good question and one which needs an answer. This talk discusses my attempts to find out why people ever get into "difficult", non-chart music, and what, if anything, this says about them.

Heady with relief over a meeting I'd been worried about, I went to the Sun. In a relationship that was going down a cul-de-sac, a man said to a woman, after a shallowness of colleagues had departed, "You work in Marketing. You talk bullshit all day. And all you can think of to say is 'I'm a student'?"

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An email arrived this morning that revealed that made me punch the air. After forty-seven years of living, I will finally be in the same room with the gorgeous and talented Jill Saward. My much danced-to Shakatak are playing Birmingham on 1st February.

Here's a link to a live version of Nightbirds. If by some inexplicable lapse of taste nine minutes of jazz-funk in a 1982 stylee is beyond you, just wind forward to 5.10 and tell me honestly that that is not one of the sexiest things you can watch a woman do.

Mary-Ann and I wended our way to the most distant room in Birmingham's magnificent art gallery. "How do we get here?" she asked the attendant, pointing to the most inaccessible room in the gallery. Outside, round a corner, a bit along a busy road, up three floors. We came to the Egyptian galleries and a sole family. Mid-snog, some Indian folk music started up alarmingly from one of the displays.

After she'd gone to get her train, and having some time to spare, I went to a pub crowded with military types at the back end of a long afternoon's drinking after the Armistice Day services. The best-looking woman in the pub came up and asked, in a gorgeous sing-song Irish accent, if the other three seats on my table were free, and brought over her husband and father.

Standing up, and handshakes. The pleasures of formality. They're involved in horse racing and were on their way back to Co. Mayo from Cheltenham. Bright, unstoppable conversation, perfectly timed to tell them a bit about Mary-Ann. They were gamely receptive to my advocacy of English stout over the Guinness her father was drinking. "It always tastes like it's got half a pint of water poured into it." The Irish property market and the price of beer; the social benefits of bullshitting; the way that people in their village are becoming more isolated as they are being priced out of going down the pub, and all done with an informal grace in which the Irish are expert. I didn't want them to leave.

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To the Storey for a poetry reading, David Tait (whom I know), and Ian Seed. Not just first rate poets, but good readers too. Then, in the interval, we were lurched from intense concentration to the ripples of language, to its being vandalised by canned music. The director exudes this anxious, tense middle class air which irrationally irritates me, but then he disables it by his honest warmth and the knowledge that he's trying hard to make this good for us and that he's going to lose his job in a few months because obviously no civilised advanced country should fund poetry readings. "It's still too loud," I said to him imperiously, after asking him to turn it off.