Kitty texted to see if I was free for a couple of days.

To the pub, of course. A couple of drinks, and a sinful pleasure for this lapsed vegetarian of duck and orange pâté. A gloomy couple sat silently through a meal about which they complained, their downturned mouths suggesting they have previous.

On the spur of the moment we went to see Robin Ince, whom I hadn't heard of but who is a populariser of science. He did an interesting but tiring show, good material overstated with too much physical energy, dry humour made soggy with shouting. We bumped into someone else I know. I introduced them and told her how I first saw Kitty in this very auditorium, mischieviously adding, as I put my arm round Kitty, that "this is our fifth anniversary."

On the way home, we texted a mutual friend who is having a weekend of sex and drugs and being the other woman. "You dirty shagger, from looby and Kitty X." "What are you incineratig?" she replied.

The next morning we went back to the pub for breakfast and a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir. I love drinking in the morning. Then we drove to Kirkby Lonsdale. I don't drive and being in cars makes me tense. It was a nerve-wracking half an hour of careering van drivers coming round blind corners with one hand on the wheel and one on a mobile phone, and angry drivers behind us who couldn't tolerate Kitty's adherence to the already too high speed limits. I was relieved to get there, and would be happy never to travel in a car again.

Kirkby Lonsdale was looking lovely, its Georgian buildings looking sharply grey in the windowpane light of autumn. In the once calm Snooty Fox where fifteen years ago I heard a teenage girl trying to decide between the veal and the rabbit, canned local radio dribbles its inanities over everyone, like it or not; in the "restaurant" a big screen shows Sky TV. We drank one drink quickly.

We left to do some Christmas shopping. Some eyes quickly scanning me; the mutual pleasure of dressing for the silently acknowledged strangers who think about clothes. Thank you. And I like your dress. I bought Melanie a glass duck for her birthday and Kitty bought her some skull and crossbones tissues. In a cheese and olives shop a twentysomething girl was playing an upright piano.

We went into the Sun Inn. No music, four real ales, a good wine list for Kitty. No table at first but an attentive staff member saved and directed us to one which came free. A tall, bald, pink-shirted thirtysomething maître d' curled and uncurled his fingers with alert enjoyment at keeping the room content. Staff were good at stopping their bodies from moving in situations where the question of who gets to pass through the narrow spots of an C17th inn might, in a strict Rawlsian sense, be a 50/50 decision.

We talked and talked, luxuriating in our unlikely and precarious privilege, neither of having to do the work normally required to fund drinking in Kirkby Lonsdale of a Saturday afternoon. On the slow way back to the car, I paid my £10 for a tutored sherry tasting next month.

Being with Kitty is like having a girlfriend but without the sex and having to sieve what you want to say through a filter of ulterior motives and thinking of how you look in another's eyes. I like how we arrange our sentences with little touches to each others' arms. I remember those skin-touches. They're short and evanescent, but I love giving them and receiving them. Unforced, when it's natural, when you want an italic.

Last night at the University: a disappointing talk by Terry Eagleton, a scattergun run through Marx. I got the time and the venue wrong and it ended up all very rushed, with no time to chat with Seriouscrush.

Straight afterwards, it was the Readers' Party at the Literature Festival. We ignored the startling, overlit surroundings. Hardly anyone was drinking. We had been asked to gift wrap a book to take along. I took Colm Tóibin's Brooklyn, as something I won't miss much.

Then, from other tables scattered with books, we were invited to take "a treat, a challenge, and something you wouldn't touch with a bargepole". My treat was Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman; my challenge was something by some male Latin American author whose photograph had the comical seriousness that only South American men can pull off - hair in a bun, thin moustache, probably still living with his mum.

We were asked to go round and talk about our choices. A youngish Brazilian woman was being interesting and witty about the level to which one should assume knowledge of other languages; then the deathly words "my husband".

I went to collect my books and they'd all been packed up and whisked away by a caretaker who was getting understandably impatient with us standing around chatting when he wanted to lock up. I wish we'd all swapped email addresses or something. It seemed a pity not to continue meeting. And of course, talking about books always attracts many more women than men.

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If you were a woman trying to attract attention with your photo on a dating site, perhaps you might choose that one when you dusted off your little black dress to meet your friend in a swish bar in Manchester; or perhaps that friendly-looking one from that weekend away, your wind-tousled hair and Edinburgh in the background.

But not for Emma from Blackpool. She chooses to advertise herself to the menfolk of Lancashire with a picture of a wardrobe.

If anyone can can shed some light on what to me is the opaque reasoning of someone who puts a picture of a wardrobe on a dating site, I'd be glad to hear your comments. And there's something a bit strange about those curtains. What's she got in there?

This weekend was the Music Festival, a three-year-old event that was started as one person's initiative after our slack, slacks-wearing Council abolished a Maritime Festival which attracted visitors, singers and musicians from all over Europe.

On Friday, at a gig in my packed local, I saw Frances for the first time since she was in nothing but stockings and sitting deliciously on top of me a year or so ago. She wasn't interested. Polite, with a smile that was composed and dissolved quickly. Linda was there, a chance meeting as our worlds revolve ever more distantly. Beautifully dressed as usual, in a grey jacket in fine wool.

On Saturday, me, Kirsty and the girls went down to the Quay to hear some folk music and do the handover of the children over a pint. I've had them girls for a week while Kirsty was on holiday in Ibiza. It's been almost effortless, a bit of understated bonding with my eldest, Faye, who can be a touch prickly at times. As she said goodbye, Kirsty took my arm briefly and smiled and I felt a blood-rush of warm feeling towards her.

Kirsty and the girls left and I relaxed into my deserved evening in the pub. A local band called Baksheesh came on. They play this gypsy / East European / kletzmer music, and half way through a somewhat underdressed woman comes on and does a sort of slow belly dancing. They have a young female trumpeter who is as confident as a person as she is technically adept. There was a suggestion of a fight which was resolved by everyone paying not the slightest attention to the aggressor.

There was someone there who makes me talk (not that I need any encouragement) quite rapidly, and we ended up happily interrupting each other with a tumble of conversation. She has a lazy eye which wanders everywhere but which I find a bit sexy. She is, I assume, "happily" married, but I think she understands the subtext. I met one of my oldest friends, who introduced me to the teacher of French he's seeing. I could see the chemistry between them working well, each happy that they have found someone who naturally performs the roles they would like the other to take.

I'm taking part in an art project called Fortnight, and part of it involves receiving texts and acting on the instructions you receive. We were asked to go into town to make a phone call from a special phone set up in the lobby of a hotel. On my way there I went to the fishmonger and bought some hake. I had to suppress my shock when he told me its price. I sent Linda a text: "Hello gorgeous, long shot. I've just spent nine fucking quid on a fish. You come round to my house tonight and help me eat it?"

Except that I sent it to the organisers of the art project instead, who generously and unbureaucratically replied "Oh looby, that was a diamond in the rough, an absolute gem." Linda was busy though.

Oh bloody hell, we got the schedule for the PhD thing today. Tuesday 22nd November, me, talking about Marxist Aesthetic Theory to a classload of sixth form Grammar School girls. I don't know what I'm more worried about, making a pig's ear of my talk, or betraying any glances halfway through a quotation from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 towards the skirt hem-thigh-black tights interface that 17-year-old girls are so good at arraying.

Next Tuesday, 6.00, Faraday Lecture Theatre, Terry Eagleton, on "Why Marx Was Right", based on what reviewers think is not his greatest book; then at 7.30 there's a Readers' Party for the Literature Festival, in which we gift wrap a book we'd like someone else to read. .

What I'd like is someone to make me more than I am, something more than we are separately, to lay close to, to work my legs between hers, to kiss her slowly, not say anything, silently saying everything.

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In other news, the attractively named Councillor Muhammed Butt is my first follower on Twitter.

Our book club's book this month is One Day by David Nicholls, which is like an out of control literary virus in the UK at the moment, selling rapidly, and now a big film. For me, it's the worst book anyone in the group has chosen since someone asked us to read something by Adele Parks with a cover featuring one of those upskirt shots with which middlebrow literature by female authors is often illustrated. A couple of people point blank refused to continue reading it, and in a unique departure from procedure, we changed the book mid-month. The person who suggested it took it rather poorly and resigned from the group.

I gave up on One Day on page 90. The language is both stagy and pedestrian, the characters are clichés, and it's patently written with an eye on the film script he wanted it to be. It rehearses received ideas of the 80s without illuminating them or adding something personal and convincing. A continually renewed carousel of lovers is a weak deus ex machina to keep the plot turning. I put it on our local freecycle list, where it was taken within the hour.

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Donna texted, saying she'd been on a "positive thinking course. It was shit." "Sounds it!" I replied. "How can you go on a course to think positively? Just make your life better, surely. Or drink more, or do more drugs. Works for me!" And on that ungraciously superior note, I think we really will put Donna to metaphorical bed. First Preston, and now a positive thinking course. She's not the woman for me.

I've been emailing a teacher from Leicester for a few weeks; lately, every night. I first contacted her because she used a couple of witty invented compound words to describe herself. "I like your hyphens," I said. It's got to the point where we should see how it might go in person. So last night, a few emails in, I say

...Mary-Ann, you were supposed to say, a few minutes ago, 'Oh, really Looby, obviously I'm quite busy but if you did end up in Leicester at some point I could possibly be persuaded out to a nice pub or somewhere, if you insisted'.

But that would be putting words in your mouth and one must never do that.

Clicking on "send" felt like lighting the blue touchpaper and hoping the firework doesn't fall over and hit you in the face.

Looby, you hadn't struck me as someone for whom the obvious needs to be stated.

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At the University yesterday, me and my fellow organiser for the PhD Outreach Week were summoned to the University's Business Development Manager's office. A manly place, bare breeze block, a large Lego poster the only decoration.

We were told that our jobs had been regraded. "I've managed to get you put up a few grades. So anyway, what that means is that your fee is going to be doubled."

Thank you Lancaster University. That'll more than cover the initial expenses incurred by the recently-formed Lancashire-Leicestershire Friendship Society (membership: 2).