Setting the tone at the outset, I was offered a drink immediately we arrived at the venue, a place run by three amiable Flemish chainsmokers. We wound up the rehearsals at about 10pm. Félix invited us to a bar round the corner. I assumed she'd like this idea but she hardly drinks and wanted to go home, which caused a battle of wills.

"But you can start drinking after the performance. You'll have three days to drink." I felt mothered. "But look, they're such nice people and we could just have a chat for an hour without it all being about the show," which was as polite a way as I could find of saying "I'll be buggered if you think I'm going to sit in your flat with a cup of mint tea on my first night in Brussels." She went home and I went on an unsuccessful search for the gallery staff, ending up somewhere else, determined to stay out in any case. The following morning she apologised for being so "horrible"; I apologised for being intransigent, inwardly disappointed that we wouldn't be enjoying the pleasures of Belgian beer together.

On the night, the gallery was crowded, with people almost encroaching on the set; those who couldn't get in were peering in from the street. It was a humid night and all three of us became progressively redder, glossed with sweat. I acquired some muddled colours on my arms and chest, bruises acquired from my Table Piece no. 12 (2009) which involves expending considerable violence on a table and some oranges.

We decanted onto the street with our endlessly refilled glasses. Then it was round the corner to another gallery for a show opening, in which car tyres were scattered across the floor, forcing a loping gait to get to the drink pictures. Our last stop was to another bar where we had more drinks and a bop. At some point in the early hours, the owner brought out a sumptuous buffet of delicious Middle Eastern food. Chatting to Félix, I somehow ended up mentioning the rather attractive female member of l'equipe. "No it's OK, I prefer Marijke," I said. "Marijke's spoken for, if I may speak for her." Oops.

As part of our recuperation, we went to see a baffling installation by Joachim Schmid. We were met in a hotel foyer and taken up to one of the bedrooms. The green furniture and wallpaper hovered between outdated and trendy, and a pair of paint-spattered trousers lay on the bed. I am unable to illuminate this critically. The 1966 film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf made more sense. We watched it in a cinema with a curvilinear 30s Art Deco bar serving almost one hundred Belgian beers. My experience of the bar, however, remained a purely architectural one, as Shelley steered us instead into O'Riley's opposite, whose offerings are of the calibre of Guinness and Stella.

I did however, manage to explore several of the city's incomparable bars and beers. Brussels allows something which should be normal but which is impossible in England: go out at midnight, at the weekend, in the suburbs, and sit in a bar, skipping the ridiculous performance of masculinity which results in blood on the pavement. Instead, I was drinking lambic beer and listening to what I might venture to call funky house (whilst fearing that using that term might date me as an ageing raver). Back in town, a female bar owner from Asturias and I chatted by cobbling together a lingua franca from her mixture of French and Spanish, and mine of French and Portuguese. She asked me about what had been happening in Tottenham. Not having seen a newspaper all week I made what must have seemed an odd comment about Spurs's chances in the Champions League.

Before coming back I had one of the best haircuts I've ever had, from a Turk who deftly wielded scissors and a cut-throat razor to leave me looking what I would call "attractively severe". Some fractionally less narcissistic photos of the actual show will be in the column on the right once I receive the CD from Brussels.

My eldest daughter is quite sporty, so we've been pressed into watching the World Swimming Championships from Shanghai, one of the few remaining sports, along with children's fencing and egg-throwing, that are still on terrestrial TV and which haven't been auctioned off to Adelaide's bastard son.

During our long night of repeated (chemical) climaxes last week, Kim had warned me that the convex bulbous look which lumpily threatens most men of my age and drinking habits, will almost certainly not appeal to the kind of grammar-obssessed, Proust-reading, secondhand clothes-wearing, bilingual, glasses would be an advantage, dirty fucker whore slut woman I am hoping to meet. Her advice made me resolve to wear looser shirts when next on a three-day drug binge with a younger woman.

Partly inspired by the enviable physiques of the world's fastest men in water and having read somewhere that a forty-minute sesh in your local pool has almost Photoshoppish transformative effects on the male torso, we set off to the University's swimming pool, where, due to my status derived from having acquired two degrees there, I receive a discount of fuck all.

We swam in a pool populated only by a few Chinese girls trying to obliterate their intense longing for home with a bit of back crawl, performed in swimming costumes with little skirts on them. Afterwards I walked back into the changing room and ripped off my trunks quickly. They gave an agonisingly painful snap as they yanked my arthritic left big toe out of its normal ten to two slot. There was no-one to hear my girly gasp of un-six-pack pain.

My body possibly fell one small notch back towards the "Before" photo when I dealt with the raging appetite swimming produces by ordering pizza and chips all round, plus, for me, a pint or two of Black Sheep, an ale which doesn't figure prominently in the diet section of Glamour. But it's full of healthy B vitamins and provides for twenty quid roughly the same sort of State of Nothingness that people in London pay thousands of pounds for in course fees and airfares.

Apart from the usual narcissicism, I'm writing this because I can feel that familiar onset of delerium that happens in the days before a gig. And this will be a big one. Only my third gig overseas, after two in Glasgow.

Off to see Potiche in a bit, Catherine Deneuve's new-ish film, then tomorrow I'm going to splash out on Denise, so to wishfully speak. I'm paying at Imran's Punjabi Buffet: seven quid for limitless food, which I suspect is sold cheaply from stuff that hasn't sold over the weekend in the family's network of "Indian" (like saying "European", surely?) restuarants.

Followed by Brussels, for what I hope will turn into a reckless, or at least Silly, few days with my co-stars and any stragglers we might pick up.

It was British Archaeology Week last week. Oxford Archaeology North, who are based in Lancaster, put on a first class open day which I enjoyed as much as the girls did. A charming and understated woman, who, with her slightly old-fashioned clothes could do no other job than archaeology, brought me face to face with an old enemy, a great source of bother every summer, yet no more than two or three microns across. She talked us through the way that different types of pollen grains can help give an account of the changing vegetation over the centuries.

The same couple of dozen families who take their children to everything were there. A Dad made an excessive courtesy of stuttering apologies when crossing on the stairs; a Mum said "No Pippa, we're going to see the pottery kiln upstairs first and then you can make a Viking helmet."

I stumbled across an affair last week, both people I know. Normally I wouldn't give such a thing a second thought, but seeing the gorgeous female involved tipped me into a vortex of jealousy. Apart from being walk-into-lamppost good-looking, she has a magnetically louche air and an acerbic sense of humour rare amongst women, brought up as they are to be conciliatory and emollient.

I walked home talking to myself, cursing myself for not having made a move before him, massing a knot of sexual jealousy layered with a self-pity based on a partial interpretation of the evidence. I asked the pavement over and over again "Why do women always see me as a friend?" discounting the days in my diary which didn't confirm such a woeful idea.

Kim, to whom ideas of romantic love and sexual fidelity are as laughable as Limbo or Bishop Ussher's chronology, rang with excellent timing. I could hear her holding herself back, before she interrupted with level-headed disdain. That worked for a while. For as long as actual sex is held at bay, it's easy to cleave to the idea that "love", "desire" and all the rest of it are conventional expressions of psychological needs determined by our material conditions. But the Historical Materialist view of hanky-panky is less of a comfort when you're plagued with formless images of a very attractive woman doing it. With someone else.

Kim gave me something else to think about: a day at the Tate Modern in Liverpool, again through a chemical prism.

In the pub the other night, there was a slight uncertainty about whether an advertised discount on beer was applicable to cider too. The barman said "It's a de facto discount, but I think we'll make it de jure."

Lancaster: the city with the country's most literate bar staff.

When I was a child, part of undergoing what was, depending on your interpretation of the facts, either a Christian upringing or a religious brainwashing, was to sing a ditty in Sunday School which went in part "Envy, jealousy, malice and pride, they will never in my heart abide." That word "abide" is important. It suggests a tolerance of a temporary attachment to these vices as long as they are abjured at some reasonably early point after which the event which causes your fall. I hope I don't feel jealous like this for long.

I stumbled across an affair tonight. I've know Ed a long time but we never really talk, but he came over and sat next to me. "Sorry to keep looking at my phone," he said. "I'm expecting a bit of leg-over. I can't tell you who it is - you'll probably know her. "I wouldn't worry. I probably won't."

In she walked. "Not Martina!" I wanted to cry. Martina, were she not married, would be Lancaster's most eligible woman. Very pretty, and a careless, witty and louche air that I am not alone in finding magnetic. The last time I spoke to her was a few weeks ago when we were sharing an afternoon glass of wine and I was worrying out loud about something. "Oh no," she said. One can over-parent sometimes," making us both laugh.

She gave me a composed smile, comprehended the situation, then carried off the five minutes I stayed with them with aplomb. A wave of jealousy built continuously within in me as she laughed and smiled with him, turning a fractionally different version of her face towards me. I tried to satisfy the pretence of not knowing what they were up to as quickly as possible. I told her about my gig in Brussels, subconsciously trying to impress her perhaps, and how I remember the phrase of hers about over-parenting, but drank up as quickly as I could. I've been in the same situation myself: every second counts on an excuse with a expiry time.

I was stunned walking home and it's plunged me into a vortex of resentful self pity. Why didn't I pick up on the fact that she might be open to distractions? Do I appear too domesticated and bland to her? What can I do to stop coming across as so safe and emasculated to women? How did Ed go about seducing her? I began to wish I hadn't stumbled across their affair.

I am wracked with jealousy, an emotion I hardly ever feel. Ed is having sex with Martina tonight, someone were I not too depressed and monomaniacal to pleasure myself, I am at the polar opposite of the sexual economy.

One of my soul music dancing set, someone I've known since I was 17, rang me last night asking if I fancied a drink. I've got the girls this weekend but they're OK for an hour or so, so after their beddybyes I'm out by 10pm.

One of the lynchpins of cultural life here, doing certainly things brilliantly, has a bar which occasionally attracts middle class social inadequates who go there because they are incapable of dealing with people not like themselves.

John buys me a drink and we sit down. Almost immediately a pestilential ragged-out hippy woman comes up to us, smothering John's dog and enjoying the closest attention her tits have had from something male this century. She squeezes in next to John and takes over our conversation, making a performance of flirting with him. John is not only spoken for but is light-years out of her league, in looks, intelligence, wit, social graces and dress sense.

As if this isn't enough, someone else who looks like she's just landed in the bar having dropped through a gap in contemporary British social care provision comes up to our table, which by now is rapidly becoming the bar's female nutter magnet. 50something, and in an ankle-length black dress, she approaches, kneels on the floor a yard away, and starts mouthing words to the dog and making circular motions with her head. The bar is morphing into a loony bin.

Hippy woman, says, twice, that she's going outside for a spliff; she looks at us significantly, waiting for a response. Fucking hurry up and piss off then. Inhale your own radicality. Feel your specialness in your lungs. Exhale and hope that someone detects the daringness on your breath.

I stand this for a while, but then make to leave. "Right, OK John, I'll ring you about next weekend..." Finally she scuttles off, realising that she's broken something up.

"I know she's your mate John but she fucking pisses me off. 'Oh God I'm so radical, I'm going outside for a spliff.'"

"Calm down, calm down" says John, who at all times has dealt with her with far more more patience than I. We get back to our conversation, planning our summer's dancing schedule. Which (thank fuck) is based around a type of music that hippies tend not to like.

Apart from that, I've had a lovely time at Hawkshead Beer Festival, about which I will write when that cock of a woman has been eliminated from my memory.