It's ended with Frances. It's been another stressful few days. She has been going on and on about wanting to read the blog and eventually gave me a bit of an ultimatum about it. I spent a couple of hours which I should have spent writing my PhD redacting it as far back as November and removing the passwords. Then I showed her it to her, instantly regretting the decision, feeling that I'd lost the ability to write openly.

Her reaction? Not a single comment about any of the nice things I or you have said about her. Simply a demand to see another earlier post which was still password protected. I lost my rag a bit at that point and sent her this:

No, I'm sorry. I like to keep a certain bit of my life separate. I hate this feeling of being scrutinised, of you probing every single thing I have said or done, as if I'm not entitled to any kind of private life. I felt absolutely crap after releasing the posts to you, as if I was undergoing a trial, a trial from which I would never, because of your limitless paranoia, ever be found not guilty. And knowing that one of the things I most enjoy doing in my life - writing - was now forever going to be trammelled and restrained and polite. I let you have all that information, and the only response you made was not a thank you, or to comment at all on any of the nice things people have said about you, but to demand yet more and more details and information about what I say to other people when you're not around. You don't like me having friends of my own, basically. You've got to realise that nowadays these are people you meet on the internet as well as in real life.

I want us to continue, but I have absolutely broke my fucking back leaning over backwards to please you this afternoon, interrupting hours and hours and hours of studying time, putting myself at huge risk of personal embarrassment and humiliation for your sake, and all I get is this. No, you will never have the password to the blog, and if you by any chance hack it I will move the domain elsewhere and my readers with me.

Miraculously, and to cut a long story short, we made up again. Then last night I left my phone at her house. This morning she writes "You left your phone at my house. What a mistake that was!" She's read all my texts and now doesn't want to see me any more. She then sent some unpleasant emails saying that she hadn't enjoyed the sex, and various other things. I replied saying I found the sex brilliant with her and loved it.

She's coming round later with my phone, to collect keys, swap little items of belongings and so on, although I wouldn't be surprised if she doesn't let me have my phone back. I'm also praying she doesn't make a scene in front of Bela. Maybe I should move to Madrid.

I got a phone call a fortnight ago from a local brewer and pub owner asking me if I'd like to be one of the judges to find the champion beer of Lancashire during our Beer Festival. There were over sixty entries.

Thursday then, was a very sociable and educational day, partly because I was allocated to the same tasting panel as professional beer writer Melissa Cole. A rather irritating man repeatedly asked her what her favourite beer is. In an excellent display of lip-biting, she tried to explain that beer isn't something that can be ranked like a league table. I managed to extract from him that he was some sort of engineer, but he was texting throughout the tasting, looking up sideways at us to make us repeat our questions which clearly failed to match his texts for interest. It's a privilege to be asked to do this, so turn your fucking phone off. "I could have strangled him," she said to me later.

I had to introduce her and Roger Protz, perhaps the best known beer writer in the country. I lost my notes so after five hours' drinking had to improvise. It went fine and in fact it looked better to be speaking without them. At last my duties were over and I could enjoy Melissa Cole's entertaining ramble through the winning beers in each category.

The beer to which I gave the highest marks won Overall Champion: if you ever encounter Lancashire Stout by Mayflower Brewery, avail yourself of a pint: it's a divine drink, all dark chocolate and burnt orange, and I'm very pleased that the brewery itself is so happy to have won. I can feel a trip to The Turk's Head in St Helens coming on.

I've just asked Csilla, whom I bumped into on the stairs in her pyjamas, if she'd mind if I turned the router on and off because I can't get it connected. "Of course of course," she said, and then did this little laugh. I can't imagine a happier way I'd like to share this house, and I should put more effort into showing them how much I love having them here.

Last night, in bed, any of her movements giving me an agony of pleasure, I said, looking wonderously up at her, "I love you Frances." I knew, I could hear, what I was saying. This morning, she said "You were very drunk last night. You got a bit carried away. Don't let's read too much into it." The fact that she was distancing herself from what I said made me like her even more and made me want her again.

I'm in a pub squirreled away in the beautiful early C19th residential streets behind Waterloo station, where you'll need a million pounds for a two bed house, drinking Doom Bar in its own glass. London looks beautiful and well dressed. I like the girl-watching, but I'm glad that I don't have a job which demands you put such an effort into appearances just for work.

I'm here for my PhD. There was a day-long colloquium about Brian Ferneyhough, a composer I'm interested in (or rather, whose social world I'm interested in). On YouTube there's a comment on one of his pieces saying "I heard a similar piece played by drainage workmen on assorted hammers and shovels while stuck in roadworks on the A27 Chichester bypass on 22 July 2005".

It was a good day but a long one. Towards the end of it, Ferneyhough started talking at exhaustingly long, unilluminating and abstract length about his music, then insisted on playing us his Sixth String Quartet in its entirety, (a work we were going to watch on a film shortly afterwards) thus eating into all but ten minutes of the meagre time allowed for the wine reception. I know how selfishly privileged that sounds, but after seven hours of papers and talks, everyone wanted a break and a natter. "I really want you to hear it now," he said. Brian, we just want a drink now.

I invited a few friends along to the evening concert, who gamely attempted the music. One of the pieces went wrong and a redfaced viola soloist caused the music to stop and resume, which I found quite exciting, like an out-take. My friend Kev said "This is the ugliest audience at a concert I've ever seen," and one of the other people at the seminar earlier in the day said "They all wear black professionally, so they've turned up in grey to show how vibrant they are when they let their hair down." Contemporary classical music audiences don't meet the bar of London girls on the tube in rush hour.

After the concert we went to the pub. Kev's a taxi driver and as we walked through Covent Garden Neil said "Don't ask him the way. He'll charge us when we get there."

I also arranged to meet with a couple of people about the research and have just been sitting on a sunny terrace by the Thames talking to someone from the UK's main body for the promotion of new music, my eyes constantly straying to the girls going to and fro from London Fashion Weekend which was setting up for some reception or something in the same building.

Right, off to Greenwich to talk to someone who blogs about contemporary music now.

Another rainy cold Sunday; in with my girls, playing on the Wii, watching Ski Sunday, a few tins of cheap cider. Low-key but close and loving.

I might have been neglecting the Hungarians. I got in tonight and Csilla said that there is some soup, "the soup of my mother". They'd already eaten but she wandered in and almost outright asked that we all go out together. I felt bad. I've abandoned them lately what with Frances, the PhD, my girls. They're foreigners, they know no-one here except me. I should take more care of them. A little while ago me and Bela had a good hour-long chat over breakfast in which she said that she finds English people cold. I'm abandoning them in the same way that I sometimes felt when I lived in Madeira, where only success was publicised in social life, because most immigrants didn't have the social networks to cope with any sort of need.

Me and Frances went out last night to see some jazz in a pub. She was wearing this beautiful Chinese-y reddish top which lowered to the tiniest glimpse of a red bra. There was a bit of a mismatch between what the audience--hopefully squeezing the last few hours out of the weekend--wanted the band to play on a Sunday night, and the ponderously ruminative music the latter were more keen on performing. With as much grace as they could muster they finally played something we could dance to. Frances and I did so on a bit of carpet in the corner. I like it that she likes dancing - and not in that embarrassing spidery 60s-influenced arm-curling "style" that some leftwing middleaged women do.