I spent a lot of this week exhausted, looking dreadful, deep black bags under my eyes. Getting pissed and having sex with Frances, who says she's not a big drinker but will get through a bottle of wine herself then invite me to have a glass from the second bottle as a way of exculpating herself to herself. Then staying up till 4am to finish a bit for my PhD, feeling absolutely ragged tired. I went to Leeds for my PhD supervision and Martin liked most the passages I wrote at 3am. "It gets better here..." "Well, that's what I wrote pissed late at night," I didn't say.

I went straight from Leeds to Kendal to meet Seriouscrush and her boyf for a night of Occitan music from Marseilles. It was dark and I liked it. I don't like how she effortlessly makes me feel attracted to her. I roam my eyes over her when I can't be seen doing it. But it's all intellectual. In the pub afterwards, they were slagging off the audience for being detached. But they are. Seriouscrush and her boyfriend like each other because they're both a bit cold.

Frances, somehow, I can't remember how, possibly because she keeps a diary in her head of the things I say, found out that there was a slight overlap when I'd been having sex with Felcity whilst having sex with her, and we had a bit of an awkward chat on Thursday about it, me feeling annoyed with her for her retrospectively holding me to a fidelity I've never promised. I told her that I was just hedging my bets, that I didn't know if it would work out with us so I was keeping Felicity in reserve. I bit my lip a lot and we went to bed, where, despite ourselves, it worked well.

I got up early, feeling awful, went to Leeds, then found this email with the subject "Honesty" in which she complained about me not telling her that I was occasionally sleeping with Felicity whilst sleeping with her. As if being honest with people all the time would end in anything other than disaster. I couldn't be bothered talking about it any more, so I replied saying "Oh fuckity fuck, I've just see your email. All I can say is, you've got me now. I don't want anyone else. I want you."

She replied saying "I haven't 'got' you! That sounds so proprietorial." But you really hate it if I sleep with someone else, I didn't say. Of course she hates that. I'd feel the same way. But I'm not sleeping with anyone else

It's all worked out OK and This is how I feel about you: Let me dress you baby Wear that dress for me When I get you home babe Take it off slowly Oh babe, I wanna do you, I wanna do you, I wanna do you baby do you, I wanna do you, I wanna do you babe, do you babe http://loobynet.co.uk/media/Eric_Benet_Weekend_Girl.mp3

I grew up in an Orthodox Feminist denomination in the early 80s, when men went on strike and women went on peace marches. One of its doctrines was a suspicion of any form of sartorial or cosmetic adornment for women. Women policed themselves for signs of a political betrayal in the form of a knee-length skirt. As a result, I occasionally ended up in bed with women I liked, but not in a sexual way; and of course, it didn't work. It's such an obvious point, but it took me years to realise my error. Going to bed with someone I helplessly find sexually attractive is a delight.

One of the florists I used to work with at Doom and Bloom is now running her own shop, a fairly upmarket affair by Lancaster's standards. "Not roses," I said, "because they're a bit of a cliché." She did me a generous deal on some orchids, underselling them by a good ten or fifteen pounds. I carried them home, feeling a bit of a charlie.

I made a Spanokopita, chilled some cava, then took everything up to Frances's. She was beautifully dressed in a moss green V-neck top and I straight away wanted her. Apart from the alarm clock beeping in flagrante delicto, everything went so well that my shadow-self stopped bothering to check if I was enjoying myself.

Next week I'm going to be in London for a couple of days, partly to meet people from an old usenet group that flourished about fifteen years ago, and partly to do some things connected with my PhD. I am hoping to interview one of the finest clarinettists around at the moment, and I'm nervous about it. I have an irritating inferiority complex when approaching people professionally superior to me in a field of endeavour for which I have respect. It's silly; I'm a PhD student in a respected School of Music: it's perfectly socially acceptable to be in conversation with a musician who specialises in the music you're studying. I'm still worried I'll make a poor fist of it, my anxiety about my own self-presentation getting in the way of actually addressing the research questions.

We went out to see Lancaster University's Big Band who were playing a small club attached to a local pub. I was pleased to see how Frances struck up conversations with strangers. I like not having to worry about people when you take them out. My friend Veronica, who was quite drunk, embraced me and kissed me unexpectedly warmly, perhaps feeling insulated from any unwanted advances by the fact that I was with someone else.

Several young people were texting throughout it, faces buried in phones. The woman sitting next to me was checking hers every few seconds. After the hundredth flash of blue light from her screen during the music I was ready to snatch it out of her hand and smash the bloody thing to pieces.

Say three drinks during an evening. That's nine quid to go out texting. I don't understand it.

Erica suggested we go out for a drink the other day. We met up with a friend of hers. She was an adept at that skill that attractive women have to cultivate, of defusing the male gaze. In a crowded pub we got talking to this bunch of young men from a small town about an hour away by train who had come to Lancaster for someone's birthday. "There's not a lot to do in our town apart from drugs." They said they had some mephedrone with them - the "plant food" that was made illegal a few months ago. I passed my new pal twenty pounds, we went to the loos, and snorted a line each off the toilet seat. I liked the sordidness of it.

I wasn't expecting much from an industrial fertiliser, but it produced a warm wave of relaxation and mild euphoria. Everything brightened. Indeed, so calm did it make us feel that Erica and I then did something monumentally stupid: we tapped out a couple of little lines on the table and snorted them from behind a menu. I glanced up and saw the small black dome of the panotopic CCTV camera, feeling completely unconcerned. Worst than the legal penalities would have been the social ones: I know some of the people who run the place.

The rain was electric on the pavement. I set off for the theatre to see a one woman show called Sex Idiot, which turned out to be a rather whimsical recitation of the performer's relationships. Not enough sex, I thought, but that might have been the mood I was in. In bed, I texted Denise, my beautiful, curvy, redhead friend. The last shimmers of the drug in my system, it soon turned frisky. Everything felt bright and clear.

Frances and I have run the course of a full relationship, up to and including its conclusion, in a week.

The inevitable conversation about the future happened last night and this morning, when I was very tired. I'd seen her three times this week, and had the most disturbed nights, with her stentorian snoring meaning I crept down the stairs in the creakiest house in Lancaster onto the sofa at 2am, trying not to disturb the Hungarians, or her up and down all night making tea and moving about with just the level of sound required to keep me awake too. Then she blithely sleeps it off until lunchtime, not really understanding that I can't spend the first three working hours of a normal day snuggled up next to her.

I don't know if she was drunk, or feeling insecure, but she started picking relentlessly at a knot I had no wish to unravel, asking dangerous questions. Various formulations of "I don't know. I like it as it is" weren't enough. She was insisting on "honesty" so doggedly that I gave it to her, partly because I was so irritated by the implied accusation that I am not honest, and partly to punish her with the consequences of what she was asking. I said I liked the film nights, the meals, the sex, that we have a shared past history of people and places; that I can offer her friendship and sex, but nothing more.

So much was uncontroversial but she didn't like it when I said that I have reached the level of intimacy possible with her. "Why?"

Because we miss each other in conversation too much, having to add little asides and footnotes when things are misinterpreted. Because I get fed up with her disputing what I have said in the recent past, citing some tiny specific instance which could arguably be interpreted as invalidating a statement which was meant to be a conversational generality rather than a proposition that matches the highest rigours of logical positivism. Because I dislike this sort of conversation. Because I want things to be straightforward. Because everything is 'because of the drink'. (I had agreed to not have a drink in February, simply to prevent her being able to level this at me for 28 days). Because you make sweeping generalisations about men and women. Because your smoking makes it impossible for me to kiss you properly.

"You're not open with me". I didn't know what to say. I'm one of the most open people I know. I hardly see how saying the things above (which are obviously presented here in a much-edited form) betokens a closed and private person.

"You don't understand me," she said. There's no answer to that because the premises and the proofs required are impossible to agree on. "And I don't think you care."

"You're a complex character," she said. "I'm not. I've got the depth of a puddle."

"Anyway I think men are different."  She got upset and started crying. "Most men don't like it when women cry." I had my arm around her and was stroking her hair, wishing I could escape.

We'd planned, booked and paid for, a weekend in Durham in April.

"I wish you'd told me this in the beginning. You're so closed off, you've decided nothing's going to develop."

"I don't think it would have", I didn't say, "but had you not grilled me, insisting on a fatal honesty, we could have seen if anything else could develop, as unlikely as I think that would have been, and as impossible it is now."

And if I'd posted seven days ago, I'd have told you about another night in our Chabrol film season at hers, followed by some of the best sex I've had in my life. Sometimes, it's not good to talk.