To Leeds University for the welcome meeting for the new Music postgrads.

I turned up at the right place and went into the foyer. There was a sign saying to knock on the opaque mirrored window, which I did. A secretary appeared to show me the way. How come university administrators are always so attractive?

Leeds Uni is very big and a bit confusing, but I eventually found the place. We were shown into a black box theatre with harsh strip lighting and after a bit of admin and some tantalising details about possibilities of using the university's links with Copenhagen, Gothenberg and Helsinki, we were let loose on the wine. Everyone was chatty and grown up and interesting. I like how at PhD level people finally start being serious about their subjects. Four of us then went down the pub.

I thought I was OK but I fell asleep on the train and woke up at Manchester Airport around the time I was supposed to be in Lancaster to babysit so that Kirsty could go out. I rang her, but she'd got her friend Karen there to cover for my absence, so that's two people I've pissed off.

I think this is an excellent start to a PhD.

It's 11.30pm and I'm in the front room of Kim's house in Leeds. I'm slightly surprised I'm here, given the Platform 14 Lunging Incident in July. At the end of our first meeting, she slapped me sharply on the arm as I attempted an osculatory manoeuvre at the station. I felt embarrassed for a while afterwards, but she got in touch, and now I'm staying at her house this weekend while I finish the MA and go to the cricket tomorrow at Headingly. In the car from the station she said she usually goes for slightly controlling men and immediately I knew there was no possibility of going to bed with her.

Her house (which she described as a "hovel"), looks like my mum and dad's, which is also rented: that wallpaper which has a border where a dado rail should be, mottled pale turquoise and creme stripes below it, then blue fleurs de lys on a yellow background above it. It's not a hovel, it's just not yours.

We chatted for a while, me struggling to find a pose which would project an image of myself that was slightly more relaxed than how I felt. She likes dancing and mentioned something going on in Leeds in a fortnight.

I think she feels a bit anxious about being a host. She went to bed while I work on the MA but came down to leave me some Pro Plus, some chilli chocolate and to apologise for the lack of any more wine.

Edit, 2.50am Monday morning. There's a bit of tidying up to do and references to check, but my dissertation is for most practical purposes over. I didn't imagine I'd finish it in the house of a woman I met on a dating site. Kim's hospitable and very helpful, taking me to and picking me up from the cricket today, making some sandwiches for us. I wish I didn't feel faintly nervous around her. She's a kind soul, but I can't find a topic that lasts more than a couple of minutes.

Fairly spontaneous pissed-up night with eight or nine people loosely associated with academe who are full of misgivings about our possible or actual roles in it. An intelligent and droll young woman from Slovenia sat at the table with the body language of an inscouciant Italian, her left elbow planted on the table and her hand swivelling round to accompany her words. I quizzed her about Slovene's complicated case and number system (it has singular, double and plural), effortlessly coming across as Older Linguistics Bore. Some of us got talking more interestingly about the way that academe dilutes friendships through the pressure of having to chase short-term contracts all the time.

Me and Linda arrived first. She looked beautiful, in a dark green scoop-necked dress coming to just below her knees, black tights, flat black shoes. She asked me what I thought about her dress. I drew my breath in as I was invited to inspect her. She spent the evening veering between entertaining to desirable to someone who makes me think harder than I would do without her; and always, all the time, fearlessly funny, puncturing the slightest bubble of pomposity and pretension in her lovely Galway accent.

Restraint and understatement are admirable virtues, so on my way home I texted her. "You're gorgeous clever witty and pisstaking and I love how you dress. You are absolutely beautiful. I love having you as a friend Linda."  Subtext (of which she is perfectly aware): "I wish you were my lover".

The dating site have cancelled my subscription, deleted my profile and refunded the money on to my credit card. To the end, they refused to say what word it was that triggered their sensitivities. But it means I've managed to acquire Woman From Thirsk for free.

I joined another dating site last week. This is an email I received tonight, together with my reply.

On Sat, 4 Sep 2010 15:00:44 -0700 (PDT) "usersupport@bleurghhh.com" wrote:

looby, In order to help our customers have a safe and successful experience, bleurghhh.com routinely reviews information posted to user profiles. During the registration process, you agreed to our terms and conditions, which limit the type of information that can be posted. During a recent review of your profile, information was removed in accordance with our terms and conditions.

The following content has been removed from your profile:

Things that looby is passionate about:
Procrastinating, finding fault in others' spelling mistakes, reading out interesting things from the newspaper to anyone in the same room, dancing in the kitchen, looking through dictionaries, going down the pub, learning just enough about a subject to bullshit plausibly about it, a good book, wondering why I sometimes get taken for gay and how to avoid this without acting like a complete dick, standing with my hands on my hips looking at DIY jobs and hoping that they'll get done if I stare at them hard enough, cooking, and working out how little I can do yet still get paid for it.

The most important thing I am looking for in a person:
Big tits, a PhD, and an mdma factory in the shed.

We recommend that you edit your profile at your earliest convenience. Please review our Terms and Conditions for more information on Posting and Communication Restrictions. A link to this information has been provided below.

Sincerely, Risk Management, ["Risk Management!?] bleurghhh.com

--------------

Dear bleurghhh.com.

This isn't working for me. Could you delete my profile and cancel my subscription immediately. You can either do this yourselves or I'll just tell my credit card company that I've lost my credit card down a drain when I got pissed in Eindhoven or something and that I want all payments from my credit card cancelled.

Good luck with matching conventional people together. But you won't need it - it's a huge market.

looby

I had a chat with a young intern at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival about helping out there. HCMF is my Glastonbury. And my friend who I did a show with earlier this year has suggested we work together again at something called New Work Scotland. And we'd get paid. So good, it's all getting arty again. And it involves working with a witty, self-deprecating gorgeous Israeli woman.

Sunday afternoon I went down a former slave morgue (it says on the website) which is rapidly becoming my new favourite pub. I bumped into a man I snogged last year in similarly relaxed circumstances, and his female friend. I got a bit carried away and in front of both of them I said "Do you fancy him?" "'Cos I do."

We discussed a bit of work I could do for him, and he wrote out a contract on the back of a shopping list. We signed it with some gravitas on the bar. I like having a contract on the reverse side of which it says "pancetta, onion, carrot, garlic, parmesan..." It's serious though. It will make me a tiny amount of money.

Getting to slight panic stations with the MA. It'll be alright on the night, but it very soon will be the night.

Felicity rang the other morning, expressing a desire to take advantage of modern telecommunications technology for recreational purposes. She had to go after a few minutes because she didn't have enough hands. She emailed afterwards apologising for it. I told her it was absolutely fine and she should do it whenever she wants. She's coming round in about three hours. Despite the invigorating nature of the phone call, I'm not entirely sure what she has in mind. Ostensibly it's to bring me some cooking apples, but it's a long way to come to give a man an apple.

Update 2300: Felicity turned up in a tight-fitting low-cut blouse. I wondered whether this was a signal, but no. "I've got to be back by 11 and I'm not staying the night." I made a rather dull aubergine pilaf from a recipe of Nigel Slater's and now I've got half hundredweight of it left to eat myself.

It was a gloomy ninety minutes, all about how she feels trapped in her highly paid job, her responsibilities, how she doesn't like being grown-up and so on. At one point she asked me what I was thinking. I felt like saying "Do something about it then. You've got shedloads of money. What's the point of all these fucking barn conversions if you're not using the money? Start doing drugs or something. In the short term, I wish I'd bought cheaper wine."

But I didn't say that. I indicated a photograph of my daughter when she was two and we were on holiday in Sardinia and that I was thinking how happy and pretty I thought she looked.

It really is time now to draw a line underneath the Felicity episode. She was quite rude to Kitty the other weekend. Yes, she rescued me from a time when my physical loneliness felt unbearable, but both she and I need to find someone more in tune with each other.