Wendy rings asking me if I was down the pub, saying she's free for half an hour. As she walks in, Kim rings. I wave to Wendy. "Kim, I'm terribly sorry, but Wendy's here. Could we do this another time?" Almost before I finish the sentence she is expertly understanding. Later that evening, I text her. "I'm sorry about curtailing you so rudely this afternoon. It's just that I lose any semblance of manners once I see Wendy, even towards you."

Wendy gets us a bottle of wine, asks me about London. She's on form, going on a riff in which we are compared to additives in food. I want to put my fingers in her hair. We finish the wine and she goes to the bar, coming back with two glasses of port. We make some arrangements for me taking her dog out two days this week while she's at work. "The keys will be in Kitty's recycling bins. Stay as long as you want. Riffle through my knicker drawer, have a bath..."

Afterwards, she texts me, saying that I really am one of her favourite people in the world, and confirms our arrangement to take a bottle of port up to the park on Monday.

I try writing back but my fingers slow me down, as does my self-censorship, attempting, far too late now, to avoid saying what she doesn't want to hear. I leave it till the evening, so that I can respond in a measured and restrained way.

And you are one of my very best favourites too. I love being with you, I miss you when you're not around, I love your irreverent, unpredictable, bright, witty, conversation. I love looking at you. I think you're utterly gorgeous, newly gorgeous every time I see you, and wish I could rake my eyes over you constantly. You make my life better for being in it. I missed you too when I was in London, because it's you that I always want to share everything with. I am, therefore, for all practical purposes, in love with you, although I must turn my head away from the radiant obviousness of such an inconvenient conclusion.

Thank you for today -- that all-too-short bit of the kind of heady near-delirium that you bring with you was all the more enjoyable for it being unexpected. If I could have written my ideal first full day back here, you would have been the first person in it.

Monday's ours. And in the meantime I look forward to rummaging in your knicker drawer, and Kitty's recycling bins, tomorrow and Friday.

And then the melancholy sets in. I wish I didn't have to go to a sex club in Blackpool. I wish it could be with Wendy, part of the same spectrum of feeling for her that I already have. I wish I didn't find our rare, three-second embraces so thrilling, so opiate. I wish I didn't re-run them in such a viscously slow recall. I wish I didn't remember every tiny ridge and fold and hem of her clothes under my stroking fingers, millimetres away from her skin. I want her to want to stroke me too, instead of her holding me, willingly enough, but without desire. Mine for her is deadened through its enforced privacy, confined within the boundaries of me, expressed only in flat, inanimate, black and white typed words.

To London, where I was hoping to combine a conference, a Chicago-meets-Sheffield Deep House night in Brixton, the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy, and seeing Melissa. I achieved one of these, the conference.

My situation forces me into such indignities as staying in dormitory hostel accommodation. It started well, with a decent soul band playing in the bar, but the weekend was about to take an Iberian nose-dive. In the bunk beneath me, a native of the noisiest country in Europe snored in Spanish all night, despite me frequently kicking our bunk in the hope of at least temporary relief.

I woke up drained, only half there. They served us a prison breakfast: instant coffee, palely shaded white bread warmed some distance short of actually toasting, sopping cornflakes floating in a mere of milk, and a pot of sugar solution labelled as yoghurt. But I suppose my customary petit déjeuner of coffee, croissants, whisky porridge and kir pètillant, is beyond the budget of a fifteen quid a night hostel.

At the end of day one of the conference, I felt like crying with lack of sleep. A challenging night was ahead: sitting in a pub for three hours until Melissa took me out for my tea in Brixton, then go out dancing till 5am, then wander about a bit to find a caff, on a freezing and rainy morning, until the conference started again.

I succumbed to emailing Trina to ask if she could lend me £60 for the cheapest hotel room I could find at 6pm. I was booked into "Travelodge Croydon Central", where I expected to bump into Alan Partridge at any moment. Melissa, to my utter relief, cancelled due to her son playing up. I had half a bottle of port, a cheese and onion and crisp sandwich, tried a blurry page of The Tin Drum, and went to bed.

---

Day Two of the conference was much better. With the benefit of sleep I was more able to appreciate the tight shift dresses and blackly-tighted legs insightful and perceptive contributions to the papers we discussed.

I couldn't face returning to La Casa de Ronquidos, but instead found an airbnb in West Norwood, attracted by the suburb's bustling high street and modern leisure facilities.

At my lodgings, I was shown in and immediately whisked away upstairs, the hostess intuitively sensing that after a chilly walk to her house I was not in any way hoping to be offered a cup of tea or glass of wine. Instead, she handed me a tube of toothpaste -- "you might need this" -- and packed me off to my room. I slept well, until someone walked straight into my room at 6.45am, asking me if I knew where the iron was.

The second I stepped out from the bedroom, she emerged from her room next door, as though she'd been hovering, poised on a hair-trigger of the sounds of my utterances, zips, and clothing. "I'll show you out," she said, her intuition once again apprehending that as a paying guest I don't at all expect a cup of coffee or something to eat in the morning. Back on the streets of West fucking Norwood at 7.15am, I consoled myself with the fact that it's impossible to find a place to stay in London for seventeen quid a night, and there was no-one snoring, in any language.

---

Yesterday morning I spent the best part of an hour lugging my stuff round a polished-looking Streatham, failing to find Melissa's flat. Two bin men I asked hardly had the English to answer me. I gave up, then caught the train up to Euston, and travelled back with the other half of my bottle of port and a conversation with an academic returning from seeing her son. All was going amicably until a single woman in her twenties was ejected from the train, into a foul night, at Warrington.

Sensing something wasn't right, I jumped up just as the conductor ushered her onto the platform. She was going to Carlisle. "Don't get off -- I'll pay your fare," -- something which, I found out this morning, I'd have been unable to do -- but she declined my offer.

I sat back down uneasily, wondering about the bottomless well of human heartlessness that throws a young woman off a train on a November night a hundred miles from home. "Oh well," said my fellow traveller, "it's not raining, that's one thing," proving, as if we don't already know, that people from well-off academic backgrounds can be clever and stunningly ignorant at the same time.

Wendy texted me: "I'm off next week and school's back. So?" An unintentionally sexy message, which made me want to reply, "Prosecco, coal fire, and sex on the stairs?"

Instead, we spent Saturday night at a party at Kitty's. Melissa was up from London with her one-year-old son. It's an impossible kind of thanks to give a mother, but I was grateful that she didn't ask me to be part of the ritual adoration. She's aware I'd be faking it, and generous enough to spare me from it. Kitty moved solicitously about the room, never leaving a glass empty. Someone I know a little turned up with a guitar and played it well, which was far better than the tinny pestering pop music of Radio 6 that Kitty always puts on during social gatherings, and which I surreptitiously turn down when no-one's looking.

Wendy looked darkly beautiful, and there was a moment when everything -- for me -- went completely silent and still, as the low light washed her décolletage in infinitely shaded browns. My desire for her later found a stupid form of expression. As were sharing a chair together, I went, without thinking about it, to kiss her on the cheek, but at that very moment she turned slightly away, and I ended up holding a closed-eyed pout an inch away from her. I wasn't embarrassed; more, irritated with myself that I had, for the thousandth time, given expression to an wanted and unreciprocated desire.

---

It's busy in the Penny Bank on a Saturday afternoon, and I ask if I can attach myself to the end of a long table of older men who are absorbed in the racing. The barmaid comes over to change ours of the numerous televisions over to the rugby, and is met with a spontaneous "no!" from those seated beneath it.

A horse with a name which might be designed to illustrate the ponciness of the French language -- Tarquin de Seuil -- is in the next race. I collect a slip and put £2 on it. I am surprised at how absorbed I become for such small stakes, when my fellow gamblers are passing tenners and twenties around. As the race reaches its conclusion, my horse comes up on the inside, and I am levered up, as if a puppet, into a standing position. I shout fistily at the screen -- "Fucking got it!" Back from the bookies with £16, I understand that the unspoken protocol is now to divest oneself of one's winnings, and I do so, in a further hour of unsuccessful bets and sweary conviviality.

I text Kim, saying that I've found the pub for us and the dog when they come over for a few days between Christmas and the New Year. I imagine us sitting together there, me licking up the misapprehension of others as they flick their eyes between us, wondering and envious of me, their vague imaginings of sex.

I take the phone outside. The Jehovah Witnesses are at their stall, the men in their excessively correct American suits, the women dressed with such a boxy, secretarial severity that it's almost sexual. I want to ask Kim about her experience of sex clubs, and what to expect in a first visit. I am possessed of -- and sometimes by -- a drive, the like of which has never been as strong, or seemed so natural. It's a synaesthetic spectrum in which art, writing, reading, dancing, music, drinking, drugtaking and sex, all bleed together. An old Modernist and Romantic trope, I know, but no less real for that.

Its quality, however, is diluted by my lop-sided relationships with women. Dates end with me being told I'm "sweet", a word which makes me want to smash my pint to the floor; female friends take my arm, not my hand, which makes me feel like a jaunty Enid Blyton character about to enjoy sharing a beaker of lemonade. Being treated like this, over and over again, can occasionally accumulate to something between unease and humiliation.

One could think of more attractive a setting than a sex club in Blackpool in which to explore it, but I want, at least occasionally, the first premise of meeing a woman, to be sexual.

---

Without knowing of this plan, my mother wrote to me last week. "Have you read The Book of Revelations? That tells you what happens to people like you."

It's half eleven on Saturday morning. The girls are watching this depressing, gruesome DVD about zombies, so I've left them to it and am having a hair of the dog in The Seat of Learning, the thick pleasure of layering drink on that from the night before, like your head being stuffed with paper.

My eldest was in an open-air performance last night as part of a kind of Lancashire Diwali called Light Up Lancaster. They pranced about with paper lampshades to an electronified Four Seasons. Kitty, Wendy, and The Little Dictator were there too. I don't enjoy this sort of thing. It's too spectacular, a manufactured attempt at wonderment by electronics. There are too many children there, giving me myriad opportunities to accumulate slight irritations with others' child-rearing practices.

"So, Wendy, have you, er...started on anything?" "Well, not really. Well, just a bit of mdma, and some speed. And a bottle of Prosecco." "Oh right, just a nice quiet family teatime then."

In the loos in the Fur Coat And No Knickers Arms, I caught up with them somewhat. We were all wearing these ridiculous Minnie Mouse flashing ears. Kitty bumped into her headmistress, who knows me slightly through my girls. She's one of these good-looking, stylish women married to a lump of a man who dresses in black jeans and bomber jackets. Kitty and I chatted amiably to her before we returned to our respective tables.

Kitty made an alarmed gesture with a twisted mouth. Outside, she said "Fuck. Sitting next to your headmistress when you're shitfaced." "You were fine, Kitty. Honestly, you don't look shitfaced. She's really good-looking though isn't she? Makes me wonder I bother trying to make an effort if you can dress like a fucking binbag and get women like that." "Shhhh looby!"

Later, back at Wendy's, The Little Dictator sloped off to bed, then Kitty went too. Me and Wendy put some better music on, racked up a bit more, and danced around the room. She looked gorgeous as she danced, in her tight brown dress and her new haircut, an untrammelled bob. I like looking at her, and she likes being looked at. I mean, really, sexually, looking at her, more scanning than looking. I was getting turned on; the pleasure of my stiffening cock stuttering up against fabric. She has this movement she does, whether deliberately or not I don't know, of taking hold of her skirt hem in her fist and pulling it up slightly. I was stroking my mouth watching her, and caught myself murmuring, "Go on Wendy, go on, higher."

I can't remember what preceded the moment, but we ended up in a long holding of each other. I felt like I was collapsing, into a nowhere of her. I stroked my hands through her brittle, treated hair, over her shoulders and along her body, before stilling with my hands clasped in the small of her back, pressing her gently into me. I opened my eyes for a moment at the same time as she did. I closed them again, and parted my lips. We were on the cusp of kissing.

One of her favourite tracks came on and she separated us, smiling broadly. She checked to see if I was looking at her, then did that stroke of her eyes down my body and on to a spot on the floor between us, a look which says "watch me turn you on."

I don't recommend staying at Terminal 2 at Manchester Airport. I've given it one star on Twitadvisor. Needs must though when one is an impoverished follower of nieuw musiek.

Someone I momentarily came across during my ill-fated PhD was having a piece of hers performed at the Transit festival in Leuven in Belgium. I found a flight to Brussels for £30 return; instead of paid accommodation, I'd have been happy couchsurfing. Trina invited herself along, and paid for an airbnb place; after we split up she said I could keep the studio flat. I couldn't ask Wendy anyone else to come with me as that particular airline wants £110 to change names on the ticket.

Without my chauffeuse, the only way I could be at the airport for an early flight was to improvise a bed there the night before. It was chilly, uncomfortable, and there are endless security announcements all night.

In Leuven, there is nowhere to change money and I was walking around with a hundred and fifty of your useless English pounds. I tried the cashpoint with ever more modest requests until it relented at €30. I bought a baguette, a slab of cheap Gouda -- the sight of which was to become odious to me over the course of the next few days -- and a €3 bottle of wine.

The studio absolutely reeked of a washing powder which -- I think I have understood the Dutch correctly -- is dangerous to asthmatics, gerbils and the elderly. It persisted all weekend and rubbed itself everywhere.

This was not starting well. I had no credit on my phone, I'd left my EU/UK mains adapter at home, and there was no note from the studio's owner about internet access. I felt glum, but the plonk achieved the desired effect and I slept for fourteen hours.

Saturday; and If it's Atonal, it must mean an Unlit Concrete Underpass. Lauren Redhead, with her aptonymic hair dye, had a première piece in which two conversations were going on at either end of the keyboard; a more timid interlocutor was interjecting the odd comment in the middle, before acquiring more confidence. Later, I sat outside a pub, De Metafoor [sic], and heard a girl, who was rattling on one-sidedly to her friend, say "people talk too much sometimes." Conversations can work well between friends even when they are quite unequal. Thus it was in the Redhead piece.

Then Michael Finnissy, who was having a bit of a birthday Festschrift, had one of his pieces where he twists diatonic folk music so far until he gets impatient with it and rips it apart; I really have enjoyed his music for decades now.

Ferneyhough's piece was disappointing, a jumble sale of notes. It sounded like a workaday piece by a journeyman, rather than a thrilling work by the master that he is when he's given time and resources. A shame too, because the title, Quirl, describes one of the sexiest things a woman can do, with or without her clothes on.

Then another piano, for the best piece on the programme, by the Portuguese composer Patrícia de Almeida, who did her doctorate under Finnissy. Her Vacuum corporis hominem tem esse memento was a demanding feat of co-ordination with the other (the co-?) pianist Ben Smith, which motored along like a techno-charged Art Tatum, a joyous blizzard of energy fuelled with rhythms of the Charleston and football chants. It would have been better last: Luc Brewaeys' pieces couldn't hold me after that.

What might seem a disparate programme was connected in a most unusual way: all five pieces were scored for Piano and Air Conditioning Drone with a stipulation that the grey noise of the air conditioning system is to be played throughout and unto the beginning of the next piece.

Quatuor Diotima had not only the best shoes of the weekend, glinting constellations against dark leather matter, but the most exciting piece I heard -- Alberto Posadas's Elogio de la sombra, which sounds nothing like its title, with various extended techniques -- one of which demanded playing con sord. and then bowing across the mutes, which made a weepy snoring sound. It was driving, passionate, and involving.

---

In the evening I upped the average age at a free techno night with an all-female DJ line-up called No-one Listens To Women. The music was excellent but the naive young crowd were a downer, texting and standing around talking in the middle of the dancefloor. I'm not going out dancing with young people any more. They've no idea of dancefloor etiquette. I got asked for rugs a few times. In the eyes of young people, I've graduated now to Old Weirdo Who Might Have Something On Him.

The bar staff eventually gave up trying to tell people to put their cigarettes out, and the air became more and more acrid. Outside, in the Grote Markt, the atmosphere was of friendly anarchy. Smashed glass everywhere, people sitting around on the pavement, drinking. A group of three young people asked me where I was from, and at 5am I ended up demonstrating batting and bowling actions in cricket to them.

---

Next day I went exploring. My flat was close to the headquarters of the Brabant Nazi Party during the War. This house, built at the turn of the century, had an additional brick course added when it was appropriated by the Nazis. In a Council decision of 17 July 1953, it was decided to retain the house as it appears as a monument to the suffering of the citizens during the Occupation.

Leuven also houses the oldest college in Europe dedicated to the study of bananas.

In the evening I went to a jazz club; felt sorry for the group. Very few people were listening to them.

I decided to take a different route home and I soon got lost. The night was still and enveloping, and it was a liberating, sensual pleasure, to have no idea where I was going.

I ended up on this housing estate with this avenue of giant cannabis plants.

Back at Manchester airport, 11pm and too late for the train home, I settled down with the other international dossers in upgraded accommodation in the Lufthansa/Swissair backroom of T1. Woke up around 5am and sent Wendy a photograph of a dress I'd seen in Leuven, telling her, quite truthfully, that she would look utterly lovely in it. Just need to find €195 down the back of the settee first.