To Manchester, for a concert by Philip Thomas, the UK's foremost advocate of the work of Christian Woolf. Not a single mobile phone or watch alarm went off, and there was not a single person fucking about in front of a dazzling blue screen during the entire concert.

The first work was "For prepared piano" from 1951. After the piece, Thomas picked out the various items inserted between and on the strings, which included several door stops. He said that he'd found them in a hardware shop in Leeds. "Why do you wanted fifty-three?" asked the ironmonger. "To put them in my piano." "Oh."

One of Wolff's interests was rejecting the pervasive idea, in Western music, of continuity. To effect this break, he wrote the piece (at the age of seventeen) in the normal linear left to right fashion, before rewriting it vertically, down to the bottom of the page, then across for an inch or two (he wasn't fond of bar lines), then across, then up, then across, then down, and so on.

The result didn't make for easy listening. Whereas another well-known formalist model, twelve-tone music, can produce beautiful, passionate and affecting music in a way which is still mysterious to this Romantic mind, I struggled a bit with the hesitating result of Wolff's experiment. But I think Ray Conniff is playing Manchester on Thursday.

---

The previous day, Trina had got the hump about not being invited, and was getting on my wick no end with her rampant insecurity, alleging that my story was but a cover for seeing another woman. "You're totally wrong," I said. "Well, not entirely right. I'm seeing Samantha and her sister. Right, come on, are we having that drink?"

As we walked to the pub, I said I'd forgotten my key to Kirsty's house, and told her to walk on ahead. Back in my house I rang Chris and explained the scenario, and asked her to ring me at 7pm. "You don't have to say anything -- just nod and go hmm. I'll explain later." I changed Chris's name on my phone to "Samantha".

We were sitting at our table in the pub when, on the dot, the call came in.

"Oh hiya -- yes, just checking up about tomorrow. So, is your sister still coming? Great. And, er... will she bring those shoes and that skirt, you know, from last time? Brilliant. OK, so my train gets in at 12.45 and so I'll meet you and Theresa in the Lass O'Gowrie and we'll take it from there then. Oh -- by the way, the cover story, just to make sure we're singing from the same hymn sheet, is that I'm going to a concert of way out piano music at the University of Manchester. Just in case anyone -- you know. Ok then, thanks Sam -- can't wait!"

I put the phone down. "Just a friend," I said. "You're horrible you are," she said, smiling. Two young punky-looking women came and sat at the next table. They were carrying a placard which said "A Dress Is Not a Yes" and were going on the local Reclaim The Night march. I chatted to them briefly, before going back to our table, where Trina, with her customary lack of generosity, said that they were only tolerating me "because I am a lot older than them." It's not even worth pursuing.

Back at mine, with us both in our separate beds, she texted me from hers, amorously. I replied

No, to be absolutely honest Trina. You've not shown your best side today. Putting the phone down on me, suspicious, needy, demanding. We really really must keep this as friends where it works very well. But as a girlfriend ... it'd be like going out with a 16-year-old. I want a simple, enjoyable life and as friends, we're definitely on. But as a relationship you are hard work.

---

My brother, a Hartlepool Utd fan, came up from Hertfordshire on Saturday for the match against Morecambe and me and the girls went along. I'm not a football fan by any stretch of the imagination but it was a cracking good afternoon out, despite losing at home to the team bottom in the league, and by an almost comical own goal.

My brother told us about a time he was watching Hartlepool on a particularly cold afternoon. His friend kept disappearing to say he was going to the pie shop, then returning with no evidence of a pie. After the sixth such visit, my brother said "Are you quite keen on those pies then?" "I'm not eating them," he said. "I'm wearing them." He was stuffing them up his jacket and in his pockets to keep warm.

It was the thirtieth anniversary of the Musicians' Co-operative, and I was asked to compere a benefit gig for them on Saturday. The upstairs pub room was chilly but there were young flimsily-dressed girls there doing that pivoted talking and laughing with their friends, before their men came off the stage and hooked their hands round their backs and slid their hands down onto their arses. Less a gesture of mutual sexual interest, more a public display of ownership.

After an hour of respectful attention to a dreary acre of guitar-based rock music, I retreated downstairs for much of the time to mingle with the boho crowd, returning only to introduce the bands.

A man who started his PhD a little after me and works in a pub I rarely go in, came up to me with this friend whom I'd never met before, to my knowledge. "This is Stu," said my friend. "Hiya, y'right?" I said, and extended as I always do, my hand, thinking it was just another introduction. He took it properly and firmly and shook it for a long time, so much so that even as someone who likes handshaking, I had to inch it out of his grasp.

"I'm Stu," he said. "I was trying to help you at the Castle the other week." I realised that he was talking about my shameful performance at the house night in the old prison a couple of weeks ago. I looked in his eyes and felt a flood of gratitude and humility.

I shook my head in mute apology for a short while. "I am so, so sorry Stu. I'm so sorry for all that. Was it you then? I'm sorry. I realise I imposed myself on you and other people that night... I'd had too much acid."

"I know... but honestly, don't worry about it. It wasn't your fault. I'm just glad that you're OK now."

Richard, my PhD friend, then said some very nice things about how he thinks I am a top man and how he'd like to have a drink and spend some time with me. I'd like to do that, but I'm not in his intellectual league. It makes me feel nervous when people say things like that. I can only disappoint.

---

Kim, whom I'm very much looking forward to seeing again at the soul weekender in Morecambe in May, sends me a text. Prefacing the sentence with a qualifiction about the disinhibiting effects of drink, she tells me that she loves me.

Well, you don't really pet, because you don't feel any sexual attraction towards me, and I know that you won't make a move on me when we're next in bed on 24th May.

Either Donna has discovered this blog or I have a very keen reader from an IP address that resolves to Milton Keynes. That would explain her radio silence since her birthday.

---

Me and Trina had a fabulous weekend out dancing in glamorous Leyland. For the first time they opened up a little room which was only intended for the DJs to broadcast onto a soul music radio station from, but which became a cupboard-sized nest of housey happiness. Someone took a minute or two of video from it but I'm not sure if the laity can access it, and I'm not au courant with the video tag in HTML5 yet, but you could try clicking on this and seeing if your name's on the guest list.

If you can get in, you'll notice a girl with straight black hair and a midnight blue top. There was a delicious vein of flirting going on between us all weekend. I do understand that that sounds like the over-imaginative projections of a 50-year-old, but I am not making it up. The careful danced bodily diplomacy of managing the space between you and someone you like is as near to paradise as you'll get in Leyland.

Since then it's all gone downhill with Trina. I stay over at the girls' at the weekends, and she was texting from my house on Friday night, needily asking me to come round for a cuddle at 1am. On Saturday afternoon we went round to Kitty's and got stoned and drunk and chatty with Wendy and her Somewhat Controlling Husband, and I made the error of mentioning Karen -- with whom things have never progressed beyond flirting -- after which Trina said, rather obviously, that she had to go.

All was then proceeding happily, when Wendy's daughter flung herself at her mum, causing them to crash into the sideboard and making a nasty lump on Wendy's head. Somewhat Controlling Husband began lecturing Wendy about her drinking. I texted her this morning to see if she was OK. She said that she was in trouble with SCH but "that's nothing new." Trina had sent me several long late night texts about how we could have been so good for each other and what do you value and why are you pushing me away... and so on and so on. I deleted them before getting to their ends.

She came round to watch the rugby this afternoon. The wrong side of a bottle of red, she came into the kitchen, where I was washing up, and said in what I heard as a contemptuous voice, "I don't know how she can live like this." I felt a flare of irritation towards Trina and protectiveness towards Kirsty, who works fucking hard and is one of the loveliest and kindest women I have ever met. What does it matter if she leaves the kitchen in a bit of a state when she goes off on Friday morning? "Well, if you don't like it you can always go to your boat." Off Trina went, without a word.

I carried on with making tea for us all. Trina texted to say she'd left me a note. I got back to mine at about 10pm this evening, picked it up, saw only the final unhidden sentence "I have had enough!" and threw it away without reading it. She's sleeping in the room below this one. We're supposed to be going to the wine club on Tuesday but we'll have to see. And she wonders why I have told her more than once that there is not a cat in hell's chance of her becoming my girlfriend.

Whilst in Leyland, we were invited to spend a weekend in Derby with a couple of people I know from going out bopping. I'd still like to take them up on that but I think she had in mind a bit more of a coupley do than if I turned up on my own.

---

Kim rang to say she's free on the weekend of the soul weekender in Morecambe in May (where last year, me and Donna had such a great time), so I asked her over. It'd be helpful if Trina could stay split up with me until after that is finished, because Kim and Trina together would be a fucking car crash, with me in the middle and all the joy gone. Trina is jealous of Kim; and it would be weird, sleeping with Kim with Trina in the room below.

---

In more pacific territory, I took two of my daughters to their interviews at a sixth form college in Middletown. Train fare wasted again -- no ticket checks anywhere. There was a mini-branch of a commercial coffee outlet in the long common room. I've never seen that before in a school and I take a dim view of such a development. School coffee should be bitter, scalding hot, in thin paper cups impossible to hold, and served at 20p a go by a busty woman from Blackburn with a full-figured tabard frontage.

It's Donna's birthday. I am a bit tired and emotional and I keep repeating a song that we danced to last year and which moves me to --- at least having to wipe my eyes.

From: looby
To: Donna
Subject: I know...
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 20:18:10

...that this is a very sloppy thing to say, but using the flimsy excuse that it's your birthday I'll say it and then get my coat.

This, in my mind, was your song. Had things been different, I would have done anything in my power to make you my girlfriend and would have bent over backwards to make myself similarly attractive to you. I miss you from time to time. As someone who hasn't ever experienced what other people call love, I had the most delicious taste with you of knowing what that might mean. The incredible sex helped, too.

But it was just a brief time and it's easy to over-project. It's easy to view a putative future favourably when we didn't have enough time to get on each other's nerves.

Nonetheless, it is still true that you are a special and unforgettable person who affected me in ways I didn't think possible.
Happy birthday X

I spent a night in prison on Saturday -- that is, the former prison in Lancaster Castle -- which nearly turned into a spell in the loony bin. Ye DJs of yore from Ye Olde Haçienda were playing. Unfortunately I didn't experience much of it, due to a slight dosage miscalculation beforehand with the peppermint tea.

I don't want to discourage Trina's ventures into the deeper end of dance music but she was irritating me, constantly touching me to assuage her anxiety about everything. The prison is just as it was left when it closed, and you can dance on the upper floor walkways or down in the main assembly area. The kaleidoscopic light show was as synaesthetically heady as the music, which was much more driving and techno-y than I'd guessed it would be.

How long I lasted I don't know, but there is a gap in my memory between dancing and talking to someone I know, then standing outside for a long time and boring the very patient security staff to tears with an hours-long monologue, loosely based around the theme of death, and my important and solipsistically described role in the carbon cycle. In the meantime I'd lost Trina.

All of a sudden, an ambulance turned up and took me to A & E, where I sat for half an hour next to a man with dried blood all over his head, before discharging myself. I went back to mine, and got into bed with Trina. She said she'd got lost and had taken a long time to get home. We had sex, the selfish sort that I enjoy the most, where I do the talking; we both came.

As a responsible father, I then went back to Kirsty's, because I "look after", in an increasingly loose sense, my girls at the weekends. I was still a few hours from feeling normal, but I passed it off as lack of sleep and too much drink, thereby sustaining the open secret that the close adults in their lives are fond of peppermint tea and similar refreshments.

I handed the girls back at 7ish when Kirsty and boyf turned up. "Oh no," said boyf. "You'd have been better off down the loony bin. Take it from someone who knows!"

Around midday on Monday, Erica rang. "So then, are you OK?" A friend of hers had been trying to help me and had told her about this "crazy guy" at the rave, and Erica worked out who it was. She told me that the door staff had told the police that they thought I ought to be sectioned, advice which the police didn't follow.

I found the girl who had tried to help me on Erica's snoopbook page.

"So anyway," continued Erica. "Do you fancy a quickie down the pub?" They walked in; sympathetic laughing and generous handshakes and kisses. Slightly Coarse Husband said not to worry. "Go big, or go home." "Yeah well, I'm not doing that again." "You will."

---

Donna's birthday tomorrow. I sent her a card which I found months ago, a stylised bird with wire-like limbs, its body coloured in kitschy artificial colours similar to those in a print in her house. "...And by the way, your friend in the north still thinks you are witty, intelligent, stylish, and very, very sexy." It's getting too late to say it really, but what the fuck.