I apologise for any difficulty you may have had accessing this page. I can't work out what's wrong with the 301 .htaccess redirect I wrote when I changed the title of the page, so have just made it worse. Never mind... onward

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I've just been boring talking to a Lecturer in Blood and Guts from the University of Groningen. I just met him at the bar. He had a winced facial expression as though he was suffering from something painful of which he could not speak, but maybe that's what living in northeast Holland does for you. He said that he's here to work on new drugs to help doolally people.

In the post office yesterday, there was someone he might have been able to help. An old man walked in and muttered out loud "I didn't realised there was a fucking madhouse down the street" and something about going back to "fucking Leeds."

It was Wine Club on Monday. Trina got endearingly pissed on a bottle of cheap Chardonnay in the afternoon preceeding. We turned up and acquitted ourselves fairly well, although she was irritating me by talking over the presenter to this blind woman who shows no interest in the wine. Later, in bed, Trina said "She's going to pray for me, that blind woman." Christian, obviously. The mixture of a sense of a transformative power of which she is the arrogant conduit, crap dress sense, and a desire to plane you down into their economy of neediness. "How do you know when someone's praying for you? Will you get a funny feeling in your legs?"

I went to the bar to get another drink for us. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" the barmaid shouted from the kitchen. She arrived, as they say in France. "Been a long time since a girl said that to me," I said. "Well, not in public," she said. That's a good answer, I thought, and tilted my head to tell her so.

A few minutes before wine club started, I was refreshing myself in the loos (stupidly, I did this not in a cubicle), and the most pleasant husband of Kirsty's neighbour's daughter walked in. Thank fuck I hadn't got to the rolled-up railway ticket stage. As he came in I stood up sharply and made a pretence of washing my hands. We talked for a short time about his dicky back. I walked out, leaving my mascara on the top behind the washbasins, stood outside, and fiddled with my sock until I saw him leave. I went back in to complete the insufflatory procedure and returned to Austria.

It was an excellent night of unretailed wines, single varieties, and hand picked grapes. We talked ourselves into a Zweigelt from the amusingly named Meinklang vineyard. The German language sounds comical to me. They make vegan, organic, biodynamic wines which are matured in concrete vats.

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My proposal for the performance-cum-installation at the text-based art festival in Cambridge got turned down. I'm relieved, because had it been accepted I'd have had to do something about it; and at the same time disappointed, for the same reason.

Trina took me to a hotel in Lytham for my birthday; it almost didn't happen. I rang her when I got back from Kimtown and thoughtlessly mentioned Kim's new love affair in the course of the call. This raised her antagonism towards her, to the extent that she hung up on me. I got home and there was an email saying that we should "leave it for a while." I'm used to Trina's fits of insecurity now, so ignored it. And the following morning, another one arrived asking if I was still coming to Lytham.

She apologised but even apologies are too tiring sometimes. I waved them away with one of my stock phrases: "No, no, Trina it's OK. That was then and this is now." She was very generous with my presents: six elegant, thin wine tasting glasses, and two books by Raymond Williams, Culture and Marxism and Literature.

We went for sushi and jasmine tea, then coming back to my social and financial level we went to Wetherspoons. Outside the pub we got talking to two homeless people. I gave them a pound each and said "I'm giving you this on condition that you only spend it on drink or drugs."

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Next day, it was straight to Manchester, where a couple more of the Klavierstücke by Stockhausen were being performed at the University. Additonal accompaniment was provided throughout by the noisiest piano stool in Manchester. The pianists's own programme note referred to "head-banging serialism".

I went with my friend Tony who put me up when I was at a conference there last year. He'd not heard any Stockhausen before and said he enjoyed it: "it made me laugh." He insisted on buying me no fewer than three pints afterwards in a cosy little pub thronging with elderly people, and a fourth in the bleak bar at Piccadilly station, which has hardly anything potable.

The following day, I was running on empty. Tess, Trina and me were supposed to be going to Barry and Chris's party, but people seemed to be dropping out rapidly. Chris's friend cancelled, and Trina said point blank she was too tired after working from 8am that day; so the "party" seemed to have dwindled down to me and Tess, having to get a bus out to the nondescript village where Chris lives. And all this for only a couple of hours, since I had to get back as I had the girls.

Given all the cancellations, I was hoping she'd postpone it, but she indicated she was keen for us to go. At the last moment, I texted her. "Listen Chris we're both really knackered and I'm sort of conscious about the girls and it's too far to come for two hours. I'm ever so sorry but it's too far and I'm too tired after a really big few days in Kimtown." I have now probably given the impression that I can only be bothered to go to my own parties, but it would have been work, not pleasure.

The night ended where the week had began. "Your friends are gitty," Trina said, referring this time to Neil. Well, they were there before you turned up and will be there after you've departed in the distraught tears we're enjoying postponing. A few days ago, Tess had passed on a remark her new boyfriend made: "You always know right at the beginning the reason you'll split up."

Trina went off in a strop again, complaining about how "your friends" (read: Kim) don't want to meet her; then she realised she'd forgotten the key to my house, and came back with a black mien which I found more comical than anything else. "Ok, well, let me know if you can't get the futon up."

This evening I came home, not for the first time half-hoping that there would be a valedictory email; and then tactically erased that thought, as it would be advantageous if we didn't split up until after we've been to France next month.

I went to see Kim for a few days while I turned fifty. I'd only been there a couple of hours when I sliced the top of my finger off with a razor as I searched in my bag for something. I was instantly reminded of The Overnight Editor doing the same thing, mid-date, four years ago. Despite trying to hold my finger in my mouth, I left a bloodcrumb trail on her rug and up the stairs.

We went to the market in C---.

Which offers an agreeable melange of tat.

But some good stuff as well.

We got off our heads, played house music at what was perhaps Irritate The Neighbour volume, and danced around her living room.

We went for a long walk, without maps, or plans, over barbed wire fences and through fields of crops. There were some horses which were a bit intimidating.

We scrabbled across a rivulet to escape from the horses, to be taken into a dark wood as dusk fell.

Next day we went to Newcastle. There was a moralising poster near the station about not giving money to beggars on the ground that they might spend it on drugs. The poor are always held to higher standards of behaviour than anyone else. Why shouldn't they have the freedom to spend their tiny incomes however they wish? Immediately afterwards we saw a beggar and I gave him £2, deliberately more generous than I'd normally be.

Alfred J. Lambart RA (1902 - 1970 (?))
Juliet, Daughter of Richard H. Fox of Surrey, 1931

I was transfixed by some beautiful C20th glass in the Laing Museum; photography was beyond me at this point, but I wrote Kitty a postcard, of a painting it owns, of a gorgeous slender girl in an emerald green dress. Back in Kimtown we went to the pub where we've often met, its tiny rooms encouraging collective conversation.

Back at hers, we put some blankets down in the living room and nodded off for a while. She's being mucked about by a man with whom she is smitten and she showed me a text exchange in which he evades, and then turns into an irritatingly lighthearted joke, the overt declarations so untypical of Kim. With the cathinone--an empathogen--stroking my skin and making her even more beautiful than she always is, I felt her near-tears as though they were my own.

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It's now Tuesday dinnertime and I'm on a train to Lytham to see Trina. As anyone who has dabbled with Beecham's Powders will know, Tuesday isn't the greatest day in which to be cheery and interested. I'd rather sit alone in a cheap pub and stare out of the window.

Back home to mine, and as usual on a Sunday night when I've been away for a bit, the toilet bowl is speckled with shit and there's a smell of bleach. One of the first things you learn in a shared house is other people's schedules of micturition and defecation, and their personal rites of its elimination.

Trina came over as usual, on Monday, and perhaps because I felt I'd won the argument about her staying only one night at a time, we ended up fucking within five minutes. Then we went to Preston (still a shithole, as segregated a city as I've ever been in in the UK), because there was a guided talk at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery round the Bruce Nauman exhibition. Someone who probably has the word "accessibility" in her job title asked us if any of us needed the services of a lip-speaker or signer. She said nothing about the inaccessiblity of putting the tour on at 1pm on a weekday afternoon.

After the tour, we were nobbled at the door by somone--possibly a volunteer--who asked us if we'd enjoyed it. He allowed us the briefest of replies, but could hardly control his communicative urges. "That art like the one you've seen, a lot of people don't want to get it. I mean, you see, I don't know about you, but when I was at school we were taught that art, a picture, well, it had to be of something, take an apple for instance, if you seen an apple as a round green thing, well that's OK but it doesn't really do that now that things have changed, in more modern times and so when you see an apple in a gallery or in modern art you don't have to see it as something that looks like an apple but it could be just something that the artist---it's the thing, the thing is an apple and I think the more people understand that an apple, or I mean, not just an apple, ..."

I held my hand up apologetically and looked at Trina. "We're going to have to go.... Mum'll be waiting." "Yes, I'm sorry," I said to the man whose epiphany of non-representational art had rendered him incontinent with enthusiasm, "my mother's out there and we ought to go and pick her up. Thank you very much, it was very interesting."

In Wetherspoons, we found a sunny, glassy table in the corner. A man with very high-waisted trousers--often an indication of lunacy and the ambivalent consequences of the care in the community programme--came over. "Oh... oh. Are you sitting there? No-one's sat there for half an hour. No, not for half an hour." I talked to him with the amiability that one has to signal to that breed of lunatic for whom violent aggression is but a sliver of a wrongly-judged sentence away. Trina stepped in and deftly shooed him away, and we spent an afternoon under the greyed sun; more affectionate than it's been lately.

There was a group of sixtysomething women, locals, next to us. Trina said how much she likes the Preston accent; I do too. It has a softness missing from the Manchester and Liverpool ones in the south, as though everyone is thinking about adopting the rhotic "r". Ours here, more northerly, is sing-song and the most euphonious of them all.

Trina smiled and wagged her head girlishly, to indicate that she was about to ask something she knew would receive my assent. "Yes, stay tonight too," I said, waiving clause 1a) in our Agreement for a Harmonious Future. In bed, she wore this plastic mouthpiece effort that looked like an oversize set of dentures to try to stop herself snoring, and we had a laughing time with her pretending to scare me with it.

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This weekend, I have mainly been stuffing my face. Fiona, my eldest, made some delicious cheese scones, and then today, a splendid Swiss roll. I'm glad I kept my mouth shut and didn't interfere; I thought it'd be technically beyond her and there'd be some teenage humpiness to deflect, but it turned out very well. I made a couple of types of bread, child's play in comparison with Fiona's production. When I went to bed last night I could smell the yeast in my urine.

Tonight I finished a proposal for a festival in Cambridge about text-based art called art:language:location. The piece is a performance and an installation, and it's about debt, using the fact that typography is used as a bullying weapon on debtors: red blocked ink and underlinings, cowing, graphical fists. It'll also be a chance to see me old pal from The London Years (in which Chris also figured), whose drum n'bass producer-cum-drug dealer sartorial image (he's missing his goldie looking chain in this pic) hasn't prevented him becoming a Research Fellow, or something, at the University there.

Here I am doing my approximation of a manly pose in June 2002, in which my elbow is more intrusive a visual element in the composition than was intended at the time. Those pints were poured at about 10.30am. England were playing Sweden in the World Cup and the pubs could open early. It ended 1-1. "Sweden hold drab England", said the BBC at the time. I tried chatting up this Scouse girl, despite not being, in those days, really sure what "chatting up" anyone meant or involved. I think I was partly doing it for my audience.

I settled down in the pub and finished Turgenev's Smoke, a passionate tale of an idealised love and the triumph of respectability and "realism", and then bumped into Wilma and her new bloke. Wilma has been off the booze for almost a year now. "I was hoping she'd become a bit less negative when she gave up drink, but she's still the same," someone said recently.

Then, an hour or so of gilding the lily, and it was off to Manchester, where a DJ I like was playing.

It was the coldest nightclub I have ever been in. It was like dancing in a freezer. The club is downstairs but there's an outside area with the communicating doors permanently wide open. I danced in my jacket and scarf, wondering how the girls in their thin dresses were coping. But the music was excellent and it was a friendly, careless crowd. And I got chatted up!

She was thirtyish, small, and had a mousey face, but it'd have been worth taking her home just to warm up. I wasn't particularly bothered about "full intercourse" but she might have had a spare hot water bottle.

She started dancing closely to me before initiating a conversation which unfortunately soon became a little stilted, about where we live and what the nightlife is like in Lancaster. She asked if I fancied a drink and invited me to sit down with them. I declined the offer, and that was it. But to be approached like that is flattering, and I'm definitely wearing that combo again--short brown suede jacket, pale brown and orange shirt with a pattern of little squares on it, dark brown jeans and plain black leather shoes--to see whether it can repeat its girl magnet trick.

The music wound down at 4.00, and my train back wasn't until 6.30, but by dint of some prior research, I had found somewhere I could go. It was a 24-hour casino, and was classier and more dressy than I was expecting. There was waitress service for everything, wherever you were. It was still fairly busy and people were wandering around the tables and sitting in the bar with a look of unconcern. The regulars and the croupiers all know each other, and there was a camerarderie of commiseration and congratulations.

A casino in central Manchester at 5am this morning

I'd never been to a casino before last night and being so close to a new subculture at perhaps one of its extremes--since casual gamblers wouldn't still be there at dawn--was anthropologically interesting. I sat watching the roulette and saw a man win six hundred pounds, and then lose it all within the hour; it's to see a licensed addiction running wild before your eyes. Another man told me he'd lost three hundred pounds that evening. "I leave my cards at home now. I'm trying to wean myself off it to be honest." I let my first train leave and stayed on for another couple of hours.

I had a coffee in Starbucks on the station, and marvelled at the incredible tedium of some people's jobs.