To Glasgow, mainly for a performance of Stockhausen's Kontakte. I arrived and discovered I'd left my cards at home and had to ask Trina to put £20 into my bank account to tide me over--another unwelcome merging of our affective and financial lives, but our sex has revitalised lately.

I met my train driver pal and his unapproachable, withdrawn Nicaraguan girlfriend in the Old Fruitmarket. I wondered whether she finds my English informality rude, and would prefer a set of longwinded prefatory enquiries about children, parents and diseases.

Things melted a bit afterwards, when we got off the train and they bought a huge pizza for us. In the pitch dark, an ice cream van was doing its rounds. A polite-looking meeting in the local library was being held behind metal grilles.

Next day, I went to an exhibition about concrete, which, I learned, has been used as a building material for at least ten thousand years.

It was more interesting than I'd have thought, although I didn't go so far as to buy the book.

London fashion observation du jour Floppy wide-brimmed hats on women. On the tube last night, I noticed three separate women on the tube wearing them. They're a bit bigger and looser than the borsolino hats Hipster Yaya mentioned the other day. I think they're just ace. And I'm not sure how they achieve this effect, but they're quite sexy too.

The second evening of my weekend with Kitty and Nikki started grimly.

I turned up at the pub to find them sitting outside. Someone wanted to smoke, so the rest of us had to shiver. Rain dripped into my soda water. I could feel myself coming up on the catnip and was pissed off, thinking that it'd be wasted; even catnip can't burnish the wet cold of a Lancashire November, nor can it perfume the acrid drifts of fag smoke.

At last, we moved onto a much better pub and settled in front of the log fire. The drug threw off its reins, and so did the evening. Afterwards, at someone's house, I got talking to a 50-year-old woman who was telling us how went on her own to Ibiza, and was the butt of countless ageist remarks: "What you doing here, Granny?" How Ibiza has changed. Now, it's all booze and coke, full of young people policing the dancefloor.

Kitty took great exception to being described as "a Lancashire lass". I think I know what she meant--it conjures up images of a brawny fishwife stirring vats of pigs' blood to make the black pudding. She seemed to have it in for our host, who adroitly made her accusation that he was "soft on the outside, hard on the inside" into the running joke of the evening.

At one point, late on, I saw Ibiza woman go to dance, check herself, and sit down again. How I wish I had leapt up at the same time. We talked instead, and I was trying to sell her the places I go out dancing. I gave her my email address, hoping we could meet again on a dancefloor, but in somewhere cultured, like Leyland.

I rang Trina to tell her about a potential new lodger (it fell through, unfortunately). She said that she'd just got back from looking round a home in which to put her increasingly demented Mum, but had had a change of heart about dispatching her there, saying she wouldn't be able to cope with the feeling of having abandoned her. She went through the alternative plan, which would be for her brother to do a bit more in terms of looking after her in the family home.

This apparently innocuous plan then lurched into an alarming sentence. "So that'd mean we could have four days a week together!" she said brightly.

I was speechless for a moment. "Yes!" I said, trying to mirror her vivacity. Sensing that I was dissembling, she mentioned how we would "of course" pursue our own interests in this time. What Trina sees as an opportunity to deepen our relationship, I see as deepening our involvement with the banal.

I don't want to spend any time, at all, with anyone, without a plan for mutual enjoyment. There are several options available with Trina, involving dancing, sex, drinking, a film, a concert, and so on, but I don't want to "spend time together", relying on our own resources. The verb is apt in this case, with its overtones of waste and ennui.

No such gloom yesterday. In the marble and wood splendour of the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square, we were offered dozens of wines, from small, independent producers, normally inaccessible to me, as the trade prices--before any kind of retail or restauarant mark-up--ranged from from nine to forty-five pounds. They pour them by holding only the base of the bottle, and you proffer your glass, tilted. Trina jabbed her elbow into someone's tits, which sparked off a chat that had little to do with wine.

I thought I'd feel like an imposter, a fraud, aware of my class position. I was afraid that this sense of inferiority would come out in over-laughing and rocking on my heels, subconciously fawning in front of a proper wine merchant; but in fact no-one seemed to mind that we were dilettantes from a small wine club in Lancashire. If anything, they were interested and grateful that we'd travelled so far.

My favourite was a Petit Verdot, made by a female winemaker whose tiny production amounts to three barrels (i.e. 1500 litres in total) per vintage. It's not available in any shop, anywhere. Unfortunately we couldn't run to the £300 it would have cost to buy a case.

I still can't get past my idea that good Chardonnay smells of fart, though.

London fashion observation du jour Floppy wide-brimmed hats on women. On the tube last night, I noticed three separate women wearing them. They're a bit bigger and looser than the borsolino hats Hipster Yaya mentioned the other day. I think they're just ace. And I'm not sure how they achieve this effect, but they're quite sexy too.

To Huddersfield, to be dazzled with the riot of monochrome couture favoured by patrons of the Contemporary Music Festival.

Finances being what they are nowadays, I can only afford to go on the middle Monday, when everything is free. Someone let us down and we were two hours late. We bustled in all a-fluster for the Morton Feldman concert. Long pauses on clusters on celeste, piano, viola and cello, against which the very sparingly-used flights of melody took one by surprise. It was a beautiful, poetic piece, even with its foxing: behind us, a mobile phone beeped; next to him, a girl unwrapped a sweet; next to me, a woman rummaged for ages in her bag for something.

In a different concert hall, lit in the blue used in public toilets where heroin users are apt to jack up, I waited with much curiosity to hear a piece by my former PhD supervisor.

Trina described it as "The Clangers on speed"; I thought it sounded like a toddler playing with a Stylophone. Short, weedy-sounding notes, often preceeded by ones that might be produced by one's finger falling twixt keys, were laid over a kind of electronic continuo. I liked how the two elements were not (to this naive ear) related to each other at all--the very disjunction was interesting. It was playful, unpredictable, and odd enough to confound any pre-set programmatic correspondences.

The other two pieces on the programme can be dealt with quickly as they were dreary rehearsals of the limited sound palette into which electronic music can easily fall: tuned jet plane sounds, white noise oscillations growing to deafening crescendi, a hundred ping-pong balls falling on a table, scrunched-up cellophane--that kind of thing, sounding like selections from a pattern book for a structure yet unbuilt.

In a chilly church I got bored listening to an undoubtedly exceptional singer run through forty minutes of "sacred music". As you might expect, it's very slow and involves lots of ooh-ing in seconds and thirds; during the many silences she stood with that silly performers' rictus of private pleasure derived from the fire exit sign in the middle distance.

Back in the welcome warmth of the University, Christian Wolff's X for Peace Marches involved feathers being thrown down onto us from a height, found instruments, and ensemble members serving us with tea. One of the performers, a fine pianist and a lecturer at Huddersfield, lost the donger from his mallet halfway through, and watched as it rolled off in front of his section of performers.

The last concert we could see, given the early-to-bed trains, was mainly given over to pieces by Dai Fujikura. It was a passionate, love-lorn way to end the day--gorgeous pieces that went straight into me and during which I only lacked a handkerchief to twist. I see that 5 against 4 was there as well but he says very little about the Fujikura.

Trina enjoyed the day, to my relief. Her favourite was the sacred music, but we both agreed on the Feldman.

In Huddersfield's freezing railway station two teenagers in thin sportswear were playing what seemed a hostile, unfriendly game in which a boy with a black eye harrassed a girl. On the train back, the man sitting opposite opened a plastic bag marked "Police Evidence" and proceeded to open several small cafe-style paper tubes of sugar, before tipping them down his throat. I hoped for his sake that sugar was but his gateway drug.

Back in Lancaster, the invite of the year has landed on the doormat. Next Tuesday afternoon, we are to be guests of a wine importer at the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square, where eight producers and merchants will be showing their wines. I can only assume Trina and I have been invited as potential agents, who will enthuse about the wines to others, giving the merchants the kind of advertising which can't be bought.

Trina leapt enthusiastically on the card, urging me to accept immediately. We did so, received our confirmation, and went to find the cheapest way of getting to London.

"Hang on, hang on," I said. "Next Tuesday--that's still November. We can't go, we'll have to cancel," thinking of our vow to remain sober in November, but Trina was having none of it. "We are not turning down an invite from D--- to the flipping South African High Commission. Well, OK then, you stay here and I'll take someone else."

Of course I'm going. This will be my second breach of a sober November, so I am going to give people their sponsor money back--or invite them to send it anyway rather than deprive Women's Aid of a few quid.

I'm a bit concerned how I might react in such opulent social and physical surroundings, to a suddenly available plenitude of drink after after almost a month of sobriety. The afternoon offers the potential for an unlimited number of mistakes.

Someone I know asked me if I knew of any local supplies of a common but illegal plant. I couldn't help him: I have no desire to return to the dull, boring nights, tense and uncomfortable, surrounded by people happy to sit down for hours on end, reverentially quiet before agonised rock guitar solos and its associated doggerel pop poetry; and their trailing, inconsequential sub-philosophical utterences which passed for conversation, an 80s version of today's Facebook statuses about fate, destiny, caring, and true friends. I want to dance, flirt, talk volubly but dialectically, to move, skate like Huysmans across the cat-ice of my life and those of my friends. In these, weed is of no help.

But he has discovered that the local scrap man who drives slowly down our back alleys looking for discarded washing machines and the like, is a distributor as well as a collector, his old-fashioned weekly shouted announcement from his lorry--"Iron! Any old iron!" having a hidden meaning to those who appreciate such a stupefecant.

Half past four and it's almost dark; I'm wearing a scarf and a Santa hat and my thick cable-knit jumper, as the house settles into its gelid winter state, chilled by silent draughts running unapologetically through all the warps and chinks of windows and doors. Thankfully, Ned and Tess have a similar idea of the insupportable profligacy of turning the heating on as I. There's a coal fire, and plenty of quilts.

Last night though--well, I looked good. Kitty and Melissa are over for the weekend, well-dressed girls the two of them, so I spent an hour putting my ensemble together: beige Aquascutum mac (Help The Aged, Southport, £10), dusky blue double breasted Linea jacket (Tatty Bon, Glasgow, £15), an 80s German brown and white shirt (from a defunct secondhand clothes shop in Lancaster, £5), black cotton trousers by Relay from its own shop, also now closed, in Old Compton St., Soho, £70, from the days when I had money), brown Pierre Cardin slip-on shoes (The Samaritans, Lancaster, £3.99), and the orange and brown scarf that Kim knitted for me.

Kitty and I were off our heads on catnip. "I am bollocksed, but in a nice way," she announced, more than once. In the J--, the lead guitarist, in the last song, started walking into the audience. He took off his guitar, draped it around the shoulders of the man standing in front of me, and shouted into his ear "A minor." The man wandered slowly up to the front of the pub to join the band, playing an unplanned solo, which finished the night with a dash of showmanship.

In the hotel Kitty and Melissa got ready for bed. Catnip makes me feel aesthetically sensitive but not sexually so; when I got back to mine it was very difficult even to get to a weak orgasm, even whilst imagining telling Chris what to do.

Someone posted a reply to a comment I left on her blog after she'd inadvertently created a picturesque neologism through a slip of the finger: "You're welcome to my typo's looby." Coursing on catnip, it sounded the sexiest remark.

Part Two begins in a couple of hours.

trina has aidentay noed over a ot of offee a over the omuter. as a resut, the eyboard's nakered, so wi go a bit quiet ti the new eyboard arrives.