I set off to my friends' house. On the way, a phone call from the Moldovans.

"What time you coming back?" "Er, well, not until tomorrow night." There is something in Ionache's voice. "OK--I will be there in half an hour."

Their immediate boss at the University has absconded and they won't be getting paid for the second week of the work they flew all the way from Chișinău to do, on the understanding there was six months' work. The replacement manager on the building project has brought his own men with him and has no need for the Moldovans.

In their room, they are carefully tapping out a card's numbers into the computer, buying tickets for the 3am coach to London. There's no work round here, especially not, I imagine, with the prejudice they'll face as soon as they open their mouths.

I can't do anything to help them. I can't let them stay for nothing while they seek work. But I am very sorry for them. They were decent, sociable, civilised, and--although I hesitate to use a once-innocent word which is now pressed into ideological service--hardworking; they don't deserve to be treated in such a heartless way. It's all very well talking about "precarity", the ugly English academic neologism for the way that workers at the bottom tier of Europe's labour supply survive, constantly on the edge of penury, at the mercy of our emasculated employment laws; but when you see its consequences in front of your own eyes, with people you quickly came to like, it's upsetting.

It's shameful that a University which never tires of trumpeting its "international links", can wash its hands of any centrally-controlled contracts with proper, humane terms and conditions that would have protected people like Andrei and Ionache. The University has millions for its endless physical expansion, but not enough to look after the people who put up the walls and put the windows in. I keep looking at the clock, imagining them on that bus to London; their dwindling money pouring away at a ruinous rate of exchange in a tiny room somewhere.

I arrive at my friends' house; the light is lambent, from a lamp hushed with a red cloth. Half-empty wine bottles, cushions, pint glasses, a coffee table stamped with a ringed history of hot drinks. L has that puzzled-looking amphetamined face, as though turning away from a bright light. They've been up all night watching porn, and after twenty minutes or so L is splaying her hands and moving them across the carpet, which I take as indicating that they'd rather resume that than continue with what must feel like dull conversation with me--straight, sober, bringing my worries into the sanctum.

I ring Kim and she starts talking about the poor pickings on the dating site. "It's just the illiteracy," she says. "You can't willingly fuck someone who spells please as 'plz', could you? It'd be a form of bestiality."

Day 7 of Sober in November. Do you bugger "feel better", "sleep better", "feel more refreshed" etc. You eat like a horse and develop weird food tastes, like those of a pregnant woman. The one advantage is that you do save money--except if you try to rejoin normal society, as I discovered last night. In The B---, two Ginger Beers (250ml each) came to £5.40. In another pub, soda water was £1.00.

Sod this for a game of marbles. Next time I fancy going out I'm going to drop six quid down the grid and go back in. It's quicker, you don't get cold walking, and it produces the same results.

---

I made up a fire in the front room and sat down with the computer. I became alert as I heard the stairs. The Moldovans made a bold entrance. Ionache was brandishing a bottle of vodka; both were dressed strangely, half zip-up outdoor nylon coats and long but flimsy shorts attracting too much attention to the regions of overlooking. Andrei apologised for interrupting me.

"Would you like to have a glass of fifty-one year-old vodka?" I heard him say, but it turned out he was saying that he wanted us all to have some vodka because it was Ionache's thirty-first birthday.

I explained that at any other time I'd love to, but I'm going sober for November.

It was a great evening, the best of ice-breakers. Ioanache went to the kitchen to find some shot glasses; I haven't got any, never needing them, so came back with an eggcup. We got through most of a bottle of vodka and some tins of Fosters. They taught me the Romanian for "cheers", and we passed the eggcup round repeatedly, the coarse but socially important throat-scrape of neat vodka, accompanied by some herring, feta and cucumber.

"You are a good man," said Andrei, repeatedly, in the friendly pan-Continental locution. "We will meet again--we will take you out. My bill, we pay everything. But you show us the best pubs. Maybe there is football? Next time, we pay everything. This is inside, next time, out."

"I don't know how is in your house, but this is your house, and we must respect. And in the house before, every week, we all go together to clean. All of us, we do everything. I show respect to you. It is your house. We keep our room clean and we all clean." It's alright mate, we're not that rigid about it.

They unwrap a huge supermarket pizza, and lay an entire packet of sliced chorizo over it. "Now is a true pizza." I offer baking trays but they say the cardboard base will be good enough.

"How much you think a week in Moldova, how much you think?" I prevaricate, trying to think of a figure which doesn't sound imperialistic. "I'm not... I don't know, I've never been." "Do not go to Chișinău without asking us first. One hundred pounds, one week--beer, wine, everything. That is all, and we show you Moldovan wine. Moldovan wine..." and he shakes his head, transported, wishing he had a bottle to prove his point.

Next morning, I discover the pizza has leaked everywhere and baked to black onto the most inaccessible rear parts of the oven, and it takes me forty minutes to clean it, using wire wool and anti-greasing agents strong enough to kill small birds.

Middle daughter is round, working on her audition speech. We adjudge the evening cold enough to put a fire in, and I set her to snapping some canes that someone gave me for kindling. The fire spits and glows and it's hard to stop fiddling with it, until trying to scene-shift an escaped piece of coal starts burning the backs of our fingers.

---

In the LRB of 22nd November 2012, Adam Mars-Jones quotes from David Halperin's book How To Be Gay, which he is reviewing.

[T]he social function of romantic love is to be anti-social, to represent a private, spontaneous, anarchic rebellion against the order of society. Love is the one socially conventional emotion that is conventionally defined as being opposed to social conventions. Falling in love is thus the most conformist method of being an individual. Conversely, falling in love is the most original and spontaneous way to conform, perhaps the only way of conforming to social demands that will never make you look like a conformist.

I still believe everything I said to Trina; but to launch into an unnecessary and superfluous exposition of my uninteresting sociological views, as a riposte to her over-reacting (in my opinion) to me forgetting a phone call, was a foolish and unfeeling escalation of our tiff. Back in front of the now-calmer fire, I mentally compose what I want to say before picking up the phone.

I apologise for not ringing her when I said I would. There is no way I can dress it up: Ned found a twenty pound note on the floor outside the corner shop, bought it home joyfully, and we all set off down the pub.

"You know it's not easy for me at the moment. I'm poorly and my Mum's driving me up the wall. I just wanted to talk to you. You always go on about being spontaneous, and then when you ring me in the afternoon to say you'll ring me in the evening, and you don't... It was a bad day for you to forget."

It was thoughtless of me, I tell her, not even thinking to stop for a minute to tell her we were going out on our gifted riches. We develop our rapprochement over several more minutes. I didn't withdraw anything I'd said, but was very grateful of her generosity in accepting my honest apologies.

We're both going sober in November, me, simply for financial reasons, her more for her health, so we'll celebrate our reconciliation tomorrow with tomato juice and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and pretend it's a Bloody Mary.

---

There was a wobbly moment with the Moldovans last night. I heard an irritating sound coming out of their room. It was bore-ing, and had all the subtle depth of character of a sine wave. I bent my head round my door to see what was going on. Yes, it was Celine Dion.

A unfamiliar mobile number; the man on the other end has a barely comprehensible Eastern European accent. He wants to see the room "now."

Twenty minutes later there are two tall, quite handsome men at my door. They introduced themselves and we shook hands. "So who wants the room?" I ask. "Both of us." "Oh I see, come in."

One of them has a Christian name common in Romania, so I venture that they're from that country. "No, Moldova." I ask them if they are from Chișinău. Surprised, one of them says "You were in Moldova?" "No, I just know the capital of Moldova," I say. "Yes, we are from Chișinău." They are joiners, working on one of the endless building projects for which Lancaster University seems to have bottomless pockets whilst being unable to fund either of my old Departments--Music (abolished) and Philosophy (merged)--neither of which can match the contribution to culture and learning of Marketing and Accounting.

"Yes, so, here's the living room," I say. "Is this the room?" they ask. "No, no, it's up here." I walk up to the first floor assuming they'd follow but they stay standing at the foot of the stairs. "You can come up," I say.

I have warned her that someone will be coming round. Her room is boiling hot. They say "is OK." They don't even want to see the bathroom, which is a relief, as the lack of a proper shower doesn't sell the place.

Downstairs, we discuss terms. They're outgoing and chatty and straightforward and my gut instinct is that it'll work and that they'll get on with Ned and Tess.

They break off to talk privately amongst themselves. I was hoping I might understand some of it, given Romanian's closeness to Latin, but apart from some numbers and the word for "deposit" which is almost identical to the English one, it's lost on me. He gives me twenty pounds to take the advert down and not show anyone else round. I ask them if they've anywhere to stay until Saturday, when the room becomes free. At a pinch, they could have slept in the living room. But it's OK, they're in the Travelodge. I go to write him a receipt but he waves it away and shakes my hand instead.

I am exhilerated with relief and ring Trina to tell her all about it. Trina and I have made up, but more on that later.

Everything is happening quite fast. Downward mainly. So it's notes, or paragraph headings.

Thirtysomething woman in a tight white scooped-necked top on the zebra crossing at Dalton Square. Lights on green, so we can't cross. The lovely curve of her bra's hem lining her tits under her top. Got almost across to the other side when a Gothy girl I know, crossing from the other side, said hello. I hadn't noticed her at all, despite her standing a foot away from bra girl. "Oh, hello!" I said, caught out.

Very pleased with my new suede jacket. Bit pricey, ten quid from Oxfam, but it's getting compliments. I've managed to de-brand it using a razor blade. It's for women and is narrowed in at the waist.

Me and Ned and Tess went out last night and ended up dancing in the pub to local Hammond organ and drums Mod combo Get Carter. Tess in that lovely dotty dress again. Back at home we got pissed. Ned said, about the Soulful Dance night in St Annes in December, "I can't work out whether you want us to be there or not."

I sellotaped the heating switch on the boiler down to stop Hong Kong Phooey putting the heating on all fucking night.

Dreading having to tell Seriouscrush that I can't pay the rent this month.

A reconcilation with my two gay friends, over needing some help with A Midsummers Night's Dream which my middle daughter is auditioning for. Neil was rude to Trina a few months ago in a way which, even by my very liberal drinker's standards, was beyond forgiveness. He gave me his Arden Shakespeare edition of it and we had a bridge-mending chat over coffee. "We haven't seen you for months." You still don't understand why, do you?

Trina very pissed off that I didn't ring her last night as I said I would. Sending her this didn't help matters.

You see social form as a very important thing and it makes me feel obligated to conform to an artificial remembering "Oh shit I forgot I must ring Trina," with all the spontaneity drained out of it. People forget to do things. I've done the same, identically, with Kitty and Kim and they ring me up and bollock me about it and it's over, with a firm finger-wagging.

[...] It's at times like this I feel life with you would be a bit more constrained and polite. I do sometimes think that you might be better off finding someone a bit more conventional. My lack of that was what attracted you to me but it's coming home to roost now. I'm not sure I'm really made for what people call relationships. I think the whole love thing is made up and a social construct and a form of behaviour modified by chemical responses. I have never, not once, in my life, felt this rapturous loss of self in wanting to be with another, that people describe so often. It just feels alien to me, like a foreign language.

She replied saying she sees my view of love and relationships "horrifying." It's gone this time, I think. I'm not sad; this has been inevitable. Last time she was here, Kim and I sat on my bed, coursing with clarity. She said "I can have close emotional relationships with someone,"--waving her arm towards me--"or close physical ones, but not with the same person." I feel like that too.