Reading a blog does not oblige anyone to comment on it; comments so made could sound forced. Some of the best things I read I am unable to comment on, because they make me think so much that I can only offer something banal which has already been done in the scroll upwards.

I've a pretty good idea of the identity of the great majority of my small group of regulars; and in the same way that acquaintances in a small city like mine can know each other by sight for decades without ever saying a word, I enjoy and appreciate our relationship of unspoken mutual acknowledgement.

However, I have two overkeen Antipodean readers I can't place. I would be grateful therefore, if these people could leave a comment or contact me offline. There is a point where silence is a breach of the social contract I consider you agree to by returning to my site so often.

First, there is a reader--although now, I suspect, a bot--using the University of Sydney's ISP. The other is a customer of TPG Internet in New South Wales. I realise every reload counts as a separate visit, but after over twelve hundred visits, I think it's time you left your card. I share my intimate life with you; this is a modest request for something less in return.

If you send me a little note soon, I will raise a glass in a vaguely southeasterly direction and we'll get on fine. Otherwise, I'll get your IP address range in its CIDR and banish it to the naughty step of my .htaccess file. I've had enough with Hong Kong Phoeey blanking me in my own house; I don't need it in my blog readers. I look forward to hearing from you both.

"Dad! I need your help!" texts my most histrionic daughter.

"I've got to learn an audition speech. Can you help me with it?" The local rep is considering her for the part of the fairy Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I go round to Kirsty and ooh-ooo like a Clanger as I walk through the door. Histrionic Daughter is giggling at the internet with her sister. But The Great British Bake-off is on and Shakespeare offers no competition to Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, for any of us. I ask if Kirsty wants "anything from the shop"--the drinker's coded way of diffusing his habit.

Melanie--my youngest, who once asked me how one becomes a tramp--starts on her homework about Of Mice and Men. She'll have trouble getting a job; she's inherited my selfishness and hedonism.

As the irritating Ruby thankfully fails to win the bake-off, Melanie storms in. From a soaked coat, she fetches out a rain-sodden "application" form for what is described as her "work experience" they all have to do early next year. How can one "apply" for something one doesn't want to do?

I suppress my laughter. "It's alright, we can dry it out, don't worry. Hang it over the fire." As we try to do so, hooking one corner under a little wooden box and the other under some letters, a corner of it falls off, weakened with wetness; I can't help laughing. "But that's my application form for a fucking job in Waterstone's," she says, with a loveable, far-sighted knowledge of the strait-jacket world of work, like a little Debord. I wrap my arms around her from behind as she kneels in front of the gas fire looking at the dismembered form. "Oh Melanie, that's such a metaphor." Why does she have to do "work experience"? Why can't she just spend the fortnight reading Steinbeck?

---

I was in the kitchen practicing writing the time in binary. I thought it would be useful if ever I bought a binary watch. It was 1011 / 110010 when the girl from Hanoi walked in. I was taken aback as it's the first time she's ever sought a conversation with me. She announced that she will be moving out on 1st November to live with a couple of other Vietnamese students. She says her schedule is out of sync with the rest of us and that she disturbs Ned in the room below.

Ned comes down a few minutes later to see how the bread is rising. He looks guilty and is apologetic, wrongly thinking it's his fault that I am now plunged into penury again, unable to meet my obligations. "She thinks you don't like her," I say. "Yes I know, I heard." He says that he did have to take her to task over two things. First he requested she refrain from taking forty-five minutes over a shower, drying her hair, and stomping about in the bathroom above his room at 6.30am on a Sunday morning; and he asked her to clean up after herself as she was about to leave raw chicken guts on the chopping board overnight.

It hasn't worked with her from the very start. Every time I see her, it's me that initiates conversation, which is always rebuffed with a quizzical and slightly agressive look. Cultural differences, timidity, and her self-isolation have all played a part in that. But part of it is sheer fucking rudeness.

She must be from a wealthy family to be able to afford the £19,000 p.a. that her course costs. She could afford her own flat and be an arsehole all by herself.

Disclaimer: I am incapable of criticising poetry in any serious way, as I have the critical acuity of an ox when it comes to that art. In fairness to the authors I didn't like, therefore, I have redacted their names.

Saturday saw the annual highlight of my literary calendar--Poetry Day at Litfest. An entire afternoon with six poets paired up in duos. W N Herbert (introduced with a quotation from George Szirtes of this parish), was every bit as enthralling as I had hoped, reading in Scots and English, with his reckless, demotic, intelligent, chicaning style. I just want to lift the needle and put it back at the start, every time.

Andy Jackson, a fellow naturalised Dundonian, introduced a poem from a collection he's edited based on television programmes by saying "Today is a good day to do a poem about The Clangers," relaying the joyous news that The Clangers is going back into production for the BBC. He read his poem written in Clang first, before the English translation, in which he avoided the perils of cuteness and nostalgia.

By the way, if this means nothing to you, or you simply want to bask in cuteness and nostalgia, click on the picture to hear Clang as she is spoken by native speakers.

Back in Lancaster, the other highlight of the afternoon was Hannah Lowe, who helped matters greatly by being attractive, pregnant, and wearing a gorgeous purple woolen dress. She read some entertaining, surprising poems about her professional card-playing half-Jamaican, half-Chinese father; her reading thankfully erased [redacted]'s tedious mother-daughter ramblings about fireplaces and veiny hands.

[Redacted] set the last session off with what according to my dispassionate notes was "quasi-religious old-fashioned claptrap," guffawing at his own weak jokes, saying that Angela Carter was a "very very dear, close friend", and telling us how he "adores" Browning--"a bit of an unconventional choice, I know!" Rad. Dope choice, man. David Morley read rather portentuously, trying too hard with the theatrics, breaking off mid-poem to ask someone for a pen, which he then waved about as a prop. I loitered around afterwards for a few minutes but I couldn't afford any books, was too shy to talk to W N Herbert, and the bar in The Storey is a jarring racket of muzak and optically-brightened plastic Argos tat.

On the walk home I landed a few yards behind a local author who has written one of these pseudoscience self-help books for navel-gazing people who haven't got any real problems a locally well-received popular psychology text. A van drew out of a side road; and although I didn't see what happened, the driver wound down his window and told him to fuck off, adding his opinion that Author Man may be given to onanism. Author Man responded weedily. Middle class voices always sound silly when trying to throw back working class insults.

---

The first edition of our local ale drinkers' magazine has been printed and distributed. I sat in the pub reading my editorial in a glow of best bitter and narcissism. Ned and Tess walked in. Tess had on a most alluring tight thigh-length dress, white with black dots all over it. Would you mind going out and walking in again? I only just saw a second or so of your dress tautening across your thighs as you took each step. She said she's not been to the hairdresser for years; she's got beautiful hair.

But away to the University, as The Sixth Former had invited me to go to see UK Gold, about the way that London has become the principal centre for channelling trillions of pounds worth of wealth into its untaxed overseas territories, and how the City of London has this peculiar, undemocratic, oligarchical system, with unique access and influence on the institutions of government. The Chaplaincy Centre has one of these ugly modern wooden sculptures above the altar, as though someone had grabbed a load of driftwood and flung it onto the wall.

I went for a drink afterwards in Grad Bar with a stranger I met at the film. We passed a poster inviting "self-defining women" to audition for The Vagina Monologues. He had mead, which went to his head rather. I said that there will be a room available here in January. Later, I regretted being so forward.

It's eight o'clock on Sunday night and I'm in Wetherspoons with a slumping, slumbering friend who's harmlessly asleep next to me with half a pint of Terrapin undrunk in front of him. He's got to be up at 4am. I've woken him up a couple of times and gently suggested a taxi but he just says he's alright every time and tries to be interested and then falls asleep again. A couple having their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary (in Wetherspoons!--he knows how to treat a lass) asked to share our table. "Of course," I say, "although I can't guarantee the quality of the conversation." And we three have been nattering while Rob nods off.

Been to Litfest and been looking after the girls but feel a bit anti-social typing this now in a pub so will resume later at home.

---

Later, at home.

Rob was asleep next to me. We need to get him a taxi but my phone's at my house. I went over to a group of men who are at some distance of acquaintance, but it is an acquaintance--they are not strangers. I explain my predicament and wonder if anyone could ring the local taxi number so that I could get Rob home.

"Well, I'm sure the bar staff would do it." My mouth dropped open. But why not you? The Hidden Injuries of Class. Or, How the rich preserve social boundaries. I've ordered taxis from my phone for complete strangers. You've got it on your spare minutes, so it can't be a financial consideration, it must be a social one. My teeth stuck together with anger, but more with pity and bewilderment that this is what matters to them, down to the fine detail of a fucking phone call.

I went to the bar. I had to wait some time to ask the barman. I looked back at them, and they were spectacting upon my efforts to get Rob home.

I accidentally gave the taxi driver £2.20 instead of £3. I corrected the coinage. "Sorry--it's him who's supposed to be pissed, not me." As we got out he went to take my hand and I thought was going a bit far so put my arm round his waist instead. "I can't believe you're taking care of me," he said. "Yeah, don't generalise it," I thought.

I pushed him into his house and walked home and got three pints for a fiver from the corner shop. Outside, the Lancaster Guardian's double-sided A-board.

I get home and I am dancing with restrained piss. On the kitchen shelves, Ned and Tess have planted the mint in a glass. I go into the living room to draw the curtains and Ned has left Ruskin's Complete Writings on the sofa.

Note here the traditional English kitchen:
two jars of Marmite and a teapot with a funnel on its head

I like having them here much more than Hong Kong Phoeey, with her timidity, her lack of contributing anything to the life of the house, the way she sees the house as a social hierarchy, with me at the top, Ned and Tess in the middle, and her at the bottom. I know maybe I've just landed with a dud, but next time, I'll be reluctant to accept an East Asian. They're too polite and distant. Just say what you fucking think or want, girl. She probably finds us boorish.

I fire up the email machine, and Trina says she misses me. I do her, whilst glad she's not here. I am reading Our Man in Havana.

At the bottom of page 120 Greene says "Similar movements of the body had once meant more to them than anything else the world had to offer. The act of love and the act of lust are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment."

If he wasn't such a great writer you'd think he'd made a mistake in the ambiguous pronoun. But let's not over-think. There's a cracking house mix from one of the DJs at the Langdales, and at my elbow is beer I'd criticise others for enjoying.

The Sixth Former invited me to a bluegrass gig at our Music Festival. When I turned up she wasn't there.

I've got a secret
I might tell it to you one day
You take my breath away

The atmosphere in the pub was becoming reverential, as the twentysomething girl buffed her doggerel with a "sensitive" guitar arrangement and my inner naughty boy wanted to let off a noisy trump during one of the quiet bits.

I'm not entirely sure what bluegrass is, but "this can't be bluegrass," I thought, and texted her for assistance. "You're in the wrong pub!" she replied, so I dashed over to the right one, and wriggled down into its crowded old wine cellars, dating from 1688, to find the Sixth Former and a singer from Houston--the little village in Texas, not the brewing city near Paisley.

The lyrics, especially a song he wrote about his Dad, were poetic and ambivalent; the music was more complex than I'd expected it to be, some metallic harmonies and unresolved cadences, rather than a hillbilly twang round I-IV-V. Afterwards I did my Drunken Overawed Teenager performance, burbling away to him appreciatively but inarticulately.

We are also in the midst of our Literature Festival, Lancaster's week-long conference for people who can't listen to poetry and prose without snorting ejaculations of "fff", "t'hhh" and "k'hhh", shoehorning writing into one-dimensional comedy. The organiser's request that all mobile phones be turned off, and not just to silent, was ignored by the American academic sitting next to me. She was updating her Twitter account, its blue and white dazzle blaring into the darkened room.

I hope she's not there again on Saturday, because I want every phoneme of Herbert's poetry in my mind and all over my skin. If she is, I'll be compelled to suggest that if paying attention to an hour or so of poetry is beyond her--something I naïvely think a University lecturer capable of doing--she might prefer to go screaming and gurning for Facebook with the bands of undergraduates outside, doing their moneyed performances of loutishness. She could even take some selfies and post them on Twitter!

---

The new lodger arrived from Hanoi on Monday. I was nervous before her arrival, worrying about the state of the house, the dodginess of the way in which we'd negotiated the tenancy by proxy from Vietnam, and Chef's unencouraging comments about cash deposits, which come from a landlord who has worked far harder seams than I've faced.

She arrived with one of those enormous suitcases used for emigration. My weedy arm was trembling as I lugged it up to her room. I shifted the rug, a little better to hide the iron-shaped scorch mark on the carpet. She didn't seem to want to talk much and so I couldn't give her her induction, about the wonky fridge door, the leaky cold water inlet to the washing machine, how to turn the heating on, and most of all, the fusspot bathroom taps. Ned asked me if I wanted to go down the pub to see England v Poland in our World Cup qualifier, so I knocked on her door, left her a note with my mobile number on, and escaped to the Golden Lion.

She unnerves me with her politeness and the way she tries to make herself small in the house. I taught her the washing machine this morning and she seems to be coping with the bathroom, in a way which films the floor with water. Over breakfast the other day, Ned offered to put a shower curtain round the bath and for a moment I looked down with shame. All this fucking education; can't even put up a shower rail.