"Hi," begins the spam text, instantly annoying me. "If you're still looking for a tenant, try listing on http://spamflats.co.uk/ you might fill your room quicker. I hope it helps, have a good day, Chloe :)"

"Chloe" has farmed my mobile number from the site on which I advertise the spare rooms here at Acacia Avenue. I ignore it. But Chloe is not so easily dissuaded, and pops up again a week later.

"Hi, did you have any luck with http://spamflats.co.uk/ Chloe :)"

It's bad timing for Chloe, as I am both pissed, and pissed off. I sent two texts, in succession.

"No. Ignored your text as I assumed you'd harvested it from [the other site] and therefore treated it as spam. I don't know anyone called Chloe, unless you're the Chloe I had crap sex with when we both used to work at the flower shop. If it's you, let's have a drink! x!

Sorry, I don't mean to be crude and I apologise for harsh tone there. We weren't meant for each other but I still like you. Are you free any day next day? Maybe Sun Hotel? Or anywhere you fancy? x

---

I met Trev and his then wife in my first year. We were all doing Philosphy (and me, a Joint Major with Music). I took a liking to his wife. She and I didn't become lovers through thrilled discoveries of Nietzsche and subcultural music, but by chatting about day-to-day things in the college cafeteria, during which days the longing to touch her became intense, and I would calculate how to see her on her own. I used to go round to their house and the three of us talked into the night, drinking her powerful homemade cider.

I am quite good at breaking up marriages; or rather, acting as the catalyst to widen the cracks in a marriage into irreparable chasms. I have always been attracted to--in every way--women older than myself (Trina has ten years on me), and I acted as the crowbar in Kerry and Trev's marriage. Trev and I swapped rooms; I went to live with his wife and he moved into my room a couple of streets away.

Kerry and I went to rent a tiny one-bed house in a village a couple of miles from Lancaster. One day I came back from The Ontological Argument or something, and walked into the house to see her bent over the washing machine, feeding clothes into the washing machine. I stopped, looked at her skirt taut across her arse, and was taken, for the thousandth time, with desire for her. I walked up to her; she said hello, and went to stand up and turn round, but I told her not to do so.

I unzipped her skirt and dragged her knickers down and she stepped out of them. She took hold of the washing machine and we fucked, closed eyes avoiding looking into the front-loader as I pulled her arse hard onto my cock. It was one of the loveliest fucks of my life, the kind of fuck that only can happen with the very rare women who can arouse you from nothing at all; I don't need romance. She stood up and clicked the program button round to set the washer going.

She eventually went off with a yoghurt-knitting man in a baggy rainbow-coloured jumper who works in the local mung bean co-operative. We all still knock about in the same city, and whenever I see her I still find her attractive and fuckable. She knows I do.

Trev is one of the most intelligent men I've ever met. He's happily settled down with someone from Yorkshire's professional literary circles--although we will politely pretend to ignore the large inheritance she had in order to fund this, as money is a taboo subject in the conversation of the middle classes. As soon as people start earning more than about £15,000, they become secretive about it.

In their house, I want to curl up like a cat, under its yards of poetry and literature, their cosy contentedness; and his forgiveness, when, in a long life of hurting others, I struck with Trev, a unique nadir of selfishness.

He's just gone home after a cracking weekend. I like someone who can start insistently tapping the table telling me to read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, then get pissed down the pub listening to some cracking Hammond organ-led Mod music from Get Carter--"a band in the Booker T mould, but their sound is more powerful"--and be entertaining and charming with some of my Lancaster friends, whom he'd never met before.

I'm off to see some bluegrass music now (one suppresses the question "why?") with The Sixth Former. She's not a sixth former any more--I met her when I taught at The Posh Girls' School, and we've stayed in touch. I know how that sounds, but it was never like that.

To Southport.

Trina has a couple of days' work there so has booked us into our usual hotel. I am walking tall and feel at ease, the luxury of being able to pay for things myself, having received the rent arrears, and the deposit from the new girl who will arrive next week. Trina snores, an ugly throated roar. Next day, I am at pains to be pleasant to her, but I am sleep-deprived and irritable with everything she says.

In the sushi restuarant, tables are a little too close, and we are herded into Southport's strange social mix of the perfumed retired inching forward on three legs, and moneyed youngish people in conventionally flashy clothes. The food is delicious and reviving. We have eel, crab, tuna, octopus and bass, seaweed and rice; the wasabi makes hot canals of our noses. The all-purpose supermarket wine suffocates the food, and I start saying that "if it were my place, I'd offer an oude gueuze instead, or a grassy Madiran." Trina joins in with my usual self-aggrandizing about "how you and me could make this place a lot better," which, if put into practice, would send us both bankrupt.

A large TV screen showing an idiotic programme about antiques barges fusspot tat and its calculating owners into the hotel's foyer and bar. I get talking to two women who have moved to Spain. I am surprised we don't get on to how global warming is a matter of belief, nor use the word "swamped". Trina arrives back from work and hurries me into the car; she wants to show me a peculiar little museum before it closes.

A man who looks like a bus spotter takes our £2 and turns on the audio tour. Three tiny rooms on the first floor of what was someone's house, are crowded with lawnmowers and paraphernalia. It's interesting, with social and engineering history combined, larded with some fanciful misinformation when he strays from his subject (the origin of the term "slips" to describe the close offside fielding positions in cricket, can't have anything to do with lawns or their mowing, cricket pre-dating both).

I buy a postcard. "I bet I know who that's going to," says Trina, prickling. "Yes--Kim," I say, trying to close the subject. "Are you interested in a pictorial history of lawnmowers?" asks the curator. "I think that would be stretching my interest too far," I say. "It's more the rather racy woman in the yellow dress that caught my eye."

---

Two young female Vietnamese knock at my door. Conversation is not easy. They are envoys for a postgraduate who is interested in the room. I show them into the kitchen. The place is suffused with sufficient a wash of sunlight to soft-focus the patches of mucky wallpaper and flaking paint.

Upstairs, they seem to think the room is "big". At the end of the tour, they say "Can we discuss now?" I gesture to them to sit down. To my complete surprise, she fetches the deposit from her purse in Lesser-spotted £50 Notes, and asks for an electronic version of both the contract and the receipt. I'm nervous that I have agreed to rent a room to someone I haven't met, although I have checked with my spy in the Department of Flipcharts and she is registered there.

They leave, all head-knodding. Ned comes into the room. "You know you're never going to get any trouble from people like that, don't you? It'll be us that'll have to be quiet at night."

It's enjoyable having Ned and Tess here. Having sociable, other-directed people in the house makes me realise how odd the absconder was, with his clumping, door-banging, piss-torrenting visits to the loo between three and five in the morning; his excessive politeness a gloss for dishonesty; his friends in black T-shirts paralysed with embarrassment if I walked in on them as they discussed computer wargames and search engine optimisation.

Trina writes: "You have been so lovely, loving and wonderful to me recently, I know you want me to see how committed you are to us and our fabulous relationship."

I reply "Fucking hell, that's upping the ante a bit! :)" and went to bed. And then next morning there was a bit of kerfuffle by email, in the modern way, about her getting "strange vibes" from me. To which I replied "Strange vibes? Have you been playing your Roy Ayres records at the wrong speed again?"

Irritatingly flippant, I suppose she might have thought; I am a lover in an unequal relationship of affection, as we are, as I always am. I can never reciprocrate what women solicit. Except in sex, I suppose, my selfishness a licence for theirs.

Your cultural memories affect what you say, and when I made the latter remark I was thinking of W N Herbert's poem "Sofia City Blues." I know this is to descend into the solipsitic fandom of an anticpated pop concert, but this is what makes me tense and relaxed and sexual and listen to this!

Eh am like thi toon whaur Eh wuz born
meh hert is always somewhere whaur it disnae belong;
the demons of thi ages rip ma heid tae rags
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you confuse great pop music
with being in love
well, don't apologise

Eh'm thi less travelled, unravelled man
just a-waiting for a slogan in thi New Bedlam
Eh'm the man ootwith thi language, wi thi slanguage fuhl o baggage
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you peel your mind and find
city within city within city?
don't make a career out of it

They tell me stoap translatin and enjoy thi kitsch
beginning wi thi wife o Doktor Lachnavitch
but anither ladybird just appeared oan ma pad
she sez Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

the bed is sandy
the bed is Sunday
the bed is bad lasagne

tissue remains

Even just typing it makes me breathe heavily and wetness comes to my eyes. He will be reading in Lancaster soon, at our Literature Festival. Poetry is an oral art first of all, and like music, a shared social experience. How can people have an experience of music or poetry with an iPod? Surely all that is left is the commentary on your experience rather than the experience itself. Or is this just a mistaken argument for a non-existent authenticity? I don't know, let's have a drink.

---

In other news, I have the money back from the errant lodger, or rather, his Dad. I had a couple of phone conversations with the long-suffering parent, the last of which was this afternoon as he was standing outside the bank, about to transfer the money into my account. Harold told me the last time this happened, he had to bail him with a four figure sum, and that this is the last time he will be doing it, and both apologised to me and said it was right that I had threatened him with court action.

I'm glad he paid up because the action wouldn't have lasted five minutes in a court. He did owe me the money, but I have no proof of it, apart perhaps from showing the court my blog, and then the whole private-public dichotomy upon which my life is balanced, would collapse.

On Sunday, about seventy of us from Lancaster set off to join the other discontents in Manchester at the march and protest at the Conservative Party Conference. The police, not known for the accuracy of their assessments of the magnitude of left-wing protests, said that there were fifty thousand people there.

People were there from all over the country: our coach got stuck between one from Northallerton and another from Glasgow. There was a man in a dress, waving a placard which said "Frocking Not Fracking"; a cardboard box with windows, which was a prop made by Gorton Against the Bedroom Tax; a group of black-clad hunt saboteurs calling for a cull of David Cameron.

We turned a corner and found ourselves on the crest of a small hill, and looked down to see the street full of people and banners as far as the eye could see, in front and behind. It made me feel un-alone, that millions of others also want a modern, civilised, compassionate society. In the words of one placard, "The welfare of all is the highest good." If the day had a dominant theme, it would have been the resistance to the Americanised privatisation of the NHS--which is already established in the areas where private firms can hide themselves most effectively.

The march took well over two hours to file into Whitworth Park. The first speaker I heard was a psychiatrist, undermining the ragged-trousered stereotype of the left with his clothes and accent. But I judged it was time to go out on the socialist lash.

In the Lass O'Gowrie, the pub looked like an outpost of the demo, with placards and posters stacked everywhere. I had to repeat, questioningly, the unpleasant surprise of the price of my pint. I met a woman from London whose union had chartered a train for them. "It's brilliant," I said. "We've taken over Manchester and I want to enjoy this." "Oh yes," she said, "a couple of pints afterwards is essential." She described another beer there as "fucking excellent", but the toilets stank and the beer cost £3.65 a pint.

In a crowded cheap pub I asked if I could squeeze onto a table with a late-middleaged couple. "I've been on that rally against the Tories." "Oh, our favourite people," they said. I straightened myself up. "Right, why do you..." "No, no, we're joking." "Oh, it's changed a lot Manchester now," she signalled, and I knew what was coming next.

How has resentment at financial inequality and the unfair allocation of resources become more frequently expressed in racial rather than economic terms in popular talk? I feel ambivalent in such debates: I resent the separatism of what I experience in day-to-day life, of the Muslim families who share my street; but the continued crafting of the UK--by all major parties--into a privatised, corporate disciplined misery for anyone but the rich, is of far greater concern.

On the train back an overweight punky couple were coming back from an afternoon's slutting down Canal St. They were amiably and loudly drunk, past the point of giving a shit about what anyone thought of them. One of them started lighting up a fag. A tall young man in narrow red jeans, big round glasses and with a quiff, was chewing gum ostentatiously and checking who was looking at him. He was becoming jealous that the gay duo were the cynosure of the carriage. When the latter got off at Bolton, Rich Kid came and sat in one of their seats in front of me. "Huh!" he said, turning round to me, hedging his bets as to which side the carriage was on in regard to them.

At Preston, our connecting train was delayed by an hour, so I wandered across to the Vic and Station, where beer was a more Lancastrian £2.40. An American man was hosting a round of the quiz; couples were lobbing a tennis ball to one another from cardboard cups. A man who organised a theatre festival I performed in a couple of time was in there. He's an obvious Tory, so we tactily agreed to ignore the subject of the demo, especially seeing as he bought me a drink.

Back at home the new lodgers were still up. I looked at Tess, and wondered why I don't fancy her, with her curly voluminous hair, shapely tits pushing against a red cotton top. To my relief, they'd also been out drinking. I was chatting, with no ulterior motive at all, about the former occupant of their room owing me £360, and they offered to pay next month's rent early.

---

Oh dear. My favourite contemporary poet, who turns me a bit silly, is appearing at our Literature Festival. I'm not linking to him from here: he's clueless about the internet but I don't want to hover around him any closer than I already do. Instead, here is part of my section about my favourite books, films and music on my dating site profile.

A police car draws up outside. I riffle through my mental Rolodex of illegality, and I can't find anything outstanding. The policeman, to my relief, goes to the house opposite and I nosey out with Schadenfreude. There's no-one in. The policeman makes some enquiries of the people on the street, who know him well. "No, I don't know--I'm just here to park my car." They start talking in Gujerati and the policeman drifts ineffectually back to his car.

---

I draft a letter to the former lodger, and send it to Trina asking her to have a look at it for tone and content.

[...] Overlooking a few odd pence, the amount due, under the terms of the agreement, witnessed and bearing your signature, is £360.

Failure to pay this amount by 1700 on Friday 6th October will result in an action being commenced against you in the Small Claims Court. This will incur a Court Fee of £35, which will be added to the amount owed. Following the service of the order, a court hearing will be held. Should you not appear in court or not respond, enforcement proceedings will be commenced, which will involve a bailiff attending at your property.

I look forward to receiving your payment shortly.

Trina said to put the exact amount he owes in. I'm also going to ring his Dad and tell him what I propose to do. They live in a little village in the rural southwest of England. There's £360 quid somewhere down that sofa.

---

I'm supposed to be off in five minutes to Seriouscrush' s birthday party. She sent me this invite for it, a copy of a screenprint of a blackbird, which looks like something Aubrey Beardsley would have done had he been a birdwatcher.

"Party," what a flexible word. "Oh really, zoology and journalism at Exeter?" "So where do you source the wood for the coffins?" "Yeah that's a tricky one, I've thought about that all the time. Have you read that book---sorry, can't remember the author, it's called 'Models of Individualism and Communitarianism'." Wishing I could just be down the pub. Wishing I didn't have the feeling of tugging my forelock at my rentier patrons. Worrying about how I'll behave. I haven't bought her a card, or wine or anything.

I had an Iranian taxi driver round this afternoon to look at the spare room. He's finished an MA and is how applying to do a PhD in Politics. I was caught mid-shave when he knocked on the door and Ned had to show him in and occupy him for a minute. He's seeing a few rooms today and he'll let me know. Please fucking move in. I'm desperate for money and you seem OK.