Some days ago I was engrossed in the activity of establishing the approximate mathematical frequency of a February with five Sundays in the month. This February, of course, is one such instance. It requires a leap year to make it possible (a full twenty-nine days). Since the first day of the month goes forward by five days every four years (notwithstanding the absence of a leap year every century, or whatever) the frequency must be something around once every 28 years. In fact, I lost myself somewhere in the middle, but I imagine that must be roughly correct. Therefore, I will not expect to be choosing music for a five-week February again for some years.

I'm going to Oxford to get away for a few days. This has not got off to the best start, it must be admitted: instead of being sat on a train to Oxford, I'm sat on a busy, but not too busy, train to Birmingham New Street. I then have to get a bus from Birmingham to Banbury, and then get a Thames Travel train to Oxford. I was looking forward to being able to sit on the direct train for three hours and look out at the scenery, perhaps get lost in some half-sleep in a nearly-empty carriage. I don't suppose I should expect things to be how I imagine them, though. We're on the move, and that's the main thing. I feel like I'm genuinely escaping what has begun to feel like a repetitive and hectic schedule in Manchester.

It is a beautiful day. The sun is warm and, through the haze of blue smoke coming from the front of our train, it's bringing out the colours of the buildings which are disappearing into the distance. Ironically, we've just passed quite close to my house. Scrawled on the blackened walls next to the line are large white letters, presumably from years ago: TORY CORRUPTION. VOTE SLP. There's no need to string observations together, is there? It is enough, I think, just to observe. The B & Q Warehouse car park is full. We are quite high now, and we've just gone over the ring road. Stockport.

I am always struck by the beauty of nature when I am on the train. Travelling across the country tends to give you a cross-section of all kinds of scenery, weather, and colour. I can imagine this train being a little raft on a rushing river as we wind through this valley. There is always a sense of a world much greater than my humanity.

I bought a recording of Rutter's Requiem on Naxos some months ago. At first I did not find it disagreeable, but I was not overly impressed by it. Perhaps this is because it is really quite different from what I have come to assume Rutter's music is. Recently I have put it into my hi-fi again and have been really struck by the range of emotions which it touches. It is the kind of piece which really needs to be learnt and dwelt on before it can be judged, I think. I came to believe that all there is in Rutter's music would be apparent at first sight, but his Requiem bucks this trend. The recording itself also feels really fresh and full of life, perhaps because young soloists are used throughout. The composition is naturally full of clarity, but this is only communicated well because of the pure emotion which flows through the soprano solo in the Pie Jesu and the oboe solo in The Lord's my Shepherd. For me it seems to sum up all that is positive and universal in our diverse religious, spiritual, and philosophical world. It is full of affirmation and quiet faith, without a trace of bigotry in ruling one thing in or out. It feels hopeful in the face of the genuine personal tragedy behind the composer's tale.

Today me and Stuart have been going out for a year. We can remember because it was February 27th when Rowan Williams was enthroned as the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

About fifty-five for the evening service was not bad. Re-learning pedal technique has temporarily destroyed any modicum of accuracy that there ever was in my hymn-playing, unfortunately. At least now it's possible to play Jesu, lover of my soul without contorting into unhealthy positions to manage the arpeggiated pedal part.

It can all feel so slow from time to time. Winter seems to take forever to pass, though I will miss it when it is gone. The same natural world which is making my fingers sting in the snow today also gave me the amazing quiet view of the park behind St James' Church in Didsbury last December. To think that, five miles south of the city centre, there is a pocket of nearly-rural suburbia is really quite amazing. The city is so inescapable, but every Wednesday I get to see how many different world there are within it. At 3.30pm I am sitting in a rich, modern, inclusive church like Emmanuel, which talks the talk of a thoroughly new and revived religion, with real effects - huge congregations, national fame, and an amazing sense of community. But it occurs in a very definite context. Didsbury is rich, white, and has a Marks and Spencer branch. It is modern, but it is nineteenth century England moved sideways into twenty-first century Britain. It is the kind of place which accommodates the man I saw walking past the Didsbury fishmonger talking to himself about 'the salmon, eh?'. I hypothesised that he might have been talking to a deceased wife whom he believed to be standing next to him.

By 4.30pm I am on the bus back up Wilmslow Road; no more than a mile passes and I am in Withington. The first things you see when you join the main road is a vandalised and boarded-up theatre which, if it were a mile further south, would have represented so much value and opportunity that it would never be sat in that state. It seems that there is always someone sat on the steps in front of it, looking dirty, homeless, or in another similiar state that would probably mean that the people from Didsbury would probably be best to avoid him. A look down the side streets - quickly as it must be taken as the bus powers on - reveals a bizarre mix of rich, renovated building and boarded-up windows. Withington has in recent years become an overflow for the growing universities. It is, literally, very patchy.

The bus takes me through Fallowfield, which you could be forgiven for thinking was created for students alone. A big, new Sainsbury's; hundreds of houses; a sports centre; the biggest halls the university owns; two Scream pubs next to each other; a Wetherspoon's; and about six kebab houses. Fallowfield is the kind of place which is full of wealthy people who would not consider themselves wealthy, because they would not consider taking two minutes to engage with those worse off than them.

Rusholme, the Curry Mile, is probably longer than a mile now. The electricity consumed by its endless neon lights is probably collectively greater than the kebab consumption by students in Fallowfield. It is something that could happen only in Britain. Some would say this is bad, some would say this is good. The Curry Mile is of similar notoriety, but probably subject of less negativity, than Belgrave Road in Leicester. It is multiculturalism - and cultural assimilation - in action. You could not be in Didsbury here, but neither could you be in Delhi. You could not be anywhere but Rusholme.

Back in Longsight, I'm yards away from gang warfare. It is over the other side of the police station. By 6.00pm, I'm being driven through Ancoats, quickly up the east side of Manchester, travelling north-east up the Rochdale Road. This is where the deprivation has always been. Deprivation has come to south Manchester; it used to be prosperous. Toad Lane in Rochdale, though today I will not go that far, is where the co-operative movement began in the nineteenth century, and the journey out there tells that history. Tower blocks stand side by side; two are totally gutted, smashed, and deserted; the others, though precisely the same in construction, are, for some reason, still fully inhabited. The little council houses in Harpurhey would be fine, if they weren't in Harpurhey. Bernard Manning's Embassy Club is just before my turn-off. Some of the bulbs have gone on the sign; a painting of Manning, which must be at least 20 years old, betrays a thinner and healthier man. BOOK THE EMBASSY CLUB AND GET BERNARD MANNING FREE! reads an advert. Commercialism has come home. It is hard to think I have not even come ten miles from Didsbury yet. But Harpurhey is on the up; in the last two weeks a new leisure centre and Surestart centre - for families - has sprung up. And two months ago a new police station opened. The old terraces are coming down, new houses have been built. House prices are rising - even if you can still get a house in Blackley for £15,000. The car pulls up, and I can't help feeling, as I step out into the street and hear the mysterious cries of children somewhere in the distance, which are so common as to go unnoticed, that I'm not in a place that's so different from Didsbury after all. I've seen students, cashiers, Big Issue sellers, organists, priests, bus drivers - just about anyone you can think of - in the last three hours. I can't help feeling, like so much is a world which is so often portrayed as broken picture of disunity and conflict - that we are brought together by so much more that which divides us. I have moved from a flourishing modern church, in a location just as unlikely as the estate in Blackley that I'm stood on, to a flourishing high church in north-east Manchester. There's really nothing different but the details. Today, I learnt that we are all human.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. My throat hurts badly, I have a cough, it is freezing cold, my fingers hurt, I'm hungry, I need to wash my clothes, I need to have a shower, I have to work tonight, I have to prepare a seminar paper for tomorrow, no-one knows who is going on strike when, and I need a haircut. By the way, watch out for some new stuff on this website when I can be bothered to do it.

After a week of enough pedal exercises to break my back, in order, you understand, to train the ankle muscles and posture at the bench suitably, and twenty-four hours in which I have worked sixteen and a half hours behind the bar, my fingers are suffering from dry skin, I have a sore throat, and I put my cheese and onion pasties in at Gas Mark 7 instead of Gas Mark 6, causing them to leak all over the baking tray. Stuart is in Germany for the weekend, I have to be up in the morning, and there's plenty more work tomorrow evening. All in all, I'm a bit fed up. I've more or less decided that I'll quite my job as soon as I've got my holiday pay out of them (which will amount to about £100); it's exhausting, unrewarding, and I don't really need the money. I should probably be making the most of the time in my life when I don't have to work... much. I just miss the freedom of being able to lie around at home and know that there is nothing to do.

Our shower broke. So did our washing machine, but they replaced that. With a worse one. Which leaks. We looked at houses last week. They were rubbish. We will look at more.

The clock strikes one, I will soon be able to say with honesty. It is 12:52; I am up writing a seminar paper for tomorrow, but am distracted by untethered nostalgia and sentimentality running unexplained through my mind. The concoction of events must have brought about, as it often does, a measure of reminiscence. Just every so often I look around and don't feel the identity that I used to. At the moment this room feels very cold and big. It is cold and big. I have been used to small spaces. It feels a little impersonal in here. I am tired, but wide awake, just like the last two nights; I've missed out on half the sleep I should have had.

What is it that Sigmund Freud said about the artist's mentality? That he is forever chasing honour, renown, and is often close to the edge? Just sometimes I feel close to tears for absolutely no rational reason. Most often chromatic chord progressions, or the lush and very distinctive harmonies of Brucker's motets will send a chill down my spine which harks back to all sorts of smells and sensations wrapped up in childish memories of freshly cut grass, of sunshine, of orange coats, of winter, of walks around the streets about my house in Leicester which I love in spite of such ambivalence. Absurd links in the mind bring back snapshots of memories that could quite easily have been lost forever, and may well be very soon. Memories that cannot even be placed in time. Memories which might not even ever have actually taken place. But memories all the same.

And so it is tonight: tonight is very different from a couple of years ago. Usually this is so positive, as it would be positive for anyone, to develop and to move on, seeing new places and meeting new people. But leaving anything behind is so hard. Even that which we have been forced to leave behind by nature. We are conservative animals, and so we survive. But tonight none of my sensations lead me to rational conclusions; tonight the most rational of all conclusions is an irrational one, driven by the romances and emotions which have always been more real to me than any science. Tonight, music and the tragedy of time and its broken hearts are as real as anything ever could be. Tonight, the universe feels so close, like it could slip through my hands like dust. More mysterious than ever, all is much clearer tonight; my humanness, my own transiency, my ever-possible perishability affirms a much greater world which, for this hour, seems to be washing over me like a flood of misunderstood tears.

A map, Strepsils extra, Post-It notes, Haggis, Clock, Non-drowsy hayfever & allergy relief, Tesco dark chocolate, diary, envelope, stamps, Simple moisture cream, Marks and Spencer Finest Reserve Port, Miffy, The European Reformation, corkscrew, cheque book, tape, Belleville Rendez-vous, coins, slide binder, highlighter, cables, receipt, set square, pens, staples, lighter, timetable, Blackwell's reward card, floppy disks, Satie,

These have been a very mild few days. I could either talk about them prosaically, boringly, or I could over-sentimentalise and produce some vomit-inducing, florid, poetry. These are always the options, and they surely have their times.

I found myself in JG's room - JG being my personal tutor - a tiny office with four or five seats, the walls filled from top to bottom with books on the European, and particularly English, reformation. He is away on sabbatical this year, so someone else is covering his course. Unsurprisingly, it is European Reformations. It seems promising; the clean-cut, direct, and compact nature of the history lecturer - who is Irish, and magnificently academic - contrasts constructively with the slightly vague north-west-of-England-DPhil-but-I-don't-want-to-show-off manner of our other lecturer. They are both sweet in their own way. Only three of us turned up to our first seminar - you would expect more than that for at least the first one.

I saw an amusing sticker on a rubbish bin while I was sitting down with a cup of coffee in the short break that the otherwise solid 12-4 lecture schedule allows. It read:

DO NOT REMOVE - PHILOSOPHY

I am now over half way through my degree; indeed, in just over a year, I will be approaching finals and the prospect of graduation. I have started looking into M. A. prospects and have been advised to discuss research with the professors heading the various research centres in the department.

I have been as busy as ever with church services and the like. Following the interminable funerals, extended rehearsals for Stainer's Crucifixion, and the usual Sunday service, yesterday was Candlemas. With a choir of five and a congregation of about three, it hardly seemed worth it. I spent half the service accompanying hymns like Praise to the Lord on the Lieblich and 4' flute. It is, though, amazing how things just seem to fall into place. Not just with music, but with everything. If I read back over my first year, and even A-Level essays, I can be critical of them in the knowledge that I would not make the same structural, stylistic, contextual and content-related mistakes that I have in the past. It is quite satisfying to realise that this process of improvement has taken shape relatively unconsciously; it would be wrong to say that my essay technique has improved because I have sat down for hours in front of my old essays and given myself a thrashing for the errors I made. No, it is just as if it has absorbed into me. By the same measure, I have no doubt I will be looking back at the essays I am writing at the moment with a wry smile in a year or two. It is so with music too, though. Even just last summer the thought of me playing a hymn with pedals without practising it first - probably at some length - would have been out of the question. But now, partly because I am not as self-conscious, and partly because I simply don't care as much, it doesn't bother me. But again, without having consciously honed in on learning to sight-read hymns with pedals, I have acquired the ability to do so, simply with the passing of time and a bit of practice here and there.

It makes me optimistic, from time to time.

Though the starting point for most reviews of Glenn Gould's playing is the word eccentric, (which, of course, I cannot dispute), there is great vitality, clarity, and freshness, to my ears, in a lot of his playing. His piano recording of Contrapunctus IX from the Art of Fugue, struck me as being particularly perfect. Some of his recordings are slow — too slow — but I think it is fair to say that he looked to push the character of a piece, as he saw it, to its limits. Contrapunctus IX came across as the perfect meeting of Bach's unprecedented skill in highly structured yet imaginative composing and Gould's evident instrumental and music talent in giving a demonstration of this structure in action. The three-dimensionality (or four-dimensionality) of this piece in particular is brought out by Gould's faultless and unobtrusive recitation of each individual line of counterpoint. It is clear that Gould brought much constructive innovation in his approach to Baroque music.

The snow here this past week revived in me for a short-lived moment the childish fascination of seeing a covering of white. But I've had enough of the winter now. The window in my room is big, old, and single-paned. Twice in the last week I've woken up to find that my room, despite being centrally heated, is subsisting at a mere twelve degrees. I know I hate the heat of the summer, but when you're fed up with the cold, being too hot doesn't seem to bad. Winter always feel so solitary. In the summer everyone is out lying on the grass, and having sex, though not necessarily on the grass. The sun makes everyone happy, in their own ways. It makes me happy because it gives me an excuse to eat Twister ice creams. I need some more sunshine to cheer me up. Then I will go for long walks and, if I pass my driving test, long drives too. Come, ye months of springtime, and hasten quickly on...