After successfully negotiating the circus of computer "games" -- they're no fun -- that railway companies use to sift the job applicants, I was invited to an assessment day for a better job (they're all better than mine).

My mood sank when I saw that a woman I used to work with on the trolleys had been promoted to something in HR. She met my smile with the same unchanged black looks she wore when we worked together almost six years ago. They said "but you got sacked for turning up tipsy. How have you got this far?"

I've done the exercises before. They were in four sections. Some of my fellow interviewees didn't get past the maths test in section three; most young people have no idea how to do arithmetic without a phone. I did well, I know.

A week later, I got the expected email saying I hadn't got the job. A couple of nights ago I bumped into another old railway colleague on the bus. He said that he'd met Miss Black. "I believe you interviewed my mate looby the other day." "Oh yes, well, as soon as his name came up I knew he wasn't going to get it."

I asked for feedback, but none was forthcoming. I assume that no-one in HR, including Miss Black, wants to broach the reason for my dismissal.

I was asked recently if I'd like to stand for election in our union as one of the reps. A great part of the attraction for me was the possibility of being sent to Doncaster with the other delegates for a week, to do a course about the regulations and legislation that I need to know. I like being in hotels I'm not paying for.

In order to achieve such office, I had to present myself at a branch meeting. In my head, I had a picture of a warm room in a church or Labour Hall, with a high table of men with papers and minutes and procedures, and an audience of a dozen "I've seen it all before" men and two fat lesbians.

Instead, me and my proposer, walked up a set of steps crumbling under the weight of its own flora and knocked on the door to a working men's club. We were admitted to a freezing cold pub populated by five union members, a young girl with two children and a dog, and a couple of blokes playing pool. My fellow union members were all around my age except for one young man who looked like he'd mistaken Gwent for Tenerife. "You dress for the weather you want," he said.

I sat turning my hands over together or pulling them up inside my coat sleeves. My proposer brought the drinks thick and fast; a show of hands, and I was accepted in to office in a branch where new members will turn up to one meeting and go home cold, never to return.

Just as I will be leaving here soon: I've been offered a flat (well, a "studio") in the city centre. I'm very much looking forward to having such modern amenities as pubs, and there are shops that sell things you can eat, rather than browning you in a big microwave before you go gambling. I hope to move in next month.

Mel suggests getting the bus out to a pub she remembers, in a small village near Bath. We time it well as the locals are coming in after work. It's a cosy place, the bar in a low-ceilinged one room with a coal fire. Mel meets someone working on the house next door, which for decades has been occupied by a couple she knows. I feel local by proxy and start to unwind; I go to stand in front of the fire.

The same man points to my cast and asks me what I've done. I explain the broken wrist and fractured elbow, before throwing any advantage away.

"It's great," I say, "I'm on more or less full pay whilst I sit on my back side. I'm going to milk it."

There's a pause. "I'm not sure I hold with that attitude myself."

In the concentrated atmosphere, and surrounded mainly by self-employed men, it feels a bigger faux pas than it would in Bristol.

Whilst we were in Tenerife I became interested in the disputed territory you'd hit if you sailed East by South from Tenerife's southern tip.

Back home, ignoring the slight nag in my head that my girlfriend might not be interested in Pre-Modern West African History, I say "there's a suggestion that the Phoenicians might have been the first non-natives to reach Western Sahara."

She looked at me quizzically for a second, then said "where's Westminster Harbour?"

In the corner shop a woman cradling four bottles of cider clatters in with the bustling movements of the unhinged. She apologises for interrupting (but continues anyway), and starts on one of those voluble monologues that I've witnessed many times in there.

"I want to change these, change them you see, he wants a strong lager, not cider, no, he wants a strong lager, so can I change these? Some of them won't let you."

The unworried shopkeeper tells her to get four of something else, presumably a strong lager. As she show signs of leaving, she concludes "...and I'll think you'll find I'm sixty-five tomorrow!"

I apologise for being late in replying to some of the comments in the last post. I should have told you I was off cavorting in the Canaries.

I've lost the cutting now, but in some un-internetted magazine, someone who, like me, once fancied himself as an academic, but unlike me finished his PhD, wrote a piece about how he felt himself drifting away from his schoolfriends, who, eschewing further education, ended up in well-paid manual trades, "with attractive wives and girlfriends, paying in cash." He snatched at a temporary lecturing job at a distant university. He struggled on with a couple more of those, before ending up in admin work.

At least I've avoided office work; but it reminded me of an episode on the train one late afternoon, when these two couples, working class and very well-dressed, stood round my buffet for a couple of hours. Lager for the gents, Prosecco for the ladies. "I might sell that place in Tenerife. If you're not there quite often, it goes downhill."

The unofficial head man noticed that everyone's drinks were getting low. He looked at me and nodded his head upwards, before making a circular motion with his finger above the glasses. He opened his wallet to pay. It was swollen by twenties. I fetched them another round, recognising something of the failure that the unsuccessful journeyman lecturer described. I'd like never to have to ask Mel if she could help out with a hotel, restaurant or bar bill.

Lacking a fat wallet to flash, but with a sick note magnetted to the fridge, I took my woman to Tenerife at the beginning of the month for a week, for a house music event over four days and three nights -- a sunny hotel terrace in the afternoon, then into a club in the night. It was joyous: chatty, dancey, dressy, friendly.

The median age was something around forty or fifty, so everyone had got passed the stage where you're afraid to introduce yourself. At the terrace bar one afternoon, the woman next to me was wearing a similarly-patterened shirt to mine.

"Hey," she opened. "Rocking the blue shirts. Are you a librarian?" "Yes I am," I said, "have you read any good books lately?" "I got her off this prossie site," her husband said. "But not a very good one."

I was making notes about people I was meeting in order to remember them next day. I scribbled down "Gary and Deb, funny, [neither of whom were] librarians, Black Country".

Back at our flat the next morning, Mel saw my notes on the table. "'Susie - nice tits'," she tutted. "And 'black cunts'! Who are the black cunts?"

We took a bus excursion up to Mount Teide, Spain's tallest mountain, a theoretically active volcano that's over 13,000 ft. Our guide told us that in the Middle Ages, there was an eruption that went on for several decades.* I wish we'd had longer up there, to get away from the car park and intensify the silence.

* Following Exile on Pain Street's scepticism about this, I had a look at a page about Teide's eruptive activity from the Smithsonian Institute. For the eruptions of which we know the durations, there's none that have gone on for longer than a bit over three months. It should also be noted that these eruptions are of both the central Teide and its sister volcanos in the same complex.

On Friday I went out, after a fashion, with the woman I bumped into the other week. A minute after I'd sat down with a pint she texted saying that she was in a different pub, saying that it was too crowded in the one we'd agreed to meet in. I texted her. "I've just got a pint two minutes ago so I'm not wasting that :)"

She turned up ten minutes later and said "I can't sit facing the mirror". We swapped places; I started feeling like a mental health worker. We lasted about forty minutes. She didn't like the pub and said she was going. She walked out, taking her glass of wine with her then came back looking for her scarf. Everyone good-naturedly got up to have a look for it. "Someone's stolen it," she said.

She's just rang, saying that "it's a bit odd that you've got two girlfriends" and "I'm a bit traditional like that."

"Hang on," I said. "I've got only got one," as if I were trying to rescue something. In fact I was pleased that she seemed to be working up to saying goodbye. "I know I'm not very attractive, but -- not to be nasty -- you're no George Clooney are you?" "Wouldn't claim to be, love." Then she said "well, I've run out of things to say," and hung up.

Pity she's a nutter. A female lush around my age would have been a useful addition.

The women at Mel's friend's 40th do the following day were altogether different, more sparkly, both in terms of dresses and personalities.

Mel knows the birthday girl from a community garden project she's involved in, and the guests were all Community Engagement Equality and Participation Inclusion Officers, or things like that. They were off the leash, with their husbands at home looking after the children. One of them in particular, a slim girl with tousled dyed dark blonde hair, wearing a spangled black minidress that she let ride up, posed a difficulty.

The karaoke was lazily run by a man in drag who sang several songs himself, and joined in, unasked, with some other people's songs. I'd been practising my song, You're My First, My Last, My Everything, but he'd set the mic levels wrong, so I couldn't hear myself. I got a couple of pats on the back as I came off, and Miss Minidress spoke to me briefly.

"You were a bit touchy-feely with Miss Minidress," Mel said the next morning. I sank into regret: the salacious older man, tarnishing Mel by association, and trying to remember, precisely, in what way I had been touchy-feely. I remembered the harsh touch of her chemical dress, its glittered surface and its scratchy surface. So yes, I must have had my one good hand on her.

"No, don't worry. Really, it's OK, I don't think she minded. She was drunk anyway. Don't think about it." I did think about her though.

I've just got off the phone to a woman who said "I'd really like to see you again," and "you know, it's not a sexual thing", and "I know I'm not that attractive," and "you drink every day? I thought it was just me."

Before Christmas, Mel had to take her mother up to the Infirmary for another set of tests to discover why she's getting old. I went with her, but left them at the doors, at Bristol's largest open-air smoking arena. I went to a pub I'd never visited before, full of inescapable televisions showing people with clipboards standing up talking about Gillingham v Swindon, or something equally as niche.

The place was filling up, and a woman about my age, or a bit younger, came in and looked in vain for a free table. I waved her over and opened my hand towards the chair opposite me.

She's been barred from four pubs, but I couldn't get precise details of any of the incidents out of her. Admirably, she went up to the bar to ask that one of the ignored televisions be turned off, to be told "no, they want it." When she went to the toilet, she said "you will be here when I get back won't you?"

There's a rough plan to have a drink together on Friday.

A couple of hours to kill in the beautiful town of Ludlow.

I perch somewhat uncomfortably, on a narrow window-sill. The man standing near me at the bar has one of those externally-fixed hearing aids consisting of a disc attached to the skull. He attributes his deafness to working at Wooferton, the UK's last remaining shortwave transmitter site. It was stolen from the BBC -- I think the term in economics is "privatised" -- in 1997.

For many years, as a boy, I thought I'd become a broadcast engineer, so I know a little about Wooferton, but nothing compared to the volumes of first-hand information and social history my new friend possessed. He said that the intense, invisible but audibly thrumming electromagnetic fields caused many of the employees to become clinically depressed. The farmer in the nearby farm burnt his hand on an invisibly radiating metal door catch; one of the secretaries spent some time in the loony bin after working there.

I kept revising my time out of the pub until I caught the very last train back to Bristol.

Since I came back from Tenerife in February, I've been saving my £2 coins up.

£532.