The job problem rumbles on, as it has done for most of my life, seeing as I don't want to work, except in a decently-paid, interesting job, of which there are very few for an unambitious drifter like me.

I cashed in a pension acquired when I was working for a catering agency down here. It had a total value of £2,700, from which was deducted 25% for tax, and that's what I've been living on since I left Transport That Fails. That's run out now and I'm on the credit card again.

I've got an interview for a job as "housekeeper" at the big hospital. I've done it before, through that same agency. It's basically cleaning, and serving them their food. It's dull and repetitive, but sometimes you meet amusing people -- demented natives as patients and interesting foreigners looking after them.

There was also a job advertised for a guard on the trains based at Bristol's main station. I have had nothing but strife trying to get back onto the railway -- a proper railway company I mean, not somewhere like Transport That Fails where they announce your shifts for the week ahead on Thursday. I texted Mel saying that I'm not sure I wanted to go through all the aggro of railway applications again, and she said to apply anyway. "It's a job where I think you'd be happy." I was glad she said that, and I've just come off the website having done so.

My brother, who is closely involved with a football club on Teeside, turned sixty last weekend, and arranged for the immediate family to watch a match from one of what they call the "executive boxes". There was endless tea for my mother, who would be happy if she were piped in to a samovar.

She didn't want to go out in the cold to watch the game, and a kind and helpful person from the club put her onto one of those hydraulic seats, where she was raised, at the push of a lever, to have a good view of the pitch. You'll go a long way to find people friendlier than the Smoggies (people from Middlesbrough).

The weekend felt short; usually weekends with my family drag. My nephew showed us this astonishing photograph. A friend of his was in a friend's house, testing a new phone. She took what she intended to be a single photograph, but pressed the wrong button and it zipped through several frames, in only one of which there is a black-clad figure bent menacingly over the bed.

Transport that Fails -- incompetent to the last.

It was the funeral of my 22-year-old work colleague. She put her headphones on, then walked into a tunnel at night when she knew a train was coming.

I arrived at the church to find three people I used to work with, and a couple of other strangers; all of us wondering why no-one else was there. Guessing, D-- , my glamorous and curvy former roster clerk, took us to the other St Mark's church, but by the time we'd driven there we were only going to catch the last ten minutes; she made the welcome and sensible suggestion that we stop for a pint then go straight to the crem. We joked about how hilarious it would be if they'd given us details of the wrong crem as well as the wrong church.

It was the wrong crem.

We got back in the car and D-- drove us to the next nearest dispatch hub, where we caught the last ten minutes of the service, stood in the annexe as there were so many people there.

Then it was on to the kind of industrial estate where the gangsters of Gwent could arrange unfortunate accidents, at the back of which was the big flat-roofed social club where the wake was being held.

I felt a bit casually dressed in grey trousers and a rather corporate shirt with thin purple and white stripes. It was a solidly working-class Welsh funeral, most people in black; some men forcing themselves into suits and shirts they hadn't worn since they were leaner, but doing it defiantly, respectfully. In the foyer there were posters advertising the forthcoming turns.

It was packed; must have been over a hundred people. All that love for her, unable to beat down the locked door of her suicide-wish. We all went outside to watch her girlfriends let off dozens of pink helium balloons, many of which got amusingly tangled in the trees.

After about three hours my colleague suggested we leave. It was time to leave the people who were closer to her to have their own conversations. To my regret, I didn't say anything to the girl's mother, out of a possibly misplaced sense of thinking she might be a bit overwhelmed with people coming up to her with unsolicited remembrances. But seeing as I was working with her daughter, spending eight hours a day with just a few weeks ago, and have nothing but fond memories of her, I wish now I'd said something.

Didn't get the job.

Therefore, I had to attend another DWP appointment, forty-five minutes of tugging my forelock before my masters at the dole. My smooth talk, a loaf of lies speckled with the odd grain of truth, means I've been granted a further extension of my bail until January. How I wish I could reproduce that sleekit style in job interviews.

But I can't live on what they're allowing me. I've applied to join a cleaning agency, working in people's houses and airbnbs. I have no taste for it, but gaining conventional work is so long-winded a process.

To Boston, where the Shrimps (Morecambe FC) were away on a Tuesday night. I'm still milking the rail pass I should have handed in when I left Transport that Fails, before it expires at the end of the year.

There are a great many East Europeans living there. The men walk round in purple outfits that are half-tracksuit, half-pyjamas. A pint in a normal pub, where some old fellows were playing cribbage, was 2.95; in Wethers it was a pound less than that.

The Boston fans were friendly; some of them walked me to my airbnb, waited while I checked in, taking me back to the pub for a pint before we caught the bus to the ground. We won, a barely believable 4-0, a result which propels us to second from bottom. Afterwards, in the same pub, two enormous pizzas turned up, which were divvied up between the customers.

A few days later I was surprised to appear photographed in an article about Morecambe in the Daily Mail. Their reporter had been amongst us, making up one of the forty-eight who travelled to the game.

I woke up with a start last night. There was a strange sound coming from my living room, like some giant gurgling fish. I realised it was the homebrew I started last night. If it works I'll have five gallons of ale for about 40p per pint.

To Lancaster for a job interview.

After ploughing through the questions about your experience and so on, then the "situational judgement test", then the bizarre online computer games involving blowing up balloons with the p and q keys, or stabbing at the right keys when a certain shape is flashed in front of you with an even or odd number within a jagged or smooth shape, then a self-recorded interview, which I did while we were on holiday in Brittany in July, I was surprised to receive an email inviting me to an interview for a job at Lancaster station.

You had to prepare a ten-minute presentation giving your one-, three- and six-month plan for what "you will have achieved in your role, how you will communicate with your team and what difficulties you might expect to encounter." What am I supposed to say? "My aims are not to lose my keys, to conceal the extent of my drinking, and to pass my probation so that I can get my rail pass."

I have never worked so hard on a job interview in my life. Kitty said she could get ChatGPT to help me, something which I'd never have thought of doing myself, and sent me some very helpful material, which I extensively revised to make it more my own voice.

The girls' mum said to shoehorn the company's values into the talk. The most difficult one was "passionate". There's a few things I feel passionate about, none of which are suitable to be discussed in a job interview, so I ended up saying I am passionate about ensuring a consistently high level of customer service, and opening the station to community groups.

The interview was held in the back room of the pub on the platform. I thought the interviewer was more nervous than me. I don't think I did very well. You're asked questions like "describe a situation in which you've had to make an unpopular decision." And my mind goes blank, then I start making something up, and I can hear myself lying as a little voice is shouting "you're making all this shit up!" in my head, whilst failing to provide me with an example I could use. I'll find out in a fortnight. I'm not hopeful. I always fail at the final hurdle.

When I was still working for Transport that Fails, I often used to work with a young girl -- well, a twenty-two-year-old -- who didn't want to work on her own in the buffet. She was very attractive, and got a lot of male attention that often wasn't welcome. It was a minor honour to be sent out on the train with her, since she felt uncomfortable working alone. There was something wrong in her upbringing -- she hated her dad -- but I enjoyed working with her and fielding her insouciant personal questions. She said she dreaded the idea of growing up: "I don't want to see twenty-five."

On Friday I got a call from someone at the station to say that she'd thrown herself in front of a train and killed herself. I wish she hadn't done it in that manner, since it's a horrible experience for the uninvolved train driver. Another funeral. You expect them to come at my age, but not for a twenty-two-year-old.

A few nights ago I went downstairs to join in with the bingo. An elderly female resident won two cards in a row. I said "you don't need any more luck Tess." "I tells you what I does need," she replied. "Sex!"

The afternoon was going well, down the pub "for just the one", with someone from my block of flats and three people I didn't know, running a good bagatelle of conversation on pints of Lancaster Black. I couldn't help myself. "That beer -- that's from my home town" I told an uninterested man, like some irritating grandad.

Then one of those shiny rays of middle-aged womanhood turned up, with her son; all blonde and brightening, she sat next to me, and I became open to the most stupid, harmful suggestion.

She was giving away something in colourful little packets. I thought it was some sort of men's sexual health outreach thing -- catch the males in their natural habitat and give them free condoms. It was actually what I've always called "snuss" -- little wads of stuff you stick up your gum to give you a big nicotine hit. I've never any used any kind of nicotine since I was a teenager.

Within minutes I was felled, sweating all over, nauseous and hot; incapable of movement or speech, with my head on the table. I did a little sick, which I managed to dribble through the slats of the table onto the pavement.

My mate from the block walked me home. He didn't seem to want me leaning on him so we did this weird walk holding hands, held safely away from each others' sides; I thought we looked like two elderly poofs who were uncertain how the date had gone.

Still hardly able to speak, with a dose of cowardice thrown in, I gave him the phone and asked him to ring Mel, who had cooked us our tea. She wanted to speak to me. It was a very short call.

I went to bed and slept restlessly, trying to calm the nausea, which ground on all night. The following day improved slowly, after my nicotine sentence was topped off with a few hours of an unpleasant dissociated feeling. What a poleaxe nicotine is, for those not used to it.