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.

I work at the hospital thirty hours a week over five days, so there's nothing particularly leisured about my week; yet the virus has quietened the din of consumerism. The showy jobs which most of us do are now admitted to be useless.

On the ward, I went to pick a hair off my trousers the other day, and winced as I discovered that it was connected to my groin. It was a pube that had somehow managed to protrude through the fabric.

Emptying the bins reveals the popularity of cakes, biscuits and crisps amongst the administrative classes, and goes some way to explain why many hospital staff are huge.

On Thursday's mapless walk I wandered around a near-silent suburbia, detouring into the road when elderly people approached. I acquired a print, left outside someone's house. Stamped on the back in red ink "The French Picture Shop, Pimlico, SW1," it's an engraving by one Adolphe Martial Potémont (1827 - 1883). I laid it down on the cricket pitch of a private girls' school that I found myself in and contemplated it over a pint of cider.

I've also been spending time with a couple of seagulls and the ceaselessly wandering homeless in Castle Park. The radiant sun, the feeling of mental emptiness and vivid intensity at the same time. The silhouettes of the trees against the wide sky; the bullshit consultancies and accountancy firms on the riverbank all turned off.

I repeated a persistent beggar's spiel back to him before he could start it. "Yes, I know mate, your name's Charlie and you don't mean to disturb me but you need your train fare." Try varying the story a bit at least.

They're converting a university conference centre into a temporary hosital for plague victims and offering £14 an hour for cleaners, with enhancements for Sundays and Bank Holidays. The small disadvantage is spending eight hours a day surrounded by people coughing corona all day long, but I've applied anyway, because I'm hard.

I am displeased with our Rector. Contrary to information on the church's website, he was not in fact there at 10am on Saturday to open the church. Me and two elderly ladies talked briefly, at a distance, before I decided at least to make an inspection of the exterior with the notes from English Heritage. As I turned the corner, the couple broke out in loud exclamations. "Well I don't know Edith. You could die, I could die. I only wanted to come out for a walk!"

I found John Frost's grave though. Even now, it's tucked away in the most inaccessible, overgrown part of the graveyard. "The outward mark of respect paid to men merely because they are rich and powerful...hath no communication with the heart."

I had a tricky interview to negotiate with the dole after having given up work at Transport that Fails.

Unless there's some pressing reason, you're not allowed to simply quit work and then claim even the completely inadequate amounts of dole money. Instead, I planned to claim I was commencing self-employment. Looby's Editorial Services, proofreading and copywriting.

I spent a few hours down the pub writing a business plan (or making up a load of mumbo-jumbo about cash flow and advertising costs) from a template I found on a website featuring a photograph of a smiling young black woman on the phone. Serendipitously, a few months earlier, I had rescued from the recycling the unpublished memoir of a former resident of my block, a retired translator. In the introduction, where he gets disagnosed with bowel cancer, he says "[t]his is my story, which I'm dying to tell you."

I took my eleven-section "business plan", along with Peter's autobiography, and a domain name I've registered with me to the dole. It looked impressively thick when placed on the asessor's table. After twenty minutes, mainly taken up with an explanation of my rights and responsibilities, I was told I'd get £400.12 a month. Since then, I've been living on my savings, which are dwindling fast, largely because I'm a spendthrift and find it difficult to stop doing things like going on the Grand Tour (to see my friends in the North).

I stayed with my mum and my disabled brother in Middlesborough for a few days. My eldest was over as well, the only person I could go out for a drink with. One evening, I rang my mum to tell her we were coming home from the pub, to interrupt her in the process of my brother having an epileptic fit. We're all quite used to it; you just have to stop him banging his head on things. The three of us heaved him on to the floor, where he spent the night in a deep sleep as he recovered from the lightning outbreak in his electrical head.

Then to Trina's. Bit of snogging, lots of eating and drinking, and one night we found Jesus. Attempting to walk home one evening, her legs buckled under her at a most inconvenient and attention-drawing location near a railway bridge. We batted away a couple of offers of help from passers-by who were happy to be batted away, but my most strenuous efforts were inadequate to the strength needed to right her.

A new couple came along who seemed more serious Samaritans. A tall, ginger, bearded man and a woman came along and managed to haul Trina to her feet, just as I was thinking that all we could do was to have a little sleep by the side of the road and see if Trina could stand up. The disadvantage of this plan would be that it'd look like a crime scene. I imagined a policewoman arriving and asking her, "did he touch you?"

Jesus and his girlfriend took us to Trina's, into her living room, as far as the sofa. I was immensely grateful to them and I wish I'd tried to track them down afterwards. In the morning, Trina named him Jesus, our saviour.

I'm on one of my spasmodic purification phases (they never last long), but there's no reward for virtue.

My friend, with whom I went to Kyiv for Eurovision in 2005, was down from Manchester. We started in Wetherspoons, before going on to somewhere with less food on the carpet. I asked for a Heineken Zero, which was £2.68 for 33cl (so £4.61 a pint); my friend's pint of ale was £3.48. He says he manages to save £800 a month from his minimum wage job: he has no housing costs. He works on the phones in customer service. When someone says their house number is one, he says "oooh, is that the posh end of the street?"

We talked about our Ukraine trip, which has a barely believable quality about it now. We spent the week drinking their version of champagne, staying in this magnificent flat belonging to a lawyer, high up in one of several high-rise Soviet concrete slabs dotted amongst unmade roads and a tiny children's playground. We knocked about with a German-Latvian couple and a couple of Glaswegian lads who were at one of the semi-finals and obtained our tickets by meeting up with a young couple in an underground station. It was all blogged at the time, but 2005 is one of the many years that I lost when I couldn't afford to renew the hosting one year and I hadn't backed anything up.

On Saturday me and Mel met up in one of the few pubs in her suburb where the pub garden has grass in it rather than paving slabs. A fence came round and we bought a load of cheese off him for a fiver. The young barmaid, collecting our glasses at the time, looked disdainfully at us and the people at the next table, who were also in the market for his goods, without having the authority to do anything about it.

There was a little shack selling what was advertised as Thai food. I ordered the kimchi bowl (everything's in a bowl nowadays). "It comes with a bun," said my cockney host. "A bun? No it's alright," I replied, "you have the bun." Afterwards a woman came over to ask me how I'd enjoyed my dish of onion and pickled red cabbage in syrup. "Well... it was just a tad on the sweet side for me," I said. "Ah well, normally it comes with a bun."

After ruining my meal by insisting on it being bun-less, we sat and drank, hatless under a radiant sun, then carried on at Mel's, where we played some increasingly drunken games of écarté, a game I learned after reading about it in Vanity Fair. We went to bed, where there was an unsuccessful mounting.

The following day, the sun and the ale withdrew their favours. I lurched from toilet to bed, spending hours trapped in a cycles of nausea, vomiting, and sleep. I finally stopped throwing up at 8pm, then went to sleep for thirteen hours. On Monday, I cycled home, and went to sleep again. It's because I didn't have it with a bun.