Last week crawled by as I awaited another assessment morning on Friday, this time for a better-paid railway job, with a proper roster, that I could walk to in under twenty minutes.

The English and Maths tests were easier than I'd feared, and the group discussion went unremarkably. Three of the five of us got pass marks in the tests, so were called into another room with a dartboard in it to await our individual interviews.

This is where it unravels for me -- I'm very poor at doing these, for reasons I don't really understand.

They contacted me by email today. Even before you open it, you know that's not going to be good news. The one they want, they ring.

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To L---, my mum's home town in Sussex, a gorgeous-looking place with a great deal of pre-Victorian architecture in a homely, southern style. Unless they've inherited somewhere to live, the indigenous working class has largely been ousted by people with non-geographical accents in semi-aristocratic eccentric dress: heavy long skirts, yellow flannel trousers, gaudy waistcoats.

My mum wanted a family get-together that wasn't a funeral. We sat in a church hall without alcohol, and I tried to rustle up conversation with a group of people I barely know. We were encouraged to bring some food. Hardly anyone wanted my cheese and cucumber sandwiches made with homemade olive bread; I've been ploughing monotonously through them since.

One of my brothers revealed that he'd found out that my paternal grandfather was almost certainly a gypsy -- this to add to the information that my maternal grandfather was an illiterate Irish tinker. For some reason, this news of our gypsy blood was unwelcome to my youngest, who kept trying to find possible errors in my brother's careful researches.

Later a small party of us went tramping through the overgrown part of a cemetery trying to locate my grandparents' grave. It's unmarked, so in thick grass, we were trying to look for "a small black or grey pot with the word 'memories' on it." The mood became listless and the search was called off.

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After four hours of endless cups of tea -- I don't know why my mother doesn't strap an urn of it round her waist with a tube directly into her mouth -- I was glad to escape to the pub with Kirsty, two of our daughters, and my trendy drummer auntie.

At Victoria station a man was swigging some sort of tequila mix drink. "You've got the right idea," I said. He thought I was going to say something critical as he lives in Philadelphia now, where public drinking attracts more disapproval than it does in London. He offered me a swig; it was delicious, tasting all the better for the temporary camaraderie.

When I went on holiday to France in July, I had abandoned any hope of getting further with a job application for trainee guard, and had forgotten about making up some bullshit about why someone residing in Bristol is applying for a job in Yorkshire.

To my surprise, my application was "progressed" (maybe in a few years it'll be "grown"), and I was invited to take a computer-based test which involves identifying particular non-geometric shapes from rows of similar ones, which the Department of Transport Logistics Delivery Resources Solutions Management at Swindon University Institute has shown to be a reliable indicator of whether you can be helpful and polite to a disabled person as you're fixing the ramp and wheeling them onto a train.

I have never passed this test, in several attempts. Fortunately our semi-adopted daughter offered to do it for me. She took the test in the bright Breton sunshine, submitted the results, and a few days later I was invited for interview. After the interview ("Why are you the outstanding candidate for this job?" I'm not outstanding, what a fucking stupid question), I prematurely started looking for flats on wrongmove.

I must have created quite an impression on them, because after an 11am interview they emailed at 4pm to tell me that I hadn't got it.

For a few days it's quite depressing; the rejection like feels like that you experience during online dating. This is the fifth time I've got that far and failed at the final hurdle. I come across better on paper than in real life. But maybe sixth time lucky: I've another interview on Friday, in Bristol this time.

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I had a sporting time last weekend. My brother bought me a birthday present ticket to day two of England v Sri Lanka at Old Trafford, then the following day me and the youngest, together with Shrimpy, went to Doncaster to see Morecambe lose 1-0.

At the station on the way down I bumped into a woman I used to work with in a pizza place thirty-five years ago. She was with her husband and her daughter, who remembered going to dance classes with mine in a cold, derelict premises with some sort of old Victorian iron press thing in the corner.

The mother is round my age and still very attractive, with this underplayed, unintentionally sexy smile and physical calm, which is unaltered from when I was watching her waitressing as I was doing the washing-up.

When we got into the taxi at Donny to take us to the ground, the taxi driver said "is that the railway station?" Our goalkeeper gifted them the goal by fannying about with the ball just outside the penalty area rather than deploying a good old-fashioned Fourth Division hoof up the pitch.

On the Sunday I had a couple in my Lancaster local, where I met an eighty-eight-year-old man who told me he'd have to have his todger cut off because he got cancer in it. "They call me Stumpy now."

My bonkers stalker texts me the night before the Euros final. "I'm watching the football tomorrow at the Venturers Arms. Hope you won't be there."

I didn't fancy her offer of coquetry and mental illness, so stayed on the settee with Mel, who could have turned a profit by predicting both the score and the first goal scorer. Apart from a couple of matches involving Turkey and Georgia, and our semi-final against the Netherlands, I found it a disappointing tournament, and got tired with the endlessly repeated banality about Southgate being too defensive, which, at peak-Euros, seemed to constitute the greater part of male speech. I have no understanding of football beyond knowing when it entertains me, or fails to do so.

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As everyone in Bristol knows, there is a desperate shortage of student housing. Developers, based in Jersey, Luxembourg and elsewhere, have shown admirable alacrity in rising to this need, turning any piece of land larger than a blanket into flats reserved for this afflicted section of Bristol's population.

A street away behind me, a machine like a huge yellow insect, or one of those mechanical art installations that shithole towns get allocated, bashes and shuffles its way towards ninety flats. Two hundred and ninety-nine more are planned for another site close to me. Already, in one of the poorest parishes in the city, the bakers at the top of my road charges £4.50 for a sourdough loaf.

I quite enjoy raising objections to planning applications, and still enjoy the occasional ripple of a years old and successful contest in which we thwarted Lancaster Priory's plans to build a car park at the highest and prettiest viewpoint in the city itself. We ran them out of money. Everyone who advised us did it pro bono; they were paying specialist London barristers, before someone in a very posh form of dog collar told them to leave it.

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To Southsea, with my eldest and my niece (whom I hardly know). We had some delicious nosh and then went for a dip in the sea, so gave my garish swimming shorts their English summer debut. The current was quite strong pushing us away from our clothes. We had a cuppa at niecey's flat right by the prom and on the corner of the high street.

On the train back me and the eldest got nobbled a bit by a rather over-chatty woman who told us of the various flats she's been kicked out of. We were relieved when she got off at Southampton.

Back in Bristol, I was walking home and I saw a twentysomething black man in a lime green gimp mask squatting down and saying something on the other side of the street. Then I saw the camera. "Are you making a film?" I asked him. He said it was a new video for an old single and gave me his stage name and the name of the track. I googled for him and he's one of the biggest rappers in South Africa; unfortunately, homophobic as well, so we'll delete that encounter from the records.

Our Breton holiday, more than two weeks long, flashed by, as holidays are wont to do. It's the same thing every year: a diet consisting mainly of butter and cider; swimming in the "little sea" (mor bihan in Breton); mild walking and trips to the market; reading and afternoon dozing in the little garden; coming back with resolutions to improve my French which last a couple of weeks. Walking along the headland and on the beach, especially in the liminal time around dusk, staring at the infinitely graduated colours of the sea and sky, it is so beautiful that you don't know what to do with it.

I lugged my old heavy computer all the way there and back so that we could watch the football. I hadn't paid for anything but a carry-on bag, but have developed a technique of slinging my man-bag over my back to hide it somewhat, and then waiting until the gates are about to close to go through, when they are less likely to spend time charging you for your extra bag.

We did online shopping, with everything brought to the door, which made me wonder at how we used to manage in the past, lugging it all back from the village. It also makes you realise how much you're all drinking.

I had an enforced night in Nantes on the way back, due to there being no bus from the village to get me to the railhead in time for my train to the airport. The poor public transport out there seems to be getting worse. I stayed in a book-lined room in a flat full of art, with a woman who spoke French to me throughout, for which I was grateful, despite the many times when I was saying what I could, rather than what I wanted to. I was surprised by her tutoyering me from the outset, and it took me until the next day until I could reciprocate. Brittany seems to be loosening her stays.

I was early to the flat and she wasn't in, so I found the local bar, where I was latched onto by the local loon, who wanted me to buy her a glass of wine, despite her shaking a fistful of euros. I declined her request. Later, I saw her riffling through people's wheelie bins.

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The gloom of work was lightened somewhat when I found out that we are to be given European rail passes -- something I've always had in my employment with other train companies but which Transport that Fails did not provide, and aligning with other companies in another respect: we are to be put onto a rolling roster, with the occasional "long" weekend (of three days, as opposed to five elsewhere, but it's a start). At the moment we don't find out until Wednesday (at the earliest) what we're doing the following week.

I'm not celebrating yet, as TtF spout more rubbish than Thames Water, but should these changes happen, Mel will be receiving quite a few postcards. I suggested we could fake cohabitating in order to get her a pass too, but she hasn't the same willingness to lie as I have.

We (me, Kirsty, the children, and one of their girlfriends) are on our hols in the same place in southern Brittany where we've been going for twenty-one years now.

The queues to get a metro ticket at Charles de Gaulle airport were twenty minutes long; the train from Paris was two hours late, and on the bus for the final leg into the village, the driver, knowing our destination, chose to keep the information that it wouldn't be serving our stop near the village centre to herself. We trudged like donkeys in an advert for forty-five minutes to reach our asylum. All is calm now. Bees burrow into the rosemary, which is flowering in a fluorescent cerise; a fat yellow rose over there is waving to me from behind a drying bikini.

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Last week, I was in Doncaster, on a residential course with a railway union, for which I am a rep now. A man told us that his short-lived career as station staff ended after an incident in which he asked a man to stop smoking inside Glasgow Central station. The passenger told him that he'd smoke wherever he fucking well liked, and exhaled a lungful of smoke into his face. Conveniently positioned at the head of an escalator, the smoker was kicked down it for a painful descent to Glasgow Central Lower Level. It was cheering to hear a rare tale of the Revenge of the Customer Service Assistant.

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I got an email on Friday telling me that I've got through to the next stage for the Sheffield job. Part of it is the shapeshifting task that I seem unable to crack, but one of the Young People in our band has offered to do it for me. She's going to do the practice test today, and see how she gets on.