I was asked that question by the male receptionist in my new job. He's outwardly friendly, but repeatedly pops his head round the door into the kitchen, saying nothing and walking away a second later. I feel checked up on; it's not part of his job and none of the other receptionists bother us like that.

It was the first day back after a weekend spent with Trina, on the lash and the dancefloor, sharing pub tables with amusing strangers, and being blessed by the gift of a music I love -- house music -- being also liked by attractive middleaged women. I was cleaning out a large commercial fridge, raking chemicals down the grooves in its rubber seals. I didn't think I was betraying any transport of self-fulfilment in my appearance.

I have two people training me. One, a hyperactive control freak who who likes to delegate the washing-up and enjoys making public remarks about irrelevant mistakes, ("your knock [on the patients' doors] is too... it's too... jovial"); and a more congenial sub-continent lad who is more laid back and lets me make the important mistakes, although I don't want to be drawn into the matey camaraderie of the Islam-flavoured misogyny which ripples underneath his chat occasionally.

I work three consecutive twelve-and-a-half hour shifts before at least three days off. It feels as though it's one long shift. The job involves taking the patients' food out, supplying them with tea, (the panacea of the English, although you soon realised the balm they're after is sugar, and tea is but its vehicle), a great deal of retrieving of cups and washing up, and being on one's feet for achingly long lengths of time. It's a fast-moving ward, which makes ordering and distributing their food a bit of an organisational plate-spinner, as people are moved in and out all the time. I gave two separate people two dinners each the other day.

There are some shouters, who need constant care and help with the most basic of tasks; a centenarian frequent attender who has acquired the unfortunate private nickname of The Shitter, for reasons of her frequent, uncontrolled and very stinky poos; and some elderly people who sleep on their backs, mouths agape, who look as though they might be involved with some stage of death, along with people who do not trouble the bed, waiting only for a bone to be reset.

My colleagues are, in the main, young, ambitious, socially adept women. I'm rather taken aback to be spoken to pleasantly and smilingly by an attractive young woman. Leaving with one of the trainee nurses the other night, I realised, as we walked through a staff-only corridor together, that her attractiveness is not a currency for her in her interactions with me.

My next-door neighbour died a few weeks ago, and we were allowed to have our pick of some of his lesser belongings. I acquired a cutlery tray and a small plastic mandoline. Last night I added a small slice of my right thumb to the scalloped potatoes I was cooking for me and Mel. It got lost in the mix so, this Easter, one of us has partaken of the Body of Looby.

Edit 11th March: It's been brought to my attention that this blog hasn't been updating on people's blogrolls. I've had a few problems since I went over to a new host and couldn't log on at all for a short while. And the spam filter seems to be targetting just the people whose comments I always welcome. I say this very hesitatingly, but it should be OK now.

I finally pluck up courage to attempt the cycle ride into work. It's not the distance (about three-and-a-quarter miles), it's the ascent -- Google reckons it's 305ft, and there's a particularly tough stretch just before I reach the hospital. Well it is for me -- cyclists of both sexes overtake me.

To my left on the pavement next to me, is a teenage girl in school uniform. I am conscious that I am panting heavily a few feet away from her. Try as I might, I cannot get ahead of her. At this point in the climb, the top speed I can manage is the walking pace of a 14-year-old. I was glad when she turned off the road.

The journey took me thirty-five minutes. Going past the signs announcing a smoke-free site, you arrive through the mass of smokers who congregate outside every hospital in the land.

Our trainer took the job, I surmise, for its opportunities to over-share. We all know how much she spent on toiletries in the supermarket last weekend; we know about her unusual domestic arrangement with her ex and his girlfriend; we know about her predilections for gin and rugby.

We watch videos of grinning nurses who work in that fabulous hospital where they have plenty of time to sit on the bed and chat (close-up of a thirtysomething hand holding an eightysomething one); followed by more smiling, the type with the tilted heads that advertisers use on cremation adverts.

But she's likeable and has some good stories. One day, she was using an online translator to ask an Indian gentleman whether this would be a good time for her to wash him. She showed him the screen, upon which he looked horrified and crouched into a ball. She later learned from one of the Asian staff that she'd asked him whether this was a good time to give him a wank.

Me, Mel, and her longstanding friend, go out for a drink down the Harbourside. We start in "The Architect". With a name like that, I dislike the place before we even start. Things improved when we went across the bridge to The Sticky Table, both in price, and the view.

Mel's friend was wearing this flimsy short greeny-blue skirt. She was sat to my right, and she kept raising her leg to put it on the bar underneath the table. As she did so, her skirt performed one of the most erotic movements that skirt fabric can do (and skirts have a large repertoire in this mode). She tugged at it to restore it to something approaching its normal height, whilst I silently urged her with all my mental might, to refrain from doing so.

It's nine o'clock in the evening and tomorrow I've got to go to work for the first time in eight months.

In order of preference, the jobs I wanted were 1) the trolley dolly job, up and down on the train between here and Leeds, 5-day weekends every other month, 30K and a rail pass; 2) cabin crew, jetting about with pissed-up guys and gals and performing the "the ridiculous cabaret" as Alan Hollinghurst put it, of the safety demonstration; and 3), as a last resort, housekeeper at the hospital. I got the last resort.

I told Mel about a time many years ago when I took my motorbike apart using a Haynes manual for guidance to try to find out why it wasn't starting. I unscrewed this and that, did what it said, put it together, and it started first time.

"So you did all that," said Mel, "but then instead of becoming a mechanic you got a degree in Philosophy, and now you're a hospital cleaner." It was funny; I didn't see it as a serious criticism.

Kim's been staying for the past five days. I won't mention yet again that she's one of the most physically desirable women I've ever met, but she wore the same blue dress that she wore when we met up in Newcastle last month, and which shows her off to such advantage.

We went round the Grade II listed 1970s Catholic cathedral, all concrete and airy, with a long arc of abstract panels along the walls, of what you think is stained glass but is actually resin (I'm not sure I know what resin is); after which we walked round Clifton, which I always forget how gorgeous it is architecturally until I see it through someone else's eyes. Not a place to live though, even if half a million dropped into my lap. They're not my people.

But mainly, we were down Wethers drinking, in which pleasantly timeless activity Mel joined us for a few times; and chatted. I made an effort with the food, including a spanokopita, the Greek filo pastry spinach and feta bake, which is very easy but looks like you've been slaving away in the kitchen for ages.

I'd better call it a night. I will be back here to moan about my wage-slavery, sexual frustration and borderline alcoholism soon.

I've got a start date for my cleaning job at the hospital: 3rd March. Not really what I want to do, but neither is servicing a credit card. Both are slavery. "Work is a prison of measured time," as Raoul Vaneigem put it. But on the bright side, I can cram all my week's hours into three days of twelve hours each.

There's a good pub about half an hour's walk from Mel's flat. It's along a car-dominated road, with the infernal grey noise of tyres on wet tarmac, and it's winter, so we don't often go there, but the other day she proposed a walk there "just for one or two" before we came back for our tea.

After "one or two", we were asked to move, as the DJ was setting up where we were sitting. "Well, we could just see what he's like I suppose," one of us said. We got chatting -- or were talked at, rather -- by this disabled woman on crutches who had been invalided out of the army who took delight in showing us her grotesquely malformed knee, and the foot pointing the wrong way.

A couple of hours later I was dancing under the 70s disco ball and those big bulbs of coloured mobile disco lights, which have a lovely catalytic relationship with alcohol in the brain. A woman was dancing near me in an absolutely enormous jumper. With no preamble whatsoever, she put it over me while she was in it, and we started dancing with our two heads sticking out of the neck hole, our bodies in a pleasant abutment underneath.

You may remember that I said that a friend of the family was playing about with a new phone one day, whilst laying on the bed, facing the mirror, in a room which a child had always reported as having a bad feeling to it.

She accidentally pressed "burst" instead of the normal take a photo button, and in a single frame, out of scores of them, there was this figure looming over the bed in which the child felt so uncomfortable.

Middlesbrough

Us siblings (apart from the youngest, who's in a home), have a group call to discuss arrangements for my mum and my youngest brother. My mum wants to have her wake in a tiny cafe about the size of a living room in Middlesbrough. And if she has to go into a home, she wants it to be "a Christian one, where they don't play bingo."

We're also a bit worried that she has my brother to stay often, when he has bad epileptic fits that see him thrashing about on the floor. It's been happening for decades, so we're all used to it, but how much longer she'll be able to cope with it by herself I don't know. She's sanguine about it all and doesn't think there's any problem.

Newcastle

To see Kim. Even by her standards, she looked very sexy, in a blue and white dress, and her artfully unkempt hair. She said she feels invisible now she's in her mid-fifties. I can't believe that; when she takes my arm as we leave the pub, I see men look first at her, then me, then thinking you lucky bastard. If only. She said her type is quite big, rough working class lads, so I fail at the first hurdle.

I unwrapped my Christmas presents, the highlight of which was this beautiful tea-light powered lamp. She also gave me some of those name labels you can sew into clothes for children and the confused. "Someone who finds you can send you home again."

Shropshire

Trina has moved into a blank, modern house in an equally featureless village. But it's near to her son and grandchildren, has gardens front and back, and is quiet and dark at night. She was very generous, jumping in first to pay for drinks and meals; it'd be lovely to treat her one day, if I can ever attain solvency again.

When I was still working, we made some plans to go to a couple of concerts this year. I shove the mounting credit card bill to the back of my mind, where it festers and nags.

Bristol

The head nurse rings from the hospital. There's a problem with my DBS, in that I ticked a box -- in good faith -- saying that I have no convictions that are not spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. However, when the certificate came back, there's a single offence still on my record -- a Contempt of Court conviction from when I was eighteen.

I was up before the magistrates for shoplifting, and when the Court Clerk said "all rise" as the Magistrate came in, I remained seated, saying "I do not recognise this court." I was going through a fervent anarchist phase.

My solicitor requested an adjournment, took me aside and said "look, just go through with it and stand up, otherwise you'll be put on remand in Risley and to be honest, someone like you won't last five minutes in there. I nodded uncommittedly. And refused to stand up for the second time, at which point I was sent straight to jail for a fortnight.

It's not the offence itself that's bothering the hospital; it's that it looks like I have lied on my application form.

And on top of it all, my homemade beer has come out a bit disappointing: malty, sweet and flat. I'll try making some wine next time. I've had better results with fruit wine in the past.