A while ago the housing association announced that our kitchens were to be replaced. There was nothing wrong with my existing kitchen, apart from, I suppose, the impression it would give an estate agent, of being "dated"; kitchens and bathrooms always have to be "new". I'd rather have had a small reduction in my rent if they've got that much money to fling around.

It's created a great deal of disorder, and I invite you, for a limited time only, into my studio flat (I suppose "bedroomless" never caught on), sprawling with the emptied contents of my kitchen. These images will be removed in a couple of weeks, so nudify them quickly.

Garden Corner

For a couple of unhappy days, I thought I was to be without a door, as the new kitchens come doorless. So unless I keep the blind down at all times, anyone walking along the outside landing could see straight through to my living room and view me at my repose, turning the heater up, whilst bathed in the stale smells of yesterday's cooking.

The Study

In my usual impatient way, I wrote and sent a two-page letter to the HA saying I was "most displeased" -- a phrase which came out naturally at the time but sounds poncy now -- which I will now have to retract.

I intercepted one of the builders this morning. "You want the door reinstated?" he said. "Well yes, if you like." He explained I was lucky that for some reason my door frame was about a centimetre wider than the others, so could accomodate the new units. We got chatting. He's from Liverpool, and said that his ex-wife worked with a "service user" who injected her daughter with heroin as a present for her eleventh birthday.

I'm off to Merthyr Tydfil FC on Saturday, who, for reasons which clearly don't include geography, are in the National League North with us and many clubs much further north. Weather's looking a bit grim.

To Lancaster, for a job interview; same job as I'm doing now, but in the hospital up there.

Me and two senior nurses cosied up in a tiny room where the door had to be locked behind me lest it hit my head when opened.

"So, it's a fifteen hour contract...." Astonished, I wondered how on earth I had missed that crucial detail. I went through with it, then went down the pub and had a highly entertaining afternoon with a retired lawyer I know who looks like a derelict ex-plasterer, and two unlikely friends of his.

Back to Bristol for a single day's work I couldn't get out of, then back up to Lancaster with Mel for a dancey house night with New York plate-spinner Todd Terry. Kirsty came along as well. I was delighted to be effusively welcomed by two attractive women I used to work with many years ago at Morecambe Jobcentre. Look at the kind of women I knock about with up here.

There was a difficult couple of hours, sat chatting in the open-air bar while my mistimed e and acid came on. I got colder and colder, wasting the energy of the pill on shivering. We went inside, danced amidst a friendly crowd with none of the ageism that is everywhere in Bristol's clubs, to some of whom, for a reason I can't fathom, I appeared to look like a drug dealer. A quite insistent woman asked me if I had anything on me. I sold her a pill, and then an hour later she came back for another. I wish I'd taken up several, and recouped the cost of the entire weekend.

We stayed in Morecambe, whose sky gifted us its vast ground of infinitely graduated colours; to walk along Morecambe prom, with the foothills of the Lake District on the other side of "the crooked bay", (as its Brythonic name means), is one of the most spiritually nourishing and aesthetically rewarding things you can do for free in Lancashire.

On the platform at Morecambe's puny modern station, shunted behind the fine late Victorian one, now an arts venue, the local railway company was using AI to save money on publicity. Mel said "Is that what you're like in the north then? Fat, disabled and your machines don't work?"

On Monday I was told I hadn't got the job (which I'd have refused anyway). I saw a much better one, back on the railway, offering just short of double my current salary. I got through the written application, then asked our semi-adopted daughter to do the computer tests for me, a bewildering suite of video games involving pressing p if the number is even within a jagged shape, or something, which they aver indicates your ability to help disabled people onto trains and to calm down gangs of pissed-up football supporters doing coke in the toilets.

She did well, and I now have to record another disembodied remote video interview, where a machine asks you to describe a situation in which you demonstrated resilience, changed your management style and other things I've never done, after which, if I am successful, I will finally be invited to a face-to-face quizzing.

I got to work at 7am this morning, to discover the one really unpleasant woman there was already there as ward housekeeper, so I asked if I could take a day's annual leave, which was granted. So I've lugged the heavy old computer down the pub and am in the corner, solipsistically typing away, something which irritates me when I see others doing it.

Me and Mel had a clunky reunion after her Greek holiday. I was tired, having been drinking travelling all day from Trina's. I stayed with Trina for a couple of days and we went out bopping at an event in "The Opal of the West" (St Annes) that we've been going to for years.

We met at about 6; the music, although not loud, was very irritating. I could hear myself moaning again, complaining about coming back to see all the women in niqabs, and unfavourably comparing Bristol to Lancashire, a theme she is sick of hearing.

Back at mine she presented me with a bottle of tsipouro, a new one on me, a Greek spirit of around 40% abv made from the residue of grapes after they've been pressed, which you drink neat. It is delicious, much less stringent than the combination "Greek" and "spirit" had led me to fear. We parted amicably enough, but it was a mistake to have arranged a get-together immediately after four hours on a train and a dancey late night, with another 5am alarm (for me) casting its doleful shadow over our table.

On the train to Trina's, I fell asleep. I'd got straight on the train on the back of three twelve-hour days at work, and woke up at the terminus, Crewe. It was half past midnight. At the Crewe Arms, opposite the station, I was engaged by three black-clad teenagers doing the semi-dancing of boys who think they're hard. "Won't get in there mate, it's full of fucking immigrants. Go up there, there's a Premier Inn." "Leave him alone," another one said.

It was a quarter to two before the third hotel I tried, on a business park -- roundabouts, slab offices, the foul crescendos of cars, and car showrooms -- had a room. The receptionist was going on about getting unfairly sacked from another hotel, and how Nigel Farage is no friend of the working man, while I was on the verge of crying with tiredness. "Ok," I said, to cut him off. "Where am I?"

The dancey do with Trina was like a big social club. I was surprised how many people I knew, including some from my Morecambe days, which is going back a bit. A friend of Hungarian heritage slipped me a bit of homemade pálinka, and a couple of wee plastic glasses to have it in. Pálinka is a rather rough country fruit brandy, but the generosity was what mattered. And although I say this every time...if you want to meet well-dressed, articulate, attractive women who dance well, force yourself to get into the more soulful end of house music, and dance yourself. I don't do anything at these nights except dance without showing off, and I always get some attention.

I have been much provoked over the last couple of years, by the next door neighbour, who cannot resist muttering something insulting as he walks past me. Recently, it was "you're sick you are," after me and Mel had emerged from my flat and made the mistake of bidding him a good morning.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a dramatic escalation of hostilities. I was sitting outside my flat on the balcony, listening to the Test Match, when he walked past and muttered "fucking weirdo" in a stage whisper. I let that go without comment or reaction, as I have ignored similar comments on many occasions.

But when he came back up and started taking photographs of me with his phone, I exploded, leapt at him and tried to wrestle the phone from his hand, which I intended stamping under my foot. Unfortunately he was taller and stronger than me, but I kept up a verbal barrage at him for a minute or so, conveying my opinion that he was a fucking miserable cunt.

I thought we had reached a détente, but he hung about on the threshold of his flat and asked me more than once whether I came from the north, as if we're all pals now and can start discussing our favourite films. "That's your flat, this is mine, now fuck off," I replied.

Although I haven't been troubled since, the incident unsettled me, and I sent an email to the scheme manager saying that I'd like it recorded. It happened a couple of days before she left (to work in a supermarket) and the complaint might have fallen down the cracks; and in the strange way that men sometimes respect violence more than civility, I hope we have arrived at a state of mutually-assured silence.

I've been offered an interview for the same menial job I'm doing now but in the Infirmary at Lancaster. It falls on an awkward day -- I'll have to go up and back in the same day, then do a day's work, before going back up the following day, because house music maestro Todd Terry is gracing our little provincial town. I just hope the place is packed for him -- I remember when Justin Robertson played Lancaster, at the height of his fame, and we had an acre of dancefloor each.

Mel is off having a couple of weeks on the Greek island on which she has spent most of her life, where she plunged two English boys into schools where they learnt Greek by immersion and the overwhelming desire that an eight-year-old has, to fit in.

A couple of days before she left I suggested a send-off for her which I designed around her likes -- a walk, a drink, and a home-cooked meal. We set off, with a map I'd copied by hand off openstreetmap, up the Frome, into the biodynamic half-marathoned suburb of St Werbergh's -- and got intercepted by a Guyanese woman who asked us where we were going, then immediately assuming the dom role and unconsensually lead us on a walk on a similar route of her choosing, which was enjoyable if rather disciplined and hurried.

We were deposited in the cafe next to the city farm, a curious building a bit like a melted adobe, popular with yummy mummies and their papoosed "partners". I was itching to get us to the Vic, the more working class pub of the two in the suburb. When we arrived one of my young hospital colleagues was serving behind the bar, with her glinting smile, managing the men, dispensing beer and bonhomie, and getting sexier with every pint.

I had promised Mel ratatouille-stuffed crêpes. I went to get us another drink while Mel sat outside. "I've promised me bird this fancy French meal tonight," I announced to the sympathetic group round the bar. "I'm not sure how far this plan's going to get to be honest." "Take her to the chip shop," was the advice.

When we got back, I forced myself to make at least the ratatouille and we ate it with homemade bread, and drained the wine. I'm not in love with her, but I'll miss her.

My move back to Lancaster has fallen through.

I resigned from my job at the hospital, and gave notice on my flat; I booked a removal firm and paid the £160 deposit, and told everyone who matters, before yo-yoing between happy anticipation and practical and emotional worries.

A week later I got two flat tyres whilst near Mel's, and the bike repair man said my punctures would take at least two hours. So we walked to the pub rather than boiling with plastic water outside. We didn't go there to talk about it, but the disinhibiting effects of her pints led to tears. "You've never once asked me how I feel about it," she said. The hard fact is that her being upset about me moving back has no weight in my decision; it's just something to be dealt with as sympathetically as I can.

She recovered, after some eye dabbing and the tissues in packets that women always carry, as the few other customers being tactfully uninterested, before we turned our minds to the racing, at which I won the afternoon's drinking back, on a horse called Kaleidoscope Eyes.

Two days later, I was sitting by myself in a cheap chain pub near hers, watching the theatre of a pub frequented by pensioned and pipped boozers, contemplating what I'd done through the clarifying darkness of Titanic Plum Porter. I've got under £1500 in savings, so given that the rent is £778 and the removal is £680, I'm cleaned out by just getting to Lancaster, and my last salary payment from the hospital has to sustain me during a job hunt of unknown duration.

That afternoon, I rang Mel and told her I'd decided to abandon the move. The following day, I had to claw back my job and my flat, and cancel the removal firm.

At this point, I composed and sent an email to the manager of the scheme in Lancaster, explaining I couldn't move in. She didn't reply, so I thought she was a bit annoyed with me.

A few days ago, she sent an email saying she was hoping I was looking forward to me moving in today. She hadn't received the email. And neither could I find it, so although I would swear I'd sent it, perhaps it didn't go. What a mess.

We had a good eclipse, thanks. Lovely weather and clear skies, on the rec on Mel's council estate, which is getting polluted, or improved, depends on how you see it, by young couples who talk in RP and are escaping London, who are thoroughly, impeccably, irreproachably, decent as they buy up ex-council stock. Our pinhole cameras were rubbish -- you get a tiny dot on the back of a shoebox -- but someone gave us a spare pair of eclipse glasses, which were much better.

Highlight of the night was a mischievous TEFL teacher who turned up with a group of mainly Vietnamese teenagers. He was holding a colander in front of a sheet of card, and was telling the kids that that the dots on the card were the planets, which you can't normally see because the sun's too bright. After a while they realised that he was taking absolute nonsense.