Happy New Year readers! I hope you had a merry Christmas, and that any fissures within the family didn't turn into canyons full of rancour. Apologies to anyone visiting here around the end of the year: I made a bit of a hash of transferring the site to a new hosting provider.

I am one of the possibly irritating people who consistently report a genuinely happy Christmas. We have settled on a formula now, with a timetable that hardly changes except for the inherent unpredictability of ovens, although I decided this year that I would go down the pub while they were watching Call The Midwife, which I find unbearably twee and woke. I got delightfully stuck in, so to speak, between two female strangers at the Old Shipbuilder’s Arms.

On 27th I participated in a "fun" run as a fundraiser for Women's Aid. It was a course of 2.13 miles, slightly shortened from the original plan due to frost. After ten minutes or so, I was plotting how to escape the course and go home, feeling that I didn't have enough puff in me. I also had a knicker elastic problem; jog, jog, jog, down, down, down came my pants, to the stage where underneath my joggers my bum cheeks were exposed like someone in an experimental dance company, while at the front the pants clung on by using my willy as a hook.

But I made it, about 125th out of 150, in an arrière-garde of the obese and the over-70s, and collected my little Christmas tree medal. I was almost disgusted with myself how difficult I found it, so have been out a couple of times since then, with the aim of covering two miles without having a near-death experience.

So if anyone has a bit of excess cash looking for a good home, email me by clicking here, and I'll send you the link to the site where you can divert your bothersome lucre to Women's Aid. Remember to click "custom amount" at the foot of the page to avoid getting skimmed by the site's owner.

The start date for my new job at the hospital seems to recede endlessly. I had to have a couple of blood tests and injections before they can start me, but, as the chatty nurse told me as I was about to leave, "part of this, really, is to see if you wash and look after yourself."

I am now vaccinated against diseases I have never heard of, and can have sex with a prossie, a man and a cow simultaneously without coming to harm. The information sheet they gave me told me to avoid any heavy lifting for a few hours afterwards, which is a pity as I was planning to move some annoying boulders from my vestibule that afternoon.

Instead, I was asked to pose next to seventy-two toilet rolls (they're cheaper in bulk). The manager of my block of flats looked curiously on.

It's pouring down with rain, I'm not really ready for Christmas, I had to go to four shops yesterday before I found any parsnips, I'm getting uselssly het up about lazy people twiddling some knobs on a computer to make AI-generated music, and I've been tiring myself out at night by listening to some of the commentary on the Test Match from Adelaide -- not an uplifting experience for an Englishman.

However, last week, I sucessfully transferred this site and all that sails in it, to a new host. Well almost -- I'm cursing myself for not backing up my emails, as I've lost hundreds from some past girlfriends.

A quick trip, with Mel, to Lancaster to have a look at the sheltered housing block in Lancaster I'll be moving into, as soon as someone has the decency to become deceased, or in a way less terminal, vacates a flat.

I tried taking us up a short cut up an alley known locally as the Khyber Pass, next to the railway line. It was pitch black and raining, and someone had flytipped a mattress and a sofa and some bin bags of rubbish, so me and Mel were squelching and bouncing about on this mattress while the brambles were trying to take our eyes out. Not the finest of introductions to the suburb for Mel.

We stayed in the guest flat, which was very warm and will hardly need heating. In The Old Shipbuilder's Arms, we bumped into a friend of mine, a jovial and well-educated man, a joiner who had to give it up after a near-fatal brain injury. He invited himself along to a meal we'd booked in a pub which is installed in a cosy old wine cellar, a suggestion I didn't mind at all. They tucked into hotpot while I had a sea bass / kale / shrimp bricolage which for £27 was a great waste of money, exacerbated by the £5.75 pints, nearly double what you pay in The Old Shipbuilder's Arms.

My friend then wanted us to go to a pub where another mutual friend was doing a gig. Again, I was pleased at his suggestion: it showed Mel that I do actually have friends.

And then, once we were safely bunkered down in our twin beds, there happened one of these inexplicable acts that follow from a night on the pop. Instead of walking the few short steps to the en-suite, I decided, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of pants, to wander out into the corridor, and out again onto a little garden area outside the guest flat, and piss in a planter.

I went to retrace my steps, but the door had locked fast behind me. I opened the window to the flat and tried to ease myself back in without disturbing Mel, but it wouldn't open more than a few inches, so I only succeeded in getting my head stuck in the gap and had to call for Mel to come to my rescue. But there was no way of opening the window any wider, so I had to pull my head back out again, almost leaving my ears in Lancaster, and wait until Mel could herself parade semi-clothed along a corridor in an old people's block to let me back in.

I got the housekeeping job at the hospital. Not really what I had hoped for at my advanced age, but it'll plug this credit card-shaped hole into which I've fallen lately.

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 an agency. It's basically cleaning, and serving them their food. It's dull, 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.