I get talking to a copper travelling first class. His field is tracking down child pornographers. "You watch their internet connections, and it's faked to be from some place, London, say, then there's a tiny moment when they disconnect when you see a little flash of their actual location." They have to have plenty of time away from the work: it's so distressing that it can lodge repeated, nightmarish films in even the most hardened detectives' heads.

Today is Day Eleven, in capitals.

In one of those rash self-improvement decisions which I now regret, I vowed to have four weeks off the pop, from one pay day to the next. In as far as I'm perfectly capable of boring and offending people whilst sober, I'm not expecting much change, but it's more a financial experiment, to see how it affects the bottom line come December's payday (on 6th). Already I'm aware that the notes in my wallet last much longer; I'm also sleeping better. The main cost is never having the type of spontaneous, unpredictable conversations with strangers that only happen in a good pub; although muttering to oneself whilst looking at one's glass of beer is also a pleasure.

To use the time freed up, I'm doing a French course which promises to take me from my present CEFL Level B1 to B2 (not in four weeks, obviously). I'm enjoying it, even though, and because, it exposes the errors I have accumulated from my largely self-taught method. I want to be good enough to make the locals I meet on our Breton holidays think twice about replying to me in their own language.

Mel is delighted about my decision, because, like all women I've ever been involved with, she has this naive belief in the ability of men to become better moral characters.

We had a depressing email come round at work yesterday, warning us to expect short-term changes to our roster now that we are two staff short, yet again showing how little Transport that Fails considers the fact that we might have lives outside work.

They've sacked one person for persistent absences, and, to everyone's relief, not made permanent the contract of a them/they who spent her six months at Transport that Fails writing sniping, complaining emails about everyone for such catastrophic derelictions of duty such as failing to empty the coffee machine's grounds.

The other day, I was on the train with the them/they, and, after struggling with one of those little plastic packets of condiment that are designed to burst all over your hands, I gave it to her, who opened it immediately. Intending a compliment, I said "if you want something doing, give it to a woman."

I received a black look which took me a moment to understand. I pretended not to notice it (neither the look nor the person).

At the moment, the state of the escape plan is:

• Trainee Conductor, near my mum up north, applied 8/10/24. "Application under consideration."
• Trainee Guard, somewhat near my home town, applied 30/10/24. Online assessment (a load of mystifying computer games) completed 3/11/24. "Application successfully submitted."
• Customer Service Assistant (i.e., on the barriers), near Trina's, applied 6/11/24. "Shortlisting".

There's also the Bristol trolley dolly job, which would be my first choice by a long stretch. The woman who was appointed (I came second) failed her drugs and alcohol test. I was hoping I might be called up to the position without further ado, but apparently not: "Application pending".

At some point shortly after the last entry I noticed that Firefox was warning me about "dangers" should I proceed to my own website. My SSL Certificate had expired.

I only had the vaguest understanding of what that means; all I know is that the new owners of my hosting company were asking £50 a year to pay for something that used to be free. Fortunately I found some instructions about how to do it yourself, so now loobynet is all badged and stamped.

A gay night after work drink in my local. Bouncing Glaswegians were chanting IRA songs after watching the Celtic game. I was moaning about my lack of a roster to a black lad, who said that he was a security guard at the nearby shopping centre and knows what he's doing months ahead. I got a bit bored with him after a while as he kept saying the same thing over and over again, so I turned to the white man on my left.

"I wouldn't change my upbringing for anything," he said, after telling me about going to a nuns' school in Ireland and being rapped hard on the knuckles "for nothing". Somehow the conversation veered into sex. "And I can tell you, he was better at sucking it than she was." He made a bit of a show about having missed his last bus, but I indicated no more to the barmaid and went home. The sex life I could have if I were gay.

Me and Mel went to Lille for a few days. A little girl photobombed us.

We went by train all the way, and arrived in an airbnb place so small it depressed me a bit, and I was surreptitiously looking on my phone around for hotel rooms we could stay in, before I resigned myself to it.

Lille's a grand city that feels like a capital. Our tour guide told us that the magnificent church of St Maurice is falling slowly into the high water table (Lille = L'Isle) as the wooden subterranean piles on which it stands are eroded.

The people were friendly. In a bar, a man mistook me for a waiter, so after explaining that I wasn't what he was looking for, I left him and his group to get settled, then got up and went over to them. "Alors, vous avez choisi?" Unfortunately my French wasn't up to understanding their jokey replies. But... on doit essayer.

Just to get the regular column, Failed Attempts At Finding A New Job, out of the way first: I failed an online assessment to become a signalman. I used to be a signalman.

To Aberdeen, where my DJ pal was having his 60th. Over the Forth and Tay Bridges, past sandy beaches and through forests.

I was in first class, sat opposite a well-to-do foursome: the parents and their daughters, softly furnished in expensive fabrics. Mother caught her necklace in some way, and a diamond popped out. We all enthusiastically joined in with the search. Bent double under my seat, I was calculating the chances of being able to hide it from them should I find it. It turned up in one of those glossy shopping bags with string handles that posh clothes shops give out.

I've never been to a city made of granite before, and Aberdeen is a striking, angular city. You can get some precise corners and straight lines in granite. It's a contrast to the constantly eroding limestone of Lancaster, and the only slightly firmer Bath stone of Bristol.

An hour or so before the end of the night, a friend came up to apologise for having to leave early. Unfortunately he'd somehow been discovered in the toilets with some Pepsi; fortunately, not until after we'd shared some between us.

The following day I flew to Dublin. The eldest and her girlfriend were moving out of their shared house to another a couple of streets away. Their tenancy finishes on Friday; their new one starts on Saturday. The landlady is charging them £50 to stay until Saturday morning.

We tottered along in the drizzle carrying precariously balanced piles of boxes round to the new place. The kerbs were troublesome. The girls in the new place are friendly health workers, but it's so unjust that two young teachers can't afford to rent a place to themselves.

My daughter took me to a cracking Irish music pub where I was all agog at hearing the uileann pipes played live for the first time. I mistook the tune the lad was playing for Kitty Got A Clinking Coming from the Fair, but once I mentioned that, we were bezzies.

At one point the concertina player waved away someone who was filming them, a gesture I was pleased to see. It's so depressing that even in (or because it is such) an excellent music pub, many young people raise their phones, making their 360 degree mobile phone panoramas to buff their social media pages.

I went to the doctor's to have my Man MOT the other day. They invite you in once you hit sixty. I've got high blood pressure and "very high" cholesterol. The latter surprised me. I don't eat meat, I've never driven a car, walk everywhere, and am on my feet for hours at a time at work. Apart from drinking a lake of alcohol every year, the "lifestyle changes" recommended on a website they sent me to, are ways I've lived for decades.

Middle daughter's girlfriend was the lead in a play. Kitty and another friend had given me a voucher for my birthday, so I used it to subsidise two of the better seats for me and Mel.

Unfortunately, it merely continued mine and Mel's run of disappointing cultural events. The play was a hackneyed version of the heroic, inspirational teacher with unpromising pupil material to work with, who this time was faced with a stuttering child given a part in Hamlet. Hallmark-card-style language ("you're free!...free to soar!") and a wicked witch headmistress concerned with balancing the school's books.

In the feedback survey I completed afterwards, there was a question about "anything you particularly enjoyed about the performance and how it made you feel", for fuck's sake. I answered "The auditorium was warm and the seats were comfy, so I was able to sleep well."

Not getting the job in Bristol last week was a great disappointment. Unusually for the railway, I was offered feedback. As I had guessed, my responses to the interview questions at the end of the assessment day were too vague and generic. "We'd have liked to have heard about what you actually said or did to calm the football supporters down for example."

Then, yesterday, back in the gloom of my current workplace, a couple of the supervisors were voicing doubts about whether the long-promised rolling roster, that was originally promised from August, would be implemented at all.

I have formulated a plan, because working for Transport that Fails is a depressing experience. I'm going to wait until the new year; at the end of the feedback conversation the HR man said there'd probably be similar jobs to that for which I applied coming up then. Plan A would be to apply for a get one of those; Plan B would be to find another railway job (although I've been trying without success at that for over two years now); Plan C is to leave the railway temporarily, find something else in Bristol, and return to it as soon as possible.

Bad news from Norway, where Helen is in hospital with pancreatic cancer, noticed too late. She's having palliative chemotherapy, but Kitty said she's not expected to leave hospital. As soon as possible we'll be over to Norway. I'm hesitating about adding "to say goodbye", but that's what it'll be. And not yet sixty years old.

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.

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.

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.