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.

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.

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."

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.

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.