Hayley comes to bed

A job interview at the airport. In the airside bar, which starts serving at 5am. I forgot to take all the documents they requested, but in that co-dependency that employers who only pay the minimum wage have with their employees, they offered it me anyway, after I'd schlepped all the way back home and out to the airport again to bring them proof that I have no taint of immigrant. I've accepted it and I have my training on Friday morning but I might have other options.

Yesterday, an interview at an insurance company. Better money and hours, although it would still colonise two weekends in every month. I was told that I'd have to give examples of how I will exemplify the company's "core values". Number six on that list is "bring all of yourself to work." I wondered if I could say that as an alcoholic I'll be bringing a couple of bottles of red to work, to demonstrate being honest to myself by getting on the sauce every day from about 10ish.

My spirit sank when I entered the black carpeted acre of call centre. A litter of headsets and computers. Company values and tweets from appreciative customers in coloured ink on the walls. I could only think of Vaneigem's adage, "work is a prison of measured time."

To my great surprise and pleasure, Hayley, she of the semi-successful Sunday sofa sex, rings. She'd lost my number but got it from Esther. At Esther's, she is there with a man she acquired the night before. Esther was as tiresome as ever, her constant demands for attention turning to infantile displays of nudity. To my relief, she'd lost the zapper with which one turns on her shouting television, so we were able to enjoy Hayley's demotic sense of humour. Esther took a phone call from the wife of a man who plays in an internationally famous Bristol band. It was one long crackhead's slur.

We all went down the pub, where we managed an hour or so of a deafening rock band. Esther, unable to cope with the attention being on a third party, stomped off home, ignored by the rest of us. All of us apart from her had had an e and some excellent speed, and none of us wanted the pacific mood to be torn up.

Last night Hayley, Acquired Man and me, went out. Hayley looked gorgeous, in a black lacy top and a blue cord miniskirt, black tights and flatties. I mentioned that I have to move out of here in the next few months. Hayley said that it's likely she'll be offered a council flat in the autumn, and suggested we could share it, an illegal but mutually beneficial sub-let. I was astonished and flattered by the suggestion. I think I've made my first real friend here.

Acquired Man wandered off, and Hayley came back to mine. She's asleep in the bed to my right. There were no consequences, despite being wrapped around her, so the semi-successful Sunday sofa sex was clearly a one-off.

When I got up an hour ago there were two messages on my phone from the landlady in the adjoining bedroom. 0012: "It's a school night. M-- has to get up early." 0029: "M-- has to get up at 7 and the walls are very thin. Weekends are for noise."

I am painstakingly quiet all of the time here, to the point where on several occasions they have been surprised to find that I am in. I thought I might have earned a little licence, a fifty-five-year-old man hopefully bringing a sexy miniskirted thirty-year-old woman home, but I'll go and apologise in a minute.

I was walking home the other night, along a section of a path which abuts some of the bleak office blocks with which central Bristol is scarred. A man and a woman were slumped in a doorway, smoking a joint. Some sort of device was playing drum and bass weakly. "You alright?" he said. "Yeah not too bad." "Do you want to join us? It's a party."