All Nigerians are thieves

Up at 5am, walking an hour to work, in the rain, without a coat, in shoes that leak, to work at the dishwasher for eight hours, with a soggy sock blotting my foot. A man prone to self-pity would be inclined to broadcast these facts in a public forum.

I stood entirely on my own for fifty minutes in a huge kitchen. I didn't know how to turn the dishwasher on, despite caressing it gently on its undercarriage and murmuring all kinds of cajoling words.

I started doing some washing-up by hand, muttering "I don't know how to turn it on" repeatedly; and Hayley filling my mind, a sour jealousy amplified in the hard, utilitarian steel of the kitchen which seemed to mock me for having emotions.

In such situations pressing random buttons sometimes helps (and it is difficult for a new person to know which buttons to press, after all). Its green eye started blinking, and a stentorian sound of rushing liquid rumbled from its innards.

My fellow KP came in at 8am, a calming Nigerian man. Good KPs are unflappable in the face of yards of washing up. We chatted about the bar he runs in Lagos. He has to go back every now and again to check up on it, "because all Nigerians are thieves. It's the way we are."

One of the chefs "asked" me to help him for a moment. "Can you clear the burn?"

For one lovely moment I hoped that my Wertherian longing for Hayley was about to be transposed, and we were away northwards to drain a stream in Scotland. What faced me was hideous: a six-feet-long, two-feet-deep bath of glossy, festering lumps of flesh. To my relief, my Nigerian senior jumped in to do it. Later, I had to lay out some trays of chicken bones. They were more chicken parts, un-neutered throats and stomachs and trailing entrails.

Half an hour before my shift was to end, I was the recipient of a welcome criticism. "There won't be enough work for me this afternoon. Work slower."

I met Hayley briefly yesterday morning. Her miniskirt, a polyestered faux-bouclé halfway between purple and cerise, stretching almost as sexily over her legs as the black vest which she lifted up for me -- once -- did over her tits. She had asked to stay with me for a couple of days, to which I agreed, but I was relieved to be told that a work colleague of hers has a spare room for a week or so.

I'm preoccupied with what will happen should my references for my new room come back as a warning to future landlords. Hayley can be a demanding presence, and I am often weakened with a mixture of imagined sex, and a generosity towards her, to go along with proposals of hers which can come with an opportunity cost to myself. I have to work; find somewhere to live; and help my daughter - who is barely surviving as the poorest member of her acting course.

But not this weekend. In another stage in the rapprochement between me and Trina, I've been invited to a joint sixtieth in Manchester with people around that age and who -- young people should sit down now, and steady themselves with a plastic jug of coloured alcohol -- like dancing to house music.