Friendly society

I got paid £198 pounds net last week. That's a bit lower than normal, and what with £112 in rent, a quarterly payment of £80 for a ten-year savings plan to a railwayman's Friendly Society I set up in more bounteous times, and my £25 pounds a week to the credit union, I was left with nothing. I had to transfer £10 from my rent account to get the bus fare to work.

I was worried about not being able to afford the ingredients for my contribution to our house meal today. I started planning a shoplifting circuit, in which I would steal single items from the places in which one is least likely to be caught (Lidl, the Co-op, Asda), before I heaved with regret and asked my mum for a bailout, again. It's sometimes disheartening to be doing all this work, sixteen-and-a-half hours yesterday, and to be in this situation, although one could argue that someone who spent last week in Bordeaux, albeit with subsidies from Trina, can't complain much.

At the end of the long shift, we sat down at 2am and had a drink on the house. The catering manager said that we can all be "mightily proud" of ourselves in making this Christmas season the best -- he meant "most profitable" -- in the three years the hotel's been open. "And still we only get the minimum wage," I muttered to my colleague sitting next to me. The restaurant manager stretched open her arms and said "yess!"

It was a depressing spectacle, watching people on wages which, a penny lower, would be illegal, celebrating their labour's surplus value being funnelled into the hotel owners' pockets.

I walked, my feet moaning, to the bus stop. I have an effective tactic with the beggers. "Sorry mate, I'm on the minimum wage myself, and I've just finished this really long...", by which time they've wandered off.

Central Bristol, 2.30am Saturday night.

Two thirtysomething women are the last to leave from a bar. There's some amusing drunken faffing and pointing, centred over whether to go to the kebab shop next door, before one of them wobbles off down the road, puts her coat on top of a wheelie bin, then yanks everything down and has a piss in a doorway. There might be a girl for me in Bristol after all.

A man comes up to me at the bus stop. "Hello," he says, and stands there. "What are you after?" I ask. "A Rizla, if you've got one?" "Sorry mate, no, I haven't. Someone'll have one." Then he says, "I don't suppose you're looking for anything else are you?" I eye him up and down a bit. "I am, but I can't afford it at the moment." I first thought he was a dealer but as he left it crossed my mind that he might have been a rent boy.

A couple came and moved along the bus queue with a rehearsed, synchronised dance, singing and wishing us all a Happy Christmas.

Someone sitting behind me on the bus says "If you kissed this man he'd shit on the floor. It's not a sexual thing."