Bristol, Wednesday
Immediately I got back from working at Cheltenham races -- four long days for £287 net -- I came down with some sort of lergy. It wasn't the c-word; I wish it had been. I slept for fourteen hours one night, thirteen the next, clammy and sweaty, in between moving my heavy bones with effort into my school dinner ladying. My hearing is muffled and my mind confused: on Monday I walked into the walk-in freezer thinking it was the toilet. The rest of my work has dried up, and I've no sick pay or any kind of safety net.
I'm advised by a group of multi-millionaires to work from home, so I've invited seven hundred children round to my house for dinner tomorrow. I'm advised to self-isolate, so I'm going to wait for four hundred and fifty pounds a month to be dropped at the door by a DeliveRent person until this blows over. I can shoplift the rest.
It's not without its advantages though: both universities here have closed, which civilises the pub, no students shouting their way through the afternoons.
Before the collective hysteria got going, me and Trina went to Whitley Bay for a soul weekender. It was a flat weekend, poor DJing, music too poppy; regretted sex.
Trina dropped me off at the station in Wigan. I spent a couple of hours in one of my favourite pubs, a middle class-, hipster beard- and coffee-free zone, where gap-toothed blokes sit fucking and bollocksing their way through their habitually leisured afternoons. Sharon, in her short leopard print skirt, was as adept at keeping the conversational spinning top circling as any Tolstoyan hostess. Or, in the ugly argot of academe, she'd be said to be "facilitating".
The racing was on the telly, a pint of mild was £2.30, and an Alsatian-ish mongrel sprawled itself seigneurially across the floor. A bloke said "he's a plumber, but I'm fucking fitter than him." If you saw the speaker you'd realise how low the bar for physical fitness is in Wigan. How I will miss all this now.
A train near Lancaster, Monday
I'm on my way back to Bristol to start work cleaning a hospital. Four weeks, at least. On Friday evening, on my way to Lancaster, the agency rang up and threw me this financial lifebuoy. It'll exact its own cost: today it's 4pm till 10pm, from tomorrow its 7am to 10pm, with a two-hour unpaid break in the afternoon. My relief at having an income again comes with a worry about how I'll cope with the cumulative lack of sleep. Yet another short term solution.
I spent the weekend in Lancaster. The girls are, perforce, back at home. It was also my birthday weekend, although that was marked with not a single card nor present from anyone in my immediate family.
On Saturday night Jenny found a Eurovision journalist online who suggested camping up our quarantine by tuning into one of the previous years' contests at 8pm precisely (if one still "tunes in" to a "broadcast" nowadays). I was almost sold Twitter, with Jenny reading out the funnier comments of some of the people who were watching at the same time. The girls had set out bowls of those delicious, unsubtle crisp flavours which set your tongue throbbing.
Yesterday, after telling me on Thursday that she thought it best if we didn't meet up, Wendy suggested a turn round the park. "You've turned up without any alcohol?!" she said, and hugged me, which I wasn't expecting. "Oh...that's better," I said, like a physical relief. We got two small bottles of wine from Spar, and found our old spot where we used to sit during my intoxicated years.
