My boss at the Plague Attenuation Centre asks me how I'm getting on with the unpaid online study we're expected to do.
Despite several deadening hours on Infection Control and Paediatric Resuscitation, I can't get the pass marks required in the tests. I resent being expected to do this unpaid. Neither do I look forward to self-suffocating every day in my clothy breath, in a job where I couldn't care less whether anyone gets better or worse as a result of my actions, an attitude which might not be that expected of NHS employees.
I send her an email saying I've been offered another job. I hadn't, but the agency offers two days' work on a badly drawn estate on which its architects would never live. We're cleaning flimsy student-occupied houses. I like the physical effort, sweating, and banter with my colleagues. At the end of the first day, my supervisor says "I'm going to ask if I can have you on my team again tomorrow. You just crack on with it." I feel boyish, the pleasure of pleasing.
It's the third hottest day on record in Bristol. I make three salads and serve them up for Cath and Richard. Everyone woofs them down, which is the best reward one can get from cooking.
Cath asks me to take some pictures of her for her profile on a dating site. She had just criticised me for pointing out a woman walking past our house, of whom I said "that woman there, she works in the newsagents. Don't you reckon Cath, if she did her hair and had a bit of make up and some better clothes, she'd be quite a looker?" She didn't like me saying that.
"So hang on, you're telling me that it's an unfeminist thing to say to someone to get some make-up on, then you ask me to take some pictures of you for a dating site? I'm not saying that the newsagent woman should get some nice clothes just for lascivious attention from blokes." "I'd love some lascivious attention from blokes."
We laughed and had another glass of wine. I scratched my head and looked at the table for a few seconds, because if Cath is in need of lascivious attention, she wouldn't have to look far to get it.
The pubs are allowed to re-open on Saturday, but I'm having second thoughts about going. It'll attract all the part-time drinkers who can't handle it, shouting and screaming their heads off as they gobble multinational lager and order food to smear on the table and floor.
I want to drink with chronic, dedicated drinkers, those who continue to compile a long list of regretted pointless arguments, cruel and unjust put-downs to others, friendships strained to breaking point or final severance, missed appointments, trains, work days and birthdays, yellow-flowered bed-wetting incidents, hours spent slumped against a wall, disciplinaries and sackings, getting in at 7am and crashing loudly against objects which normally go untouched, mornings spent apologising, well-intentioned, unsatisfying and sometimes comical sex, lucky journeys home, long seconds desperately trying to remember who the fuck is the friendly, chatty person who comes up to you and remembers you from Friday --a day of which your recall stops around 11am, and muddy bruises and scabbed-over wounds which caused not the slightest pain at the time.
These are my people. A weekday afternoon sesh is when we might commune, in the latte-free places for the unravelled and dishevelled, where no-one talks about work because no-one does any.
I’m just waiting to see if there was actually one lunatic who opened their pub at bang on 6am this morning.