I accidentally buy 154 stamps

I am so robbed of time with this job. I am neglecting everyone.

I miss my old life. I went to Hayley's after work the other day. The front door was wide open, music playing. Hayley, just the same -- selfish, physically desirable, funny, talking over me, loveable. "I feel like an ant in a box," she said, about her gradual estrangement from her boyfriend. Which I found first mysterious, then hilarious. She was slightly stooped over the crack she was preparing for us, an oval ladder in her tights just below her skirt hem. I went to hug her for saying it, keeping a secret smile from forming.

She's working in security on a film set, getting thirteen pounds an hour -- three pounds more than I get. I was tired, so was she. As I left we kissed lips to lips. With my cock stiffening, I opened my mouth to try to encourage her to open hers, but she refused such an intimacy.

Back here, Cath is irritated that I have spent the weekend with Mel rather than cleaning. It's my turn to do it and she likes it to be done at the weekend. On Sunday I am happily tired from wrapping myself round Mel at her friends' house, so I start on it when I get in from work on Monday. She makes a fourteen-year-old's show of stomping upstairs as I hoover the hallway.

Later, she's downstairs again and I apologise to her if I chucked her out of the living room. "Why do you start it at half past six on a Monday?" she cries, with a passion fueled by the lack of regulated discipline in my cleaning behaviour. "Cath, I've got a full-time job and a girlfriend now." "But you had all Saturday to do it!" betraying how little interest she had in the gripping Second Round FA Cup tie in which Morecambe beat Solihull Moors in extra time to win a third round place away to Chelsea. "Well, it's too bad," I said, and she went back upstairs, my admonishment complete.

I was rattled by all this and wanted to go out, feeling the miasma of Cath's disapproval as I felt my way down the stairs in a house thrown into darkness at nine o'clock. Anxious people are never content only with fucking themselves up but see those closest to them as unsigned recruits. I texted the woman I met a few weeks ago outside the pub. "You about? Bored shitless. Just had an argument with my landlady. I'm going down the park if you want to come. I can get us some drink." She didn't reply but I went down anyway.

It was a mild still night, the plane trees almost denuded, just thin witches' fingers left; but most of the magic shouted down by the cars. The council has taken a third of a small park and given it over to foam-floored play spaces for children, giving us alkies fewer seats to share. There were four men there I didn't know. We didn't approach each other. I smelt an effort on their speech, something a bit dissembling.

The same evening I accidentally bought one hundred and fifty-four second class stamps. My mother sent me five hundred pounds the other day. It comes from the meagre savings of a woman who has never owned property, and has nothing but the state pension to live on. She refuses to accept any refund, so the ruse was to buy her fifty pounds' worth of stamps, as she's a keen letter writer.

I could have sworn I got a message saying the transaction hadn't gone through, so I tried it again. Same error message. Then I got two emails from paypal thanking me for my business, with two orders of fifty-two pounds to Royal Mail.