There is a man in my room in the middle of the night

Back from holiday, to the din of the suburbs on a Sunday morning. The endless angle-grinding and sawing and banging deployed on houses that will never finally satisfy their owners.

My flight was from Gatwick at 0645, so I booked an airbnb within walking distance. Leaving the airport, there are signs for public footpaths which lead you over railway tracks in caged tunnels, and into a sylvan hinterland in which I ended up completely lost. Every bit of guesswork either took me further into the woods, or lead to a wire fence with barbed wire on its top.

After a long time of wandering, lugging my bag and feeling silly -- despite me seeing no-one, on account of my airport lounge dress style -- I decided to "retrace" my steps, if only I knew them. At last I came back to the terminal. I tried one more time and headed the other way, which landed me on a curving A-road where the only signs were for KFC and McDonald's. I gave up and got a big padded taxi driven by a big padded black man who was uninterested in my account of my peregrination, shouted from behind the plastic partition.

I settled into my bed. In the middle of the night, a man unlocked the door, went for a piss, then said "oh God! Sorry! Sorry!" And left.

The walk to the terminal next morning was a mystifyingly simple ten-minute walk. At 5am, the airport's bars looked like Bristol on a Saturday night. I had a pint of ale for seven pounds.

I spent a fortnight swimming, eating, drinking, playing cards with the girls, and reading -- To The Lighthouse and a witty John le Carré novel called The Naive and Sentimental Lover, which has a repugnant, bullying and vainglorious writer as its protagonist.

I bought Mel a necklace from the market, made from small tumbled semi-precious stones by someone in the next town along, who let me stumble on in my creaky French without jumping in in English. We went to a fest-noz -- a concert of Breton dancing and music accompanied by some pricey outdoor local food and drink. The cost of drinking out in France continues to soar, whereas to get sozzled at home costs next to nothing: a 25 or 33ml beer in a bar was anything from €3.50 to €5.00, whereas decent cider can be had from the supermarket for €2 a litre.

Back to work, and an online Health and Safety course, which has been adapted from an old Albanian Internal Security Department Torture Manual to see how much boredom you can stand. But then we got on to the Anti-Discrimination course, from which I learnt a great deal.

Drugs are dangerous for men. Ibuprofen can lead to brown ale and cod liver oil.

When a gay man and a black one work together, the gay man must avoid looking at the way that the black man is fiddling with his knobs, as this can lead to a nuclear explosion.

If you are accused of racial discrimination, you will be put on a very small chair at your hearing.

Ties on men can avert a nuclear explosion in a way that requiring women to wear bikinis cannot, so the requirements are different.