Mel turns me down

On Christmas morning, we unwrap our presents with a touch of ceremony, one by one. My youngest daughter unwraps a David Shrigley mug depicting a cow being milked. The cow is looking back at her milker saying "what the hell do you think you are doing?" But my daughter is crestfallen.

"You don't like it?" "You gave me this last year, Dad."

It felt a long time off work; I didn't expect to be granted so much annual leave, and then there were the strikes. Going back, I felt anxious, as though I'd forgotten what I was supposed to do. I applied for a job as a guard, but failed at the first hurdle.

The first stage was a test lasting forty-five sweaty minutes, where you have to click on the shape at the beginning of the line and a given shape, from long lines of shapes. I could feel myself getting more and more tense. I kept knocking a small pile of magazines and papers with my mouse and lost my temper with it, and in the angry sweep of arm to rid me of the journals, I also knocked over a pot of coffee. It splashed all over the carpet and the radiator and the wall halfway through the test. I couldn't stop the test, so it's soaked in nicely.

I'm disappointed, but perhaps a man who leaves all his clothes on a train before a foreign holiday, and similarly disposes of his presents before visiting his rellies for Christmas, isn't really up to a job where you have to remember rules and colours and what this button does and where the train is.

I had to come back to Bristol to work for a few days in between Christmas and New Year. There was a pleasantly chatty bloke on the train one day. He was going home to L---, and asking me things about myself, which men rarely do. I said "it's a OK job, bit of a doss, just the hours can be a bit demanding, starting at 5am sometimes."

"So what do you do?" "I'm a criminal mate, just got out of Cardiff [prison]. It's brilliant, you just come out and the station is just there" -- as though he were giving a tripadvisor review about its accessibility to public transport.

It was an enjoyably untypical week on the railway, free from the wordless worker bees bent over their inane spreadsheets, which are so important, they can't possibly talk to anyone other than their managers; and instead, we got crims and pissed-up sparkly-dressed women from Cwmbrân.

The honeymoon period is over with Mel. I had an involuntary half hour stay in Port Talbot the other day. I used my work phone to look at "attractions in Port Talbot". There is a Baked Bean Museum of Excellence, run by a man who changed his name by deed poll to Captain Beany, and I noticed some C19th Welsh Methodist chapels with their austere classicism and inscriptions in Welsh on the entablature.

I rang Mel to suggest a day out in a baked bean museum followed by a couple of hours in draughty Welsh chapels, but I'm not sure she saw the romance in it. There was what I took as a bemused silence, before she exclaimed "of course not!"