I meet a homophobic man wearing a gimp mask

My bonkers stalker texts me the night before the Euros final. "I'm watching the football tomorrow at the Venturers Arms. Hope you won't be there."

I didn't fancy her offer of coquetry and mental illness, so stayed on the settee with Mel, who could have turned a profit by predicting both the score and the first goal scorer. Apart from a couple of matches involving Turkey and Georgia, and our semi-final against the Netherlands, I found it a disappointing tournament, and got tired with the endlessly repeated banality about Southgate being too defensive, which, at peak-Euros, seemed to constitute the greater part of male speech. I have no understanding of football beyond knowing when it entertains me, or fails to do so.

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As everyone in Bristol knows, there is a desperate shortage of student housing. Developers, based in Jersey, Luxembourg and elsewhere, have shown admirable alacrity in rising to this need, turning any piece of land larger than a blanket into flats reserved for this afflicted section of Bristol's population.

A street away behind me, a machine like a huge yellow insect, or one of those mechanical art installations that shithole towns get allocated, bashes and shuffles its way towards ninety flats. Two hundred and ninety-nine more are planned for another site close to me. Already, in one of the poorest parishes in the city, the bakers at the top of my road charges £4.50 for a sourdough loaf.

I quite enjoy raising objections to planning applications, and still enjoy the occasional ripple of a years old and successful contest in which we thwarted Lancaster Priory's plans to build a car park at the highest and prettiest viewpoint in the city itself. We ran them out of money. Everyone who advised us did it pro bono; they were paying specialist London barristers, before someone in a very posh form of dog collar told them to leave it.

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To Southsea, with my eldest and my niece (whom I hardly know). We had some delicious nosh and then went for a dip in the sea, so gave my garish swimming shorts their English summer debut. The current was quite strong pushing us away from our clothes. We had a cuppa at niecey's flat right by the prom and on the corner of the high street.

On the train back me and the eldest got nobbled a bit by a rather over-chatty woman who told us of the various flats she's been kicked out of. We were relieved when she got off at Southampton.

Back in Bristol, I was walking home and I saw a twentysomething black man in a lime green gimp mask squatting down and saying something on the other side of the street. Then I saw the camera. "Are you making a film?" I asked him. He said it was a new video for an old single and gave me his stage name and the name of the track. I googled for him and he's one of the biggest rappers in South Africa; unfortunately, homophobic as well, so we'll delete that encounter from the records.