Short Leg

When I went on holiday to France in July, I had abandoned any hope of getting further with a job application for trainee guard, and had forgotten about making up some bullshit about why someone residing in Bristol is applying for a job in Yorkshire.

To my surprise, my application was "progressed" (maybe in a few years it'll be "grown"), and I was invited to take a computer-based test which involves identifying particular non-geometric shapes from rows of similar ones, which the Department of Transport Logistics Delivery Resources Solutions Management at Swindon University Institute has shown to be a reliable indicator of whether you can be helpful and polite to a disabled person as you're fixing the ramp and wheeling them onto a train.

I have never passed this test, in several attempts. Fortunately our semi-adopted daughter offered to do it for me. She took the test in the bright Breton sunshine, submitted the results, and a few days later I was invited for interview. After the interview ("Why are you the outstanding candidate for this job?" I'm not outstanding, what a fucking stupid question), I prematurely started looking for flats on wrongmove.

I must have created quite an impression on them, because after an 11am interview they emailed at 4pm to tell me that I hadn't got it.

For a few days it's quite depressing; the rejection like feels like that you experience during online dating. This is the fifth time I've got that far and failed at the final hurdle. I come across better on paper than in real life. But maybe sixth time lucky: I've another interview on Friday, in Bristol this time.

I had a sporting time last weekend. My brother bought me a birthday present ticket to day two of England v Sri Lanka at Old Trafford, then the following day me and the youngest, together with Shrimpy, went to Doncaster to see Morecambe lose 1-0.

At the station on the way down I bumped into a woman I used to work with in a pizza place thirty-five years ago. She was with her husband and her daughter, who remembered going to dance classes with mine in a cold, derelict premises with some sort of old Victorian iron press thing in the corner.

The mother is round my age and still very attractive, with this underplayed, unintentionally sexy smile and physical calm, which is unaltered from when I was watching her waitressing as I was doing the washing-up.

When we got into the taxi at Donny to take us to the ground, the taxi driver said "is that the railway station?" Our goalkeeper gifted them the goal by fannying about with the ball just outside the penalty area rather than deploying a good old-fashioned Fourth Division hoof up the pitch.

On the Sunday I had a couple in my Lancaster local, where I met an eighty-eight-year-old man who told me he'd have to have his todger cut off because he got cancer in it. "They call me Stumpy now."