A Goidelic weekend

Just to get the regular column, Failed Attempts At Finding A New Job, out of the way first: I failed an online assessment to become a signalman. I used to be a signalman.

To Aberdeen, where my DJ pal was having his 60th. Over the Forth and Tay Bridges, past sandy beaches and through forests.

I was in first class, sat opposite a well-to-do foursome: the parents and their daughters, softly furnished in expensive fabrics. Mother caught her necklace in some way, and a diamond popped out. We all enthusiastically joined in with the search. Bent double under my seat, I was calculating the chances of being able to hide it from them should I find it. It turned up in one of those glossy shopping bags with string handles that posh clothes shops give out.

I've never been to a city made of granite before, and Aberdeen is a striking, angular city. You can get some precise corners and straight lines in granite. It's a contrast to the constantly eroding limestone of Lancaster, and the only slightly firmer Bath stone of Bristol.

An hour or so before the end of the night, a friend came up to apologise for having to leave early. Unfortunately he'd somehow been discovered in the toilets with some Pepsi; fortunately, not until after we'd shared some between us.

The following day I flew to Dublin. The eldest and her girlfriend were moving out of their shared house to another a couple of streets away. Their tenancy finishes on Friday; their new one starts on Saturday. The landlady is charging them £50 to stay until Saturday morning.

We tottered along in the drizzle carrying precariously balanced piles of boxes round to the new place. The kerbs were troublesome. The girls in the new place are friendly health workers, but it's so unjust that two young teachers can't afford to rent a place to themselves.

My daughter took me to a cracking Irish music pub where I was all agog at hearing the uileann pipes played live for the first time. I mistook the tune the lad was playing for Kitty Got A Clinking Coming from the Fair, but once I mentioned that, we were bezzies.

At one point the concertina player waved away someone who was filming them, a gesture I was pleased to see. It's so depressing that even in (or because it is such) an excellent music pub, many young people raise their phones, making their 360 degree mobile phone panoramas to buff their social media pages.

I went to the doctor's to have my Man MOT the other day. They invite you in once you hit sixty. I've got high blood pressure and "very high" cholesterol. The latter surprised me. I don't eat meat, I've never driven a car, walk everywhere, and am on my feet for hours at a time at work. Apart from drinking a lake of alcohol every year, the "lifestyle changes" recommended on a website they sent me to, are ways I've lived for decades.