Chelsea 5 Morecambe 0

I got through to the final selection for cabin crew on a budget airline. I get off at the nearest station and start walking to the "country hotel". A young Asian woman a few yards ahead of me checks her phone and starts on the same route.

At the hotel, the bulky young receptionist gives me what I interpret as a "what? you?" visual scan as I tell her I'm there for the assessment day. Have you read Boule de Suif by Maupassant? I thought in return.

In the waiting area I am outnumbered: two other men, thirty women, and of them all, I'm the oldest. We get called in for two physical checks: one to see how high you can reach, and The Test That Dare Not Say Its Name, where you click yourself inside a fixed-length seatbelt, which is designed to sift out bodies like that inhabited by the receptionist. The little Asian girl isn't tall enough. I felt for her -- she was the only other one of us I saw walking to the hotel rather than being taken there in nice cars.

We get the company bingo. It's like being part of a family, we'll make proper friends for life and you'll end up trusting your colleagues with it. The last bit at least, might be true. We're put into groups and have to match up parts of a cut-up photograph, then we have to design and pitch an idea for a new type of hotel. Someone suggests the Easter Hotel, so we drew up ideas involving eggs and chocolate. I did my presentation in the form of a radio advert from a chocolate company.

We had a nervous dinner break while we waited to see who'd be called to the final interviews. My name was read out on the list of those escaping the cull. I then had to wait a long time and in the meantime chatted and swapped numbers with a couple of girls as we sat in the static, timeless artificiality of a hotel's huge windows. I was starting to get caught up in it by now and wanted both the job and the money (an experienced hand said you should easily clear two grand a month).

A week later, I received an email that began with those gloomy words, "[T]hank you for attending..."

Morecambe drew Chelsea away in the third round of the FA Cup. All three of my daughters, from Lancaster, Dublin and Manchester, converged on Stamford Bridge, and then we were to meet up with one of my old pals from when my daughters spent most of their time in cribs in a one-bed flat on Ruislip High Street.

On the train to London I had the pleasure of being stuck on a table of four with three middle-aged, articulate women who were talking between themselves, mainly about their men and boyfriends and a divorce. I was feigning a lack of interest, looking out of the window, in order to get them talking more, but eventually the facade cracked and we had one of those conversations amongst strangers on a train that people who spend the time plugged in and scrolling away, have never tasted.

A thousand or so of us marched through Chelsea to protest against the ownership situation at our club. It was a delight to see a woman, dressed head to toe in designer gear, being ignored as she beeped at us to let her and her fancy car out of a side street.

At half-time, with Chelsea scoring from a lucky deflection and our goalie having saved a penalty, I thought we were in with a shout, but things unravelled in the second half. The atmosphere was rather flat, perhaps because of all the corporate guests and foreigners that Chelsea attracts, but that just provoked us into singing our heads off.

We met up with my old pan from London, whom I've not met for almost as long as the children are old. We used to attended meet-ups with a group of people united only by their membership of a pre-social media usenet group. They were some of the most drunken nights in my life, and included the only time I've spent a small part of the night in bed with a man and a woman.

We found the coldest Indian restaurant in west London, where, however, the food was delicious. More importantly, everything went well socially with my pal and the girls. Once they'd left he said he envied me having daughters like those. I thought he'd come from somewhere in north London, but he'd actually invested a lot of time and effort schlepping from Suffolk. I was flattered that he thought it worth it.

And to return to where I began: I've almost completed another hurdle race and have an assessment day and interview for a buffet steward position based in Newcastle. Freezing cold, but near Kim, and an hour away from my mum, sister and youngest brother. I haven't disclosed any of this to Mel.