Smoggie ghosts

The job problem rumbles on, as it has done for most of my life, seeing as I don't want to work, except in a decently-paid, interesting job, of which there are very few for an unambitious drifter like me.

I cashed in a pension acquired when I was working for a catering agency down here. It had a total value of £2,700, from which was deducted 25% for tax, and that's what I've been living on since I left Transport That Fails. That's run out now and I'm on the credit card again.

I've got an interview for a job as "housekeeper" at the big hospital. I've done it before, through that same agency. It's basically cleaning, and serving them their food. It's dull and repetitive, but sometimes you meet amusing people -- demented natives as patients and interesting foreigners looking after them.

There was also a job advertised for a guard on the trains based at Bristol's main station. I have had nothing but strife trying to get back onto the railway -- a proper railway company I mean, not somewhere like Transport That Fails where they announce your shifts for the week ahead on Thursday. I texted Mel saying that I'm not sure I wanted to go through all the aggro of railway applications again, and she said to apply anyway. "It's a job where I think you'd be happy." I was glad she said that, and I've just come off the website having done so.

My brother, who is closely involved with a football club on Teeside, turned sixty last weekend, and arranged for the immediate family to watch a match from one of what they call the "executive boxes". There was endless tea for my mother, who would be happy if she were piped in to a samovar.

She didn't want to go out in the cold to watch the game, and a kind and helpful person from the club put her onto one of those hydraulic seats, where she was raised, at the push of a lever, to have a good view of the pitch. You'll go a long way to find people friendlier than the Smoggies (people from Middlesbrough).

The weekend felt short; usually weekends with my family drag. My nephew showed us this astonishing photograph. A friend of his was in a friend's house, testing a new phone. She took what she intended to be a single photograph, but pressed the wrong button and it zipped through several frames, in only one of which there is a black-clad figure bent menacingly over the bed.