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 an agency. It's basically cleaning, and serving them their food. It's dull, but sometimes you meet amusing people -- demented natives as patients and, occasionally, 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.