I am panting next to a teenage girl

I finally pluck up courage to attempt the cycle ride into work. It's not the distance (about three-and-a-quarter miles), it's the ascent -- Google reckons it's 305ft, and there's a particularly tough stretch just before I reach the hospital. Well it is for me -- cyclists of both sexes overtake me.

To my left on the pavement next to me, is a teenage girl in school uniform. I am conscious that I am panting heavily a few feet away from her. Try as I might, I cannot get ahead of her. At this point in the climb, the top speed I can manage is the same as the walking pace of a 14-year-old. I was glad when she turned off the road.

The journey took me thirty-five minutes. Going past the signs announcing a smoke-free site, you arrive through the mass of smokers who congregate outside every hospital in the land.

Our trainer took the job, I surmise, for its opportunities to over-share. We all know how much she spent on toiletries in the supermarket last weekend; we know about her unusual domestic arrangement with her ex and his girlfriend; we know about her predilections for gin and rugby.

We watch videos of grinning nurses who work in that fabulous hospital where they have plenty of time to sit on the bed and chat (close-up of a thirtysomething hand holding an eightysomething one); followed by more smiling, the type with the tilted heads that advertisers use on cremation adverts.

But she's likeable and has some good stories. One day, she was using an online translator to ask an Indian gentleman whether this would be a good time for her to wash him. She showed him the screen, upon which he looked horrified and crouched into a ball. She later learned from one of the Asian staff that she'd asked him whether this was a good time to give him a wank.

Me, Mel, and her longstanding friend, go out for a drink down the Harbourside. We start in "The Architect". With a name like that, I dislike the place before we even start. Things improved when we went across the bridge to The Sticky Table, both in price, and the view.

Mel's friend was wearing this flimsy short greeny-blue skirt. She was sat to my right, and she kept raising her leg to put it on the bar underneath the table. As she did so, her skirt performed one of the most erotic movements that skirt fabric can do (and skirts have a large repertoire in this mode). She tugged at it to restore it to something approaching its normal height, whilst I silently urged her with all my mental might, to refrain from doing so.