Trainee

To Lancaster, for a job interview; same job as I'm doing now, but in the hospital up there.

Me and two senior nurses cosied up in a tiny room where the door had to be locked behind me lest it hit my head when opened.

"So, it's a fifteen hour contract...." Astonished, I wondered how on earth I had missed that crucial detail. I went through with it, then went down the pub and had a highly entertaining afternoon with a retired lawyer I know who looks like a derelict ex-plasterer, and two unlikely friends of his.

Back to Bristol for a single day's work I couldn't get out of, then back up to Lancaster with Mel for a dancey house night with New York plate-spinner Todd Terry. Kirsty came along as well. I was delighted to be effusively welcomed by two attractive women I used to work with many years ago at Morecambe Jobcentre. Look at the kind of women I knock about with up here.

There was a difficult couple of hours, sat chatting in the open-air bar while my mistimed e and acid came on. I got colder and colder, wasting the energy of the pill on shivering. We went inside, danced amidst a friendly crowd with none of the ageism that is everywhere in Bristol's clubs, to some of whom, for a reason I can't fathom, I appeared to look like a drug dealer. A quite insistent woman asked me if I had anything on me. I sold her a pill, and then an hour later she came back for another. I wish I'd taken up several, and recouped the cost of the entire weekend.

We stayed in Morecambe, whose sky gifted us its vast ground of infinitely graduated colours; to walk along Morecambe prom, with the foothills of the Lake District on the other side of "the crooked bay", (as its Brythonic name means), is one of the most spiritually nourishing and aesthetically rewarding things you can do for free in Lancashire.

On the platform at Morecambe's puny modern station, shunted behind the fine late Victorian one, now an arts venue, the local railway company was using AI to save money on publicity. Mel said "Is that what you're like in the north then? Fat, disabled and your machines don't work?"

On Monday I was told I hadn't got the job (which I'd have refused anyway). I saw a much better one, back on the railway, offering just short of double my current salary. I got through the written application, then asked our semi-adopted daughter to do the computer tests for me, a bewildering suite of video games involving pressing p if the number is even within a jagged shape, or something, which they aver indicates your ability to help disabled people onto trains and to calm down gangs of pissed-up football supporters doing coke in the toilets.

She did well, and I now have to record another disembodied remote video interview, where a machine asks you to describe a situation in which you demonstrated resilience, changed your management style and other things I've never done, after which, if I am successful, I will finally be invited to a face-to-face quizzing.