Three days' work in a school canteen. Young Italian chef who was once told by an Indian hotel manager that he was "doing the pasta wrong". A brigade of middle-aged women, some of the anonymous saints who do the poorly paid work that holds up everyone else's vanity.

They were friendly, funny and foul-mouthed. Their manager is off on long-term sick which they are all hoping will become final; she insists on throwing food away rather than letting the staff have a meal.

"It doesn't matter, we all take the piss out of her behind her back," said Jules, before going into an exaggerated dance where she thrust her hips forward and crossed and uncrossed her arms in front of them, accompanying it with a sforzato "take, that, bitch!"

The sous chef was a cheery Rasta who, seeing a new dog in a pack, had to establish his place in the hierarchy. We got on fine; all I had to do was nod and say "wow, really, did you?" all the time. I felt a bit sorry for him at the end though because out of nine hundred children only two chose a pot noodle thing he made, and it's shit seeing the food you've made getting sluiced.

We walked back to the bus stop together and the unenglish cultural pattern of constant touching came out. I normally welcome any tactile punctuation (Kitty is lovely at it), but there was something a bit challenging about the way he kept putting him arm against mine. I wished it were the women I were walking with.

I'm going up to Lancaster later this afternoon for essential travel reasons, as these Lindt bunnies are going to melt soon if they don't spend four hours on a train. Me and my shit telly and red wine little boos will all be together for the first time since Christmas.

Eldest has landed a TEFL job in the state school system in Russia, middle one is looking for acting jobs (she's a graduate of a well-known drama school down here), and doing FOH in a Manchester theatre as soon as it re-opens, and youngest is doing Chinstroking and French at mine and her mum's alma mater, and playing in two bands. Then there's our semi-adoptee, who's had to stifle a few tears in her young life and is counted as one of us now. I love my little clan of girls.

Last weekend, Mel suggested her coming over and staying for two nights. "We could relax a bit more." I smilingly acceded to the suggestion for as long as she could see my face, then let it unmask into worry in the kitchen. Is it now that the little irritations start? The sexless "tiredness"?

In fact, the weekend didn't seem a moment too long. Mel's spent most of the past thirty years in Greece, so I overcooked us a spanokopitta, which came out rather dry and spongy. She'd said that the oven was fast, so I turned the heat down and left it in longer, but in future I'll just follow the recipe.

It didn't matter at all. Afterwards, she put on the shoes, and my other investments. We turned up the heating, which, handily for lovers, is included in the rent here. She looked down at her tits, bemused. She doesn't find herself as sexy as I do.

Reporting this to Kim after she'd left, Kim said "so, looby, are you going to have your Boring Years now? Stable girlfriend, own flat?"

I went to the bingo and raffle afternoon yesterday and sat with some of the other rezzies in my block. I was nervous about how I'd fit in, and felt scrutinised at first, but as the chicken legs and chocolate rolls kicked in everyone relaxed.

We're not allowed to sit in the communal lounge, so we're all in the right angle of a corridor instead. Six women, two blokes. "Oh!" said Keith. "So you've come for your initiation then?" Carol juggled her tits when 88 came up, and I said "ey up, double trouble". "Don't make me jealous!" said Lena. Brenda farted as I was going to get one of my prizes. "Was that you?" I said. "Don't mistake me for a lady, love." I wondered if we were being secretly filmed by Ken Loach.

They knew all the phrases for the numbers, a folk knowledge that will die out soon, with words like "fat" and "legs" being censored as mechanical numbers-only bingo takes over. I was taught several new ones. like 77, Sunset Strip; 69, Yours and Mine.

I won a tube of hand cream, a tin of baked beans and a packet of cheese straws in the raffle. Brenda asked me afterwards if I'd enjoyed it and I said "no, it were shit." I helped with the tidying up, in order to conceal from the block's management evidence of us associating.

I picked up the post from my old address the other day. If one simply ignores debts, they eventually dwindle and die.

I left work at The Big House last night, and walked along quiet residential streets to get my bus, strongly conscious of my privilege in worrying far less than the women I saw (and quietly tried to avoid), who were engaged in the same blameless activity that was Sarah Everard's last act.

I am sick of it all, and of the 80% male police force who employed her murderer tacitly indicating to women at the demonstration in London, that they shouldn't be in public places, at night.

As I return after sitting in the park with the LRB drinking, the smoking clan is in the doorway. Inside, the weekly bingo party, along with the chicken legs and sausage rolls, is hotting up. I want to join in one day but I have to decline the invite as I'm back at the The Big House later. Not many people in this block work, their main objective being never to let their lungs have a glimpse of clarity.

Mel has also found herself a social housing flat. It's spacious, with a shared garden, in a sixties arboreally-named street. One would think Bristol was teeming with dark fruit. As in my block, it contains preventative fixtures to arm us against the falls we're expected to take.

My flat still has sections of raw particleboard flooring showing, a visual irritation I can't afford to conceal at the moment. Someone on The Instatok said that she sealed hers with clear PVC glue and then painted on it, but the thought of doing anything DIY-ish gives me a shiver of distaste and anticipatory incompetence, an instance of which might be my only completed job on the flat so far -- covering the interrogation-quality fluorescent light in the kitchen with front covers of the LRB, which I heard somewhere is printed in a flame-retardant ink.

The other night, Mr Patel in the corner shop said to me "no, for you sir, two for four-fifty."

I went to put my recycling out the other day, bottles sticking akimbo out of my carrier bag, and one of the other rezzies said "oh! You're going to fit in really well here!"

It takes less than a fortnight to aquire a reputation in a new suburb if one behaves consistently.

Littérateurs: has anyone else struggled a bit with Cafavy? I'm halfway through his collected poems and it sounds like the pub bore cut up into shorter lines. If anyone can give me a key, I'd be grateful.

From Perception, trans. Evangelos Sacherperoglou

The years of my youth, my sensuous life---
how clearly I see their meaning now!

What useless, what futile repentances...

But I couldn't see their meaning then.

From Painted

I'm careful about my work and cherish it.
But today I'm disheartened by the slow pace of composition.
The day has affected me. Its aspect
keeps growing darker. All wind and rain.
I'd rather look at things than speak about them.

Eight-nine pages in, I'd rather he would too.

Ah-ha! Finally worked out how to get the internet on the rather complicated router-clock-intercom-VoIP phone contraption in my new flat.

I moved in on Wednesday. The removal man was called Mr Stent, so I was worried he'd have a heart attack as he struggled with my sofa.

Having been barred by the block's management from using the communal lounge for their weekly raffle and bingo, the residents now come closer in the corridor. Me, Mr Stent and a cheerily helpful resident barged apologetically between them, arresting their dabbers poised over possibly remunerative numbers.

Mel came round and watched me timidly wire up the electric cooker her friend had given me. I poked the on switch and leapt back. A silent elemental red started glowing under the black screen.

Just as everything was in, I got a phone call offering me an almshouse. Whilst the nature of the tenancy here is highly attractive, the neighbourhood -- where vegetables are harder to find than pornography -- is not. This is not the gaily coloured Bristol of the postcards; it's white, working class suburbia, where B&M Bargains is your best bet for a food shop. The almshouse is in the city centre, a bungalow in a quiet street behind one of the oldest churches in Bristol.

The next day I rang the manager to express a concern. I'd heard that some almshouses impose in the Licence a prohibition on overnight guests. She confirmed that this was the case in St Joseph's Close, so I declined the offer, and omitted to say anything about how the poor are always expected to be models of chastity in a way never demanded of people with their own housing.

Besides, the accommodation seems to have a baleful effect on one's health: this is the (uncropped) picture on their website with which they lure potential residents.

Mel came round for the weekend. I was nervous about the volume at which she wanted the music on, and we have very few overlapping areas in our Venn diagrams of likes. Had I not insisted on us improvising our own soundtrack, she'd have had it on whilst we had sex.

She was disappointed by my dinner offering of three-day-old reduced price quiche, cauliflower, sprouts and carrots. I agree that that ensemble might lack a certain seductive allure, but my kitchen armoury until yesterday consisted of two dinner knives and forks, and a saucepan. The carrots, refusing the blunt edge of the knife, turned my worktop into a skid pan. I am also financially wrung out from overlapping rent payments at Cath's and here.

She refused it, and all I could offer instead was scrambled eggs. I usually warm plates, so I poured some boiling water onto hers. Turning into the living room to humour her, aware that I had displeased her, I then returned to the eggs. Forgetting my plate-warming technique, I plonked them down into the hot water.

"I'm a bit disappointed looby. I thought you were going to cook something nice for me. 'Oh, I can make a souffle!' and now it's out-of-date quiche."

"It was in date when I bought it. Anyway it's nicer at room temperature." "Yeah but not three days."

But we're at the sexed-up stage where desire can stifle arguments, and a couple of hours and a bottle of wine later she asked "do you want me to dress up?", a cock-hardening question which I pretended to be reluctant in answering. The sex, now I'm free from Cath's supervision, was the best yet. Selfish, for both of us, many overlapping pleasures. "I like it when you're in all this," I said. "It reduces you to sex."

As I was sitting in the park the other day, a little girl walked past and enquired of her parents, "is that a normal man?"

On Thursday I was alone in a courtroom, controlling the technical side of an online application hearing, which would normally have been held with all parties present in that room.

I get an email, which was sent round to everyone in the Court, from the post clerk. "Could whoever did this" -- and there was a photograph of an envelope I'd addressed to Helen in Norway, sending her my change of address card -- "please be careful in future. This was very nearly missed. Air mail must be clearly marked as such."

Coming down back into the open plan office, where every error is public, I was hot with shame. By the way she muted her normally perky chatter as she spoke to me, I knew that one of my colleagues had recognised my handwriting and had reported it.

I bade as cheery a good afternoon to everyone as my reddened face would allow, and resigned by text the following morning. I sent a separate message to my manager. "I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience this has...", then re-wrote it as "...I have caused." She was magnanimous. "It's alright, just as long as you are OK. Feel free to ring me for a chat."

But I wasn't going back, the photograph of the fraudster's envelope having been circulated as courtly samizdat.

It felt liberating, and as for work, there's plenty of cleaning shifts at the hospital, and I'm still working at The Big House. It's a liberation. Lettergate only hastened a decision to leave which I had planned anyway. I only wish my colleague who had found me out had just had a quiet word with me, instead of betraying me.

My family have been so pleased for me becoming a civil servant, which they see as an elevation into a respectable and ordered class, that I haven't told them that I'm back scrubbing toilets -- for an hourly rate inferior by ten pence.

On my first shift back at the hospital, as I was cleaning a sink, a patient said to me "this canula's still leaking." "Oh right OK, I'll tell a nurse." "Oh, sorry, I didn't realise you were a domestic." No, neither did I.

Me and Mel went to the new flat. We bumped into some of the other denizens of the block, all maskless. "Can I introduce myself? My name's looby and this is my girlfriend Mel." Nods and smiles all round. We stood about while Billie, perhaps the unofficial concierge, told us of the improvised social programme now that the landlord has forbidden us from using the capacious communal lounge. Those that like society meet up on Wednesday afternoons where the corridor turns a right angle outside her flat.

"We do a raffle and have a cup of tea and a biscuit. If you want to join in you can buy something yourself or you can give me a fiver and I'll get the prizes." I wondered about the "cup of tea", suspecting that the odd small sherry might form part of our games of chance.

Pleased at the opening account we gave of ourselves, we left them to go to the flat, where we ordered pizza and a bottle of wine. There being no carpets, nor a bed, Mel had to stand up to get her dessert.

But at the moment, I'm still sharing a house with Cath, who was enthused by reading the other day that people in our sub-postcode are encouraged to do "surge testing" -- so under her cosh, yet another bit of retching on a twisting cotton bud, cooking up her anxiety catnip for her, fuel for her evangelism of worry.