Two mornings at the hospital, training sessions under suffocating mouth and nose masks which provoke the very face scratching that we are to avoid. We are issued with gaily coloured lanyards; I wonder when they'll turn black. To my relief, we are told that we won't be involved in inserting the needles into the patients' veins. I stand around as it's explained to me, all meaningless. I mean, having a value. I don't care about it.

We are told the job might not be full time. That might be handy, if I can work out how much I could get on Universal Credit. I don't want to work at all, really.

I ring Hayley, but disturb her as she is going to bed, at half past nine in the morning. Later, she dances up to me in the street, shouldering her tits and switching her miniskirted arse. She hands over the the fifty pounds I lent her a fortnight ago. I stop in surprise. Back at hers, the table is dotted with lumps of crack of varying sizes. Wasn't expecting Harry though. Face control to look pleased to see him.

Harry doesn't last long and goes off to deal with some commerce. Hayley starts on a recitation of some injustice in the division of the drug that will form the chronic leitmotiv of the ensuing hours. She's endlessly generous with me though, pipe after pipe of the grey clouds going gratis into my brain.

There's a phone call which snaps Hayley into action. She has been trying to persuade her dealer to come out to the woods for a "bike ride". She washes and half-dries her hair, changes her miniskirt, applies mascara, and puts her long brown boots on.

He's an amusing, voluble Irishman, who possesses that welcome trait in a drug dealer, of not hanging around. "Love you lots! Ring me!" she says, following him out.

"Do you think he fancies me?" We're suddenly at the school disco, but on crack and speed. I hadn't noticed anything, but I tell her that she's very fit and no man's going to turn her down if she showed an interest in him.

She rakes her hair. One splayed frond curves across her cheek and under her chin, the greater mass a corrugated approximation of a bob. She's back-lit against the window. We swap first time masturbation stories. She says that Harry filmed her masturbating from a tiny camera inside the telly. "You're heading for the loony bin you are."

I don't want to go, but I am aware of Cath's yanking leash, like Flo greeting Andy Capp. "I think we're stuck with each other now, don't you?" I say. "For life," she says.

A green light paints the pavement. A tiny cafe, converted tonight to a party venue. Six people were dancing inside, two more outside. "You're the family I never had," she texts, as I'm at the bus stop. A black man comes to the shelter and stands outside it. I'm a bit nervous, wishing he would sit in the shelter with me.

The following day, we're all down the park, and Hayley is one boring stream of complaints against Harry, who is doing his best, fetching Doritos and cider and reduced price sandwiches from Tesco. "He keeps saying he loves me. Means fuck all. You can love your cat."

I wish he could have stood up then, to give her a good verbal bollocking, followed later by an equally good rodding over the settee, instead of using that reasoning voice of a soft-cocked vicar that she finds so irritating.

A couple of days' work at The Big House. It starts with an hour for breakfast, sitting in a huge bay window, before me and Beryl attempt to iron the king size duvet covers and other bedding, all linen and silk, reluctant to yield their creases. It's a pity Beryl likes the television on all the time; otherwise it would be somnolent work.

Down the park with Hayley and Harry, her friend Tammy, who put her up in her High Gothic art gallery flat for a few weeks when she was homeless, and Tammy's Aussie boyfriend. I'm impatient to see Tammy again. I told Hayley once that I find Tammy very attractive, and she gave me the look that one might give a disloyal boyfriend.

Tammy shows us her new toes, newly straight after an operation and a month being pinned along a metal plate, correcting years of being crammed into high heels. There is much planning about going for a piss, now that the pubs are shut, and we relay to a spot underneath the bridge. It's a chatty, easy afternoon, no-one dominating. I think about Tammy in high heels.

Hayley and Harry separately tell me, with am dram eyebrow raising, of an enterprise they want us to start, both telling me to keep it quiet from the other. We are to set up a coke operation in Bath. It's a risible scheme. Hayley would swindle me and smoke any profits. But I go along with it, not wanting to cloud our sunny mood, nor the in-group air they're enjoying creating for me.

The following day, at hers, her cigarette smoke follows me wherever I stand. She talks about her son, and her friend Faye, with whom Hayley's dealer Nick is smitten.

"You should have seen it. She's never met Nick before, and his fucked-up wife is taking ages getting the rock ready, and she says 'look, it's not like you've not done this before so don't fuck us about. £40 is a lot bigger than that. And get a fucking move on.' She went off in a huff to the front room, but slammed down a massive rock, much more than £40. Nick was open-mouthed, and you could see it -- it was like he fell in love, right there."

"So she's in the front room and Nick goes to the loo. When he gets down he says 'where's L---?'. 'Don't know. In the front room. I don't care, it's nice and quiet without her.' He went into the front room came back with this funny look on his face. She was smacked out on the floor."

"Anyway, he talks about her all the time. So I'm going to milk him a bit, say Faye was wondering if you could sort her out with a couple of g's, and hope he doesn't ask for any money."

Hayley started talking about her night and day with the former Fish Importer, who has now moved out of mackerel and into crack. The posh lunch, the pub where they went dancing, "...and he's a great fuck. Harry can't... get it up." And she looked at the ground, planning; she jumped up and texted our fishy friend.

I walk part of the way back to Harry's with her. When we part, we hug, and kiss, on the lips. There's a moment when I wonder if it'll turn into a proper kiss. We look at each other for a second; the moment passes.

Three afternoons spent on a disembodied group video call, during one of which my computer overheats and can only be persuaded to rejoin the presentation when provided with freezer packs under its arse. We are shown colour-coded phials, and a complicated machine with lots of tubular attachments and plastic bags suspended on in-patient pylons with some fluid of yours. It'll make more sense on Tuesday I suppose, when I start at the hospital proper.

At last, some first rate speed in Bristol. I've had some expensive flat whites since moving here.

I took it round to Hayley's, who rang at half past nine asking me if I fancied an early drink at hers. She said that they'd been doing coke the previous night. "I picked my nose this morning, and managed to find a little lump of it still there." Hayley talked, I listened, but it was easy enough.

Harry came round later, and busied himself at the far end of the garden cutting down the weeds with a pair of scissors. When at last he came to talk to us he was jittery, eyes big, sociability an effort. In the bathroom there were stains on the little table, walls and floor. Someone to whom she had given a key had let himself in and done something that involves bloodletting.

She was pressing me about renting the flat again. "To be honest, Hayley, I wouldn't want to get involved in anything financial with you. I don't trust you with money." "Well, you know looby, my house is your house." She is kind like that.

She told me about the various financial ruses she's got going, farming from a network of lies to officials, exes, men who fancy her, and Harry, so that at the moment, she can pay the rent and the bills, by far the largest of which is her crack habit, without having to work, at least in any institutionalised way. Yet you still can't find the fifty quid I lent you?

I wanted something a bit less loud, so I went to a tree-shaded grassy square nearby. It adjoins a large homeless hostel, so there's a free soap opera going on all day. Someone was overreaching himself by attempting to stand up, and was pulled down with laughing friendliness onto a bench. Outside the pharmacy, a topless man was shouting at a put-upon older man who was trying to explain something. I felt for him, doing his best under the hail of that aggression. A recumbent man in the square, his patience exhausted, sat up and yelled "stop shouting like a crackhead!" When the police arrived, several people stood up on their benches, the better to observe the spectacle.

I said hello to a woman who was sitting by herself, insouciantly swinging a placcy bottle of cider to an inaudible summer track. "Hiya love," she said. Northerner. I gestured questioningly with an open hand, she invited me over, and we started chatting in the recommended turn-taking style. Hayley sometimes isn't good at the "con" element of "conversation".

"What brings you to Bristol?" I asked. "I just wanted to get away." One to leave for now, and let the story emerge over time. The less you ask, the more you learn. "Are you OK? she said, as I squirmed on the bench. "Yeah, it's just I've got a bony arse. I should bring a cushion out really."

On the day I was supposed to start the job I mentioned the other day, (which offered only the minimum wage and minimum holidays), I was offered another, which I have accepted. I'll soon be using needles in a legitimate use. It involves taking blood from people who have recovered from covid-19, then centrifuging it to extract the antibody-rich plasma so that it can be injected into people in the throes of the lergy. I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but the bit I do understand is £10 an hour, £14 after 8pm and £19 on Sundays. Three month contract, which will be OK because me and Kirsty and the girls should be off to Brittany at the end of August.

I was sitting at a bus stop last night when this elderly man came along, hobbling about using a walking stick.

Being a Northern man with the easy sociability that is the gift of my class, I said "yer right?" To which I received the reply "fuck off."

I was somewhat displeased by this abrasive response to my well-meant overture, so decided to defuse the situation in an understated and peaceful way.

"Fuck off yourself you old cunt."

He hobbled off and then came back a minute later. Finding that he suddenly didn't need his walking stick any more, he brandished it over his head, making as though to hit me, and shouted with the limited power available to his geriatric voice, "cunt!" He seemed satisfied with this and did not deploy his stick against me. He walked off with the gait of triumph.

Whilst I'm not advocating calling elderly people on day release from the loony bin cunts, I quite enjoyed the incident. I like a bit of ag every now and again.

I was on my way back from Hayley's. As night follows day, the cracks now appear in her relationship with Harry. The details were a little difficult to assemble, but I ascertained that they had spent £260 in one night (and morning, and afternoon) on the stuff. During the journey, Harry had started looking over her shoulder at an imaginary big black man called Patrick, whom he was convinced was looming over Hayley. She said he'd left Harry curled up in a ball on the floor. Harry said it was migraine.

"I said 'stand up! Be a man!'" and that she had told him that she has suffered worse abuse than him. A league table of abuse in which the winner takes it all.

"I basically see people for what I can get out of them," she said, and I thought of the £50 she owes me from last week that will be forgotten, and the countless times (including that night) when I've bought the drinks. "I know you do Hayley, I've known that a long time."

Two days of deadening work at a different hospital, working with a monomaniacal cleaner who talks of nothing but stain removal techniques.

A Skype interview, the second in two days. It went on for one-and-a-half hours, for a minimum wage job. It appealed because it was part-time, and I'd been wondering whether it might be possible to get away with only working three days a week, and seeing if Universal Credit could fill the gap. At the interview they said that there was an error in posting the advertisement, and it was a full-time position. I decided to go along with it anyway.

They found me in the Skype directory before I'd had a chance to make my profile pic less merry.

Hi looby

It was nice to meet you earlier on your Skype interview. As we discussed at the end of your interview we would like to offer you the post of Housekeeper at the Bad Knocks To The Head Rehabilitation Centre. You interviewed very well, and your transferrable skills will be an asset to the Housekeeping Team at BKTTH (the name by which we are known). I'm sure you will fit in very well with the Housekeeping Team and the other teams here at BKTTH.

Even my drug-laced DBS Certificate didn't put them off. I'm doing some shadowing on Wednesday and possibly starting full-time the week after.

Saw this poster near the Crown Court yesterday evening. I think it's brilliant.

Hayley is leaning with both hands on the kitchen worktop, her tits pushing forward. My cock is hardening. "Fucking hell, you're fit Hayley." Last week she saw me looking at them. "They're great, aren't they?" and cupped them, admiring them herself too. It's liberating being with a woman unapologetically aware of her own attractiveness. She makes another proposal. I live in her flat, she moves in with Harry.

It's tempting -- a street full of birdsong, ten minutes' walk from the city centre, thirty feet of garden. The woman in the flat upstairs seems to think I live there and am Hayley's boyfriend, so we could keep that useful fiction going.

But I keep running up against a difficulty Hayley refuses to acknowledge: what happens when they split up? Do me and Hayley then share a one-bed flat? My life is coloured brightly from her loud hedonism, but I like having a lulling suburban harbour.

I suggested last night that we could have a bop and a drink in the garden this afternoon. "That sounds a great idea looby, yes!"

The flat's deteriorated since I left. Black tidal marks of dirt on the vinyl floor, cigarette ash dusted everywhere, sodden butts in the sink; strawberries with grey bouffant hairdos, suppurating into the fridge. But the lovers didn't turn up, and the itinerant cat was making an insufficient contribution to the afternoon, so after a couple of hours of sitting distractedly on the wall, I came home again.

The other day, having wandered around the northern suburbs for a few hours, I was hungry, and a bit cold. Along the part of Gloucester Road known as Pigsty Hill, a church was offering "soul food", a meat or vegetable curry, for free. A dozen or so of us, in various stages of decay, were dotted about a ruthless plaza in front of the church hall.

I was engaged by one of those over-clean thirtysomething men which guitar-based Christianity attracts. To my secret delight, he said that that "fashion sense is obviously important to you." I was wearing this new mustard coloured pashmina scarf, and the trousers which were implicated in an appreciative remark my arse received from Trina. Then I realised the poor currency in which the compliment was paid, given his own mediocre dress.

He told me that God is in everything. I looked down at my butternut squash curry. I can do without God in my curry. For an omnipotent, if surpassingly needy and insecure being, he seemed to be a much weaker influence in the dish than garlic or turmeric. I said I found that idea difficult to understand, but thought it might be politic to avoid biting the hand that was feeding me. "But your compassion, and kindness, in doing this -- I find that very easy to understand."

A few days ago I was irritated to see that someone had gone to the not inconsiderable effort of tearing the leg off a plastic chair that had been stationed on the Common for at least all the time I've lived at this address. The vandal had then tossed it into the adjoining nursery's playground. I have spent nearly a week now simmering with fantasies of violence towards him.

Refreshed from having had God in my mouth for several minutes, I noticed that someone in my street had placed four plastic garden chairs in their front yard. I asked permission to take two, and removed them to the Common. Next day I sat with some cider and wrote to one of my elderly aunts.

Later, I thought how lovely it would be to sit in the dusk, on one of the now publicly owned chairs. One had disappeared entirely. The other is extant now only in its back, which has been sawn from its legs.