There's a little ragged patch of ground in one of Bristol's epicentres of homelessness and drug taking, used as an informal, twenty-four hour outdoor social centre. I met a commercial lawyer, her husband, and two homeless people there the other evening. She bought us all some cider and Buckie. "At last," she said to her husband, "we've met a straight man who's camper than you."

They said they had both had the lergy, a story which is at least compatible with their Twitter feed, and invited me back to theirs. We danced and got more drunk. One rarely meets a poor lawyer, but it was kind of her to keep us in supplies all evening.

They asked me what music to put on and they were politely unmoved by my choice, but were gracious enough to let a fairly long track run its course. Hayley would just switch something off after a minute if she didn't like it.

I had to get home, lest I risk a repeat of my recent disgrace. I was very reluctant to leave. I was hoping I'd made two new friends, and they were arranging getting something that I like, which is out of favour nowadays; people talk about it in the past tense.

On my last day at work, I got stuck in a corridor. Doors both ends, electronically locked. I was lost, looking for the area where I'd been told to work. Agency workers don't get a badge with which to operate the doors. As I was wondering about how to spend the night there, and leaving a puddle of piss, I was rescued by a big black man called Sampson, who released me and escorted me to where I was supposed to be.

Next morning, my boss informed me there is no more work, not even at the hospital. We're in the least lergy-afflicted area in Britain, so they don't need extra people.

I went up to the Common to try to stop worrying about the fact that I won't have my rent this month. I sat under a tree, drinking, feeling a touch self-consciously tramp-like amongst the impeccable middle classes taking their leisure. I rang Kitty, who urged me to overcome my timidity and tell Cath about my situation.

Emboldened by two pints of Romanian lager I came back and explained the situation. She was more understanding than I had any right to expect, telling me I could defer or reduce the rent in the short term.

Bristol offering few opportunities at the moment, I tried thinking of a nearby city, commutable on the train, with a population of fat, smoking, sugar-addicted alcoholics who might be miraculously dying from covid after having had two strokes, lung cancer, pneumonia and decades of the general misery of living in southeast Wales. I've therefore applied for a job on a rubbish tip in Newport.

Trina is displeased with me for breaking the curfew with Hayley. I don't regret doing so, I just wish I'd not told her. She says she wants nothing to do with me. She sent the email saying so at dinnertime, before she'd have started on the pop, so it might be serious.

I'm resigned to it, although Wendy said that it's mixed up with her jealousy of Hayley and that she'll be back; I'm not sure. It was dreary sex, but we did a good line in drunken blather. It'll be a spur to make more friends in Bristol rather than relying on someone who lives two hundred miles away. Here, it's Hayley, my friend from my stint in the cafe at Parks and Carks, and that's it.

Well, it was a great decade and I hope we can be friendly when this is all over and we start going out again. I've shared my musical taste with you, and I'm very glad to see you adopting it. I'll get you a drink, if only to see you throw it over my face and create a scene. We need a public spat my love -- that's one thing lacking so far.

Patronising, flippant, ungracious.

I went round to The Big House yesterday morning. The joy of making a social call. Sexy ex-boss and my fellow housekeeper were in the huge vestibule, ripping up cardboard, finding something to do. We went into what would have been the drawing room. Tall windows; sun-drenched, quiet furnishings; kilo upon kilo of curtain. Instant coffee, strange and unpleasant.

Her husband turned up and shook my hand. "You shouldn't be doing that," said Sexy, knowingly saying the opposite of what she meant. "It's bollocks, isn't it?" said hubby. I felt naughty and relaxed, with other people refusing to do the two metre tango.

Karen asked me if I'd like to come back to work there again when this is finished. I hadn't expected that and was boyishly pleased.

I had a letter from the doctor's the other day. As a result of the responses I made to a questionnaire I filled in when I joined the practice, I am to be invited in to discuss my "pattern of drinking." I'd say it was circular, myself.

Fretting about moving out of Hayley's.

I eventually did so, without telling her, while she was at Harry's. I felt wobbly packing up the few things I had. Felt I was rejecting her, slapping her and Harry in the face after they'd helped me when no-one else would have.

Wendy and Kitty have been great (they're always great), prodding me into action, asking me if I'd contacted her.

Strapped all around with bags, I got the bus up to The Lovely House. Wasn't berated or criticised, but for insurance purposes I proffered an insincere apology that I burnished with some glances at the carpet. We had tea together in the front room. Reconciliation.

Up in my room, I sent Hayley the pre-prepared text I had composed, cowardly, to avoid ringing her.

Hello my love. I've decided to go back to Cath's. Your offer was fab, and I appreciate it like every kindness you've shown me recently, and ever since I met you. But I can't depend on a flat that relies on you and H staying together. What happens when you split up? Then H will need his flat back and I'll have nowhere again. I can't thank you enough for how you helped me when I had no-one at all. Let's get a party in the garden going as soon as poss! xxx

And she was fine about it. She said that her and H aren't going to split up (no, of course not) but that she respects my choices -- in much less formal language than I'm paraphrasing here. She said she's going to get the garden party going as soon as possible.

I squashed myself under a gate to get into a private girls' school's deserted playing field. The sun; being alone and unobserved. I started feeling a bit turned on. I texted Wendy, saying how I wish she were here, "with your lovely hair falling to the ground" (to convey that we'd be laying down). She didn't reply.

Scrolling through for candidates to talk to, I lighted upon, and stood up to, the name of my (married) boss at The Big House, where I used to iron High Court judges' underpants as part of my living. I ran again a moment when we were alone in the kitchen, chatting. Me glancing at her up and down, the way she repeatedly curves her blonde bob behind her ear, her lovely tits, the blouse's buttons I wanted to reach out and undo, running my tongue round the inside of my mouth, some kind of sublimated kissing perhaps. I'm sure she knew.

I liked that job. Ironing, hoovering, and disappearing any specks of judicial shit by day, polishing the cutlery and glasses, and setting the dinner service out for the evenings; then a change of clothes for champagne receptions and dinner parties.

Me and Karen chatty easily -- volubly even -- and she invited me up to The Big House any morning. I'll go tomorrow. It's a huge Italianate villa: dotted around the room, we will easily conform to the regime's orders.

Accidentally sent a text meant for my sister to someone I had a single date with a few weeks ago.

"Sorry [similarly named woman], that was meant for my sister. I'll delete you from my phone book. Hope you're OK x"

"There's no need to delete me! Give me a shout when we can go out dancing! Take care x"

That started yesterday very well!

I'm back from an unplanned evening walk, deliberately following darkened streets and alleys, the underpass with its anti-shooting-up blue light, until the sky opened to a lambent half moon in the park, like a Bristolian Verklärte Nacht. The couple there weren't close in any sense though. The man stood impatiently at some yards' distance from her, looking backwards, huffing, waiting for her to catch up, treating her like a dog on an invisible extending lead.

"You still haven't done it properly!" I give her a sympathetic look. He allows her this time. "Got there eventually," I say. "Eventually!" she smiles back, and I skip up the steps to Hayley's flat on an arpeggio of neighbourliness.

Saturday, and Hayley and Harry arrive at half past eight in the morning. This means it is still last night for them. I am slow to start, but we get going on her birthday, the cider, the crack and the mdma. The music is too loud.

I offer to go out to replenish our stocks of booze, and sit for half an hour under some dogged trees in the Bearpit, a roundabout with a sunken pedestrianised area avoided by most pedestrians. An old bearded man standing still. A couple playing frisbee boringly. I want them to kiss, touch, stroke, but they just toss the plastic disc to and fro, to and fro.

Back at Hayley's, they give me a rock to suck on. I am a little sick and hot, and go to sit down. It passes; I am aware of my skin. Everyone talks sotto voce and I feel close to them. With a calm so intense, it becomes suspicious.

"What is this?" I ask? Oh fuck, they're getting me into smack now. "What is this we're having, now?" "Crack!" she says, like an impatient, worn-out teacher. I quieten, ashamed of having doubted her, upsetting the collective reverie.

Harry and Hayley share a plan: Harry moves into Hayley's; I illegally sublet Harry's flat. It makes sense, since I think I have burnt my bridges with Cath at The Lovely House. They are pleased to hear it, and next day go off to start cleaning and clearing it out.

The following morning, after a few hours of tossed-about, imperfect sleep, I am in the garden when Cath calls. I don't want to face her, but she's friendly and asks me if I'd like to come back. I say I'll return the next day, Monday.

On Monday I wake up at dawn, and immediately fall into the hyperthermia, bad nausea, sweats, and vomiting unto bile and then simply retching, of mdma poisoning. I recognise it from a previous experience after a weekend in Blackpool with Trina. It can go for days, and doesn't grant you an interval in which to sleep.

I get up, having been in bed since 7pm on Sunday, at 10am on Tuesday. On Monday morning I did what must have sounded an impressive ringing in sick, in which I was sick during the phone call.

They keep coming back with reports of their latest little improvement to "my" flat; but I can't rely on an illegal tenure that depends on them sustaining a relationship. In my usual anxious and cowardly way, I haven't told them I'm moving back to The Lovely House. I can't even get lost in alcohol: I've been off it since Sunday, an uncommonly long time for this devotee.

The agency rings to say that there is no work next week, and that the agency itself may have to fold in a month or so if we're not let out by then.

In what I hope is a kindly indication that I might be rehabilitated once my compulsory re-education is finished -- it's a course without a specific graduation date -- Cath offered to run some of my stuff over to Hayley's. Thus I was able to attend the last couple of days at work in my own trousers, rather than Hayley's, which exhibited the gnarled spindles that are my Max Wall-ish legs rather too explicitly.

The author yesterday

I say "last days at work" pointedly. On Friday, as I was sliding into my own more concealing trousers, I received a call from the agency, informing me that that day was to be my last at the hospital. A couple of people who have been self-isolating, but finding no trace of plague in their breasts, have come back to work, ousting me.

I got in to read an email from the HR Manager, saying that he is going to have a look round to see if he can place me anywhere else. I've applied to be an ambulance call handler. They're paid £9.40 an hour, a poor wage for that job, but I need something.

Crack, of which I have had more since moving here on Tuesday than in my entire life, is a fucking waste of money. Like art, it's put into the market to absorb any amount of spare income. Me, Hayley and Harry stood around in her / our living room-cum-kitchen with a proper pipe this time. Harry moaned in a way suggestive of an orgasm aftermath, ran his hands through his hair, and said he had to sit down. I analysed my pleasure, wondering why it wasn't matching the others'.

It's pleasant, but lesser in physical and social warmth than that produced by the second bottle of red in familiar company; and the worst value drug of anything I've tried. I've done well the past year, living relatively frugally, working long hours in jobs where you get fed, so all I've had to find is rent, bus fare and alcohol. I've given Kirsty four hundred pounds towards our Brittany holiday, and have more to give her. I don't want to see my advantages go down a crack pipe.

I went out this morning and met a rather aggressive ex-paratrooper. He was sitting topless with a rucksack, its strewn innards of clothing, and a bottle of vodka nearing exhaustion. He gave me a can of Stella and invited me to sit down. His mother was a twat, apparently. A degree short of a cunt then?, I didn't say.

Asking after my background, he silenced me whenever I went to speak, apologised for doing so, then silenced me again after I'd resumed my story. His eyes brightened in brotherhood when I said I'd recently lived in Kazakhstan. "Yeah...I know Afghanistan too."

I gave him five pounds towards a bottle of vodka. He went swerving across the street, yelling about St George's Day in front of a bus, and came back with a carton of orange juice. "No, he won't sell me alcohol. I'm banned from there." I said I had to get a bus to go and meet my daughter. Most of them are more interesting than that.

I sat in the park. Middle class dyads and offspring, expensive bikes, the men in tubular shorts. Hayley rang and I said I was writing. I told her there was a salad in the fridge. "Thank you so, so much!" she said, the retarded hunger kicking in. When I got in I was pleased to see her and Harry there, and two empty plates, only a small portion out of a saucepan-full left for me.

"Oop!" she said, and got up to get a detergent spray gun to use on the spots of blood she'd leaked onto the settee. I felt like a good mother. They are like my children. I mop and clean and cook -- in as far as one can cook in a house with neither knives nor a cooker -- and every hour, give my silent thanks to her. Sexy, mini-skirted, and kind.