My drinking is coming to the attention of my live-in landlady Cath, now that I don't have the omertà cloak within pubs. The betraying sibilant gob of a tin of lager as a housemate occupies the adjacent room. Yesterday I bumped into Cath in the off-licence as I packed away, just too late, a couple of bottles of lunchtime cider.

This morning, she drew my attention to a book she left out for me which she had said I could borrow in a conversation of the previous evening. "You won't remember; you were pissed," and no, I couldn't recall anything about it. Hers is at the moment a benign noticing, but it would be prudent to redouble my efforts in the alcoholic's unpaid job: concealment, not of the fact of drinking, but its extent.

At the very unHayley-ish hour of 8.30am, I get a text with her new number, suggesting, unarguably, that I could "save it under 'sexy Bristol blonde'."

Until today the story had been that she'd lost her old phone, but she said that she'd broken the previous one by dashing it over The Abuser's head; they still live together most of the week. Last week she offered me her flat to rent, for the same amount I'm paying for this room. It's on a quiet street on the edge of the city centre, with a large garden, but Hayley would be too unreliable a mistress, financial or otherwise.

I'm going round to hers tonight. I went to the loo just now, looked at myself, and went to have a shave, before realising that any effort is pointless: not only does she not fancy me, she thinks I'm gay.

Standing around in Kirsty's (née, our) living room, Jenny said that she sometimes steals things, and gave some examples of recent unpurchased items. "I got this from House of Fraser," she said, indicating a glitter-coated plastic water bottle of the type that are de rigeur amongst people who wish to reduce the use of plastic.

"How much should it have been?" "Fifteen pounds." "Fifteen quid? Well, you did right to nick it then." I can't condemn her. Shoplifting is the easiest, most immediately rewarding method of wealth redistribution available to the poor, the hazards of which are diminished now that the police will only come out if you can provide a live stream of someone gouging your eyes out whilst he looks at child porn.

Except when someone is sitting alone in a park during a mild touch of the plague. In Castle Park yesterday it was so hot I had to seek leaf cover. A panda car drew up and an official leant out.

"You can't sit there. You're allowed out for exercise, and sitting on the grass isn't exercise."

"But there's no-one near."

"That doesn't matter."

"Doesn't this count as exercise?" I said, moving the arm holding my bottle of cider up and down.

"If you're going to be funny I'll give you a ticket."

"I'm not trying to be funny."

"You are."

I wandered about the park a bit, then settled under the remnants of the church of St Mary-le-Port, twice bombed in the twentieth century, once by the Germans and once by the natives in 1962, who shoved a grey office block against St Mary-le-Port's thighs, grudgingly acknowledging the five hundred-year-old neighbour her legal right to remain unmolested.

Image reproduced without permission from https://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1960/NUbristol.html which gives a copyright notice but no information about how to contact the owner and I am so locked down I can't be arsed with a whois.

On another of my mapless walks, I was clawed by out of control brambles many yards long and a centimetre thick, in a dell next to Lidl. I gave up trying to tramp the brambles down, and felt my way up the nettled bank, and back to the sudden flat tarmac. People standing apart for show, before they revert to type in their bottom obsessions with no care for distance.

Ringing Trina, I learned that the flicky-tailed bird I saw at the bottom of what charitably looked like a culvert's inlet, although had something of the sewage pipe about it, was a yellow wagtail, and the bee with a proboscis interested at something at my feet was a burrowing bee.

Back in our front garden, the message isn't getting through to these tarts.

I work at the hospital thirty hours a week over five days, so there's nothing particularly leisured about my week; yet the virus has quietened the din of consumerism. The showy jobs which most of us do are now admitted to be useless.

On the ward, I went to pick a hair off my trousers the other day, and winced as I discovered that it was connected to my groin. It was a pube that had somehow managed to protrude through the fabric.

Emptying the bins reveals the popularity of cakes, biscuits and crisps amongst the administrative classes, and goes some way to explain why many hospital staff are huge.

On Thursday's mapless walk I wandered around a near-silent suburbia, detouring into the road when elderly people approached. I acquired a print, left outside someone's house. Stamped on the back in red ink "The French Picture Shop, Pimlico, SW1," it's an engraving by one Adolphe Martial Potémont (1827 - 1883). I laid it down on the cricket pitch of a private girls' school that I found myself in and contemplated it over a pint of cider.

I've also been spending time with a couple of seagulls and the ceaselessly wandering homeless in Castle Park. The radiant sun, the feeling of mental emptiness and vivid intensity at the same time. The silhouettes of the trees against the wide sky; the bullshit consultancies and accountancy firms on the riverbank all turned off.

I repeated a persistent beggar's spiel back to him before he could start it. "Yes, I know mate, your name's Charlie and you don't mean to disturb me but you need your train fare." Try varying the story a bit at least.

They're converting a university conference centre into a temporary hosital for plague victims and offering £14 an hour for cleaners, with enhancements for Sundays and Bank Holidays. The small disadvantage is spending eight hours a day surrounded by people coughing corona all day long, but I've applied anyway, because I'm hard.

I am displeased with our Rector. Contrary to information on the church's website, he was not in fact there at 10am on Saturday to open the church. Me and two elderly ladies talked briefly, at a distance, before I decided at least to make an inspection of the exterior with the notes from English Heritage. As I turned the corner, the couple broke out in loud exclamations. "Well I don't know Edith. You could die, I could die. I only wanted to come out for a walk!"

I found John Frost's grave though. Even now, it's tucked away in the most inaccessible, overgrown part of the graveyard. "The outward mark of respect paid to men merely because they are rich and powerful...hath no communication with the heart."

I live in a shithole. That's what my suburb's name means in ye olde Englysshe.

I went on a random walk this morning. No map, no plan. I went down an alley and stumbled across a 50s council estate, with semis and play areas for the urchins, from the lost time when people were housed decently and not for profit.

Then, again by accident, to the parish church with a jumbled graveyard, full of primroses. The oldest remaining parts of the church are from C16th, although according to its bell ringers' website, the peculiar shape of the graveyard suggests pagan origins, and it's possible that no less than St Augustine, or one of his followers, had a church built there to replace the heathen cesspit of un-Christian activity.

In the graveyard is buried John Frost, a leading Chartist, showing that even then Bristol was full of revolting peasants. He was hanged, drawn and quartered for his trouble, and his lumps now rest in my parish's graveyard.

There are some gifted, beplaqued benches, which I have earmarked for peaceable drinking. The website says that the Rector will be opening the church on Saturday mornings, so I'm going to call in to express my appreciation of the erection, to locate its architectural features noted in the English Heritage citation for its Grade II* listing, and to find Frost's grave. What you find when you look without seeking!

I've had some interesting birthdays in my time, but I've never spent one cleaning a gynaecological ward.

On my first day at the hospital, me and an uncommunicative man starting at the same time as me were shown into a tiny room. We were given a stapled pamphlet which told us that we should respect each other, embrance change and celebrate difference, or respect change, celebrate each other, and embrace difference. I forget which. When my fellow starter was made to speak, his speech impediment was revealed, which made me ashamed of my silent irritation with him earlier.

I was relieved to be told that they were not expecting me there for fifteen hours a day, but just the second part of it, from four till ten, Monday to Friday. We get time-and-a-half from eight o'clock, which makes up for the short shifts.

I was visited upon an Anglo-Chinese man in his early thirties who wasn't expecting me. He dealt with this unexpected coat-tails hanger-on with admirable forebearance. We have to clean examination rooms, in which there are instruments that would make the hardiest man quail. Now, even the word "speculum" makes me cross my legs.

It's a doss of a job. I was told to slow down as I gave the taps an excessively vigorous hand job. Now that he feels safe with me, we sit doing nothing in reception for at least an hour of each shift, which I spend with A Confederacy of Dunces.

Bristol, Wednesday

Immediately I got back from working at Cheltenham races -- four long days for £287 net -- I came down with some sort of lergy. It wasn't the c-word; I wish it had been. I slept for fourteen hours one night, thirteen the next, clammy and sweaty, in between moving my heavy bones with effort into my school dinner ladying. My hearing is muffled and my mind confused: on Monday I walked into the walk-in freezer thinking it was the toilet. The rest of my work has dried up, and I've no sick pay or any kind of safety net.

I'm advised by a group of multi-millionaires to work from home, so I've invited seven hundred children round to my house for dinner tomorrow. I'm advised to self-isolate, so I'm going to wait for four hundred and fifty pounds a month to be dropped at the door by a DeliveRent person until this blows over. I can shoplift the rest.

It's not without its advantages though: both universities here have closed, which civilises the pub, no students shouting their way through the afternoons.

Before the collective hysteria got going, me and Trina went to Whitley Bay for a soul weekender. It was a flat weekend, poor DJing, music too poppy; regretted sex.

Trina dropped me off at the station in Wigan. I spent a couple of hours in one of my favourite pubs, a middle class-, hipster beard- and coffee-free zone, where gap-toothed blokes sit fucking and bollocksing their way through their habitually leisured afternoons. Sharon, in her short leopard print skirt, was as adept at keeping the conversational spinning top circling as any Tolstoyan hostess. Or, in the ugly argot of academe, she'd be said to be "facilitating".

The racing was on the telly, a pint of mild was £2.30, and an Alsatian-ish mongrel sprawled itself seigneurially across the floor. A bloke said "he's a plumber, but I'm fucking fitter than him." If you saw the speaker you'd realise how low the bar for physical fitness is in Wigan. How I will miss all this now.

A train near Lancaster, Monday

I'm on my way back to Bristol to start work cleaning a hospital. Four weeks, at least. On Friday evening, on my way to Lancaster, the agency rang up and threw me this financial lifebuoy. It'll exact its own cost: today it's 4pm till 10pm, from tomorrow its 7am to 10pm, with a two-hour unpaid break in the afternoon. My relief at having an income again comes with a worry about how I'll cope with the cumulative lack of sleep. Yet another short term solution.

I spent the weekend in Lancaster. The girls are, perforce, back at home. It was also my birthday weekend, although that was marked with not a single card nor present from anyone in my immediate family.

On Saturday night Jenny found a Eurovision journalist online who suggested camping up our quarantine by tuning into one of the previous years' contests at 8pm precisely (if one still "tunes in" to a "broadcast" nowadays). I was almost sold Twitter, with Jenny reading out the funnier comments of some of the people who were watching at the same time. The girls had set out bowls of those delicious, unsubtle crisp flavours which set your tongue throbbing.

Yesterday, after telling me on Thursday that she thought it best if we didn't meet up, Wendy suggested a turn round the park. "You've turned up without any alcohol?!" she said, and hugged me, which I wasn't expecting. "Oh...that's better," I said, like a physical relief. We got two small bottles of wine from Spar, and found our old spot where we used to sit during my intoxicated years.

Spent last week at Cheltenham Festival giving myself the best chance of catching the lergy. Eleven-hour shifts where I carried heavy crates of glasses into and out of the bar, over and over again.

I stayed with my brother in his large flat in the private school where he teaches. I was allocated his wife's sewing room, which is littered with inspirational quotes on postcards, a hectoring wall of reminders about how God understands your weaknesses, how one should always be kind, how one can't change the past but your self-redemption can start now. Substitutes for thinking. I caught the same bus in the morning with my nephew, who went and sat away from me, which astonished me.

I was working in a big upstairs viewing room where they had to pay £1500 a day to get in (£2000 on Gold Cup day). We had a bloke there who'd won £11 million on the lottery and was having his seventy-eighth birthday. There was a compere who went round betweeen races, taking the jovial piss. "So Charles here, he's making the most of his win, as he's in a high risk group." Stuart Pearce the ex-England player was there. "He's played in quite a few semi finals, so he's a bit of a loser really."

There were these "hostesses" who looked after a couple of tables each. They were in their twenties, kitted in tight red dresses and being asked if they were married. Large screen TVs between races showing previous hostesses smilingly serving drinks. I picked a betting slip up off the floor for a losing bet of £600.

Met Jenny, my middle daughter, who's struggling through the last months of her course at the theatre school. She's homesick, misses her sisters, class-alienated. "I can't keep up with a lot of their conversation. I've never been to Austria skiing." She was saying about some of her fellow students' farce book posts. "You know, leaving a partner, moving away...all these things that people say are difficult. It's not bravery you need to do something, it's money."

I asked her if she had any projects of her own. "Well, I don't know, it sounds a bit weird saying it to your dad..." I opened my hands. "Well, we've written this duologue between a girl who's never wanked and one who has saying, 'well, don't you think it's a bit weird, never to have had a wank?' I laughed and we started discussing the venues where they could present it.

Had a job interview on Monday with a utility company doing admin. I was so confident I'd got it I didn't open the email for a while. "Whilst you interviewed well..."