I had a tricky interview to negotiate with the dole after having given up work at Transport that Fails.

Unless there's some pressing reason, you're not allowed to simply quit work and then claim even the completely inadequate amounts of dole money. Instead, I planned to claim I was commencing self-employment. Looby's Editorial Services, proofreading and copywriting.

I spent a few hours down the pub writing a business plan (or making up a load of mumbo-jumbo about cash flow and advertising costs) from a template I found on a website featuring a photograph of a smiling young black woman on the phone. Serendipitously, a few months earlier, I had rescued from the recycling the unpublished memoir of a former resident of my block, a retired translator. In the introduction, where he gets disagnosed with bowel cancer, he says "[t]his is my story, which I'm dying to tell you."

I took my eleven-section "business plan", along with Peter's autobiography, and a domain name I've registered with me to the dole. It looked impressively thick when placed on the asessor's table. After twenty minutes, mainly taken up with an explanation of my rights and responsibilities, I was told I'd get £400.12 a month. Since then, I've been living on my savings, which are dwindling fast, largely because I'm a spendthrift and find it difficult to stop doing things like going on the Grand Tour (to see my friends in the North).

I stayed with my mum and my disabled brother in Middlesborough for a few days. My eldest was over as well, the only person I could go out for a drink with. One evening, I rang my mum to tell her we were coming home from the pub, to interrupt her in the process of my brother having an epileptic fit. We're all quite used to it; you just have to stop him banging his head on things. The three of us heaved him on to the floor, where he spent the night in a deep sleep as he recovered from the lightning outbreak in his electrical head.

Then to Trina's. Bit of snogging, lots of eating and drinking, and one night we found Jesus. Attempting to walk home one evening, her legs buckled under her at a most inconvenient and attention-drawing location near a railway bridge. We batted away a couple of offers of help from passers-by who were happy to be batted away, but my most strenuous efforts were inadequate to the strength needed to right her.

A new couple came along who seemed more serious Samaritans. A tall, ginger, bearded man and a woman came along and managed to haul Trina to her feet, just as I was thinking that all we could do was to have a little sleep by the side of the road and see if Trina could stand up. The disadvantage of this plan would be that it'd look like a crime scene. I imagined a policewoman arriving and asking her, "did he touch you?"

Jesus and his girlfriend took us to Trina's, into her living room, as far as the sofa. I was immensely grateful to them and I wish I'd tried to track them down afterwards. In the morning, Trina named him Jesus, our saviour.

I'm on one of my spasmodic purification phases (they never last long), but there's no reward for virtue.

My friend, with whom I went to Kyiv for Eurovision in 2005, was down from Manchester. We started in Wetherspoons, before going on to somewhere with less food on the carpet. I asked for a Heineken Zero, which was £2.68 for 33cl (so £4.61 a pint); my friend's pint of ale was £3.48. He says he manages to save £800 a month from his minimum wage job: he has no housing costs. He works on the phones in customer service. When someone says their house number is one, he says "oooh, is that the posh end of the street?"

We talked about our Ukraine trip, which has a barely believable quality about it now. We spent the week drinking their version of champagne, staying in this magnificent flat belonging to a lawyer, high up in one of several high-rise Soviet concrete slabs dotted amongst unmade roads and a tiny children's playground. We knocked about with a German-Latvian couple and a couple of Glaswegian lads who were at one of the semi-finals and obtained our tickets by meeting up with a young couple in an underground station. It was all blogged at the time, but 2005 is one of the many years that I lost when I couldn't afford to renew the hosting one year and I hadn't backed anything up.

On Saturday me and Mel met up in one of the few pubs in her suburb where the pub garden has grass in it rather than paving slabs. A fence came round and we bought a load of cheese off him for a fiver. The young barmaid, collecting our glasses at the time, looked disdainfully at us and the people at the next table, who were also in the market for his goods, without having the authority to do anything about it.

There was a little shack selling what was advertised as Thai food. I ordered the kimchi bowl (everything's in a bowl nowadays). "It comes with a bun," said my cockney host. "A bun? No it's alright," I replied, "you have the bun." Afterwards a woman came over to ask me how I'd enjoyed my dish of onion and pickled red cabbage in syrup. "Well... it was just a tad on the sweet side for me," I said. "Ah well, normally it comes with a bun."

After ruining my meal by insisting on it being bun-less, we sat and drank, hatless under a radiant sun, then carried on at Mel's, where we played some increasingly drunken games of écarté, a game I learned after reading about it in Vanity Fair. We went to bed, where there was an unsuccessful mounting.

The following day, the sun and the ale withdrew their favours. I lurched from toilet to bed, spending hours trapped in a cycles of nausea, vomiting, and sleep. I finally stopped throwing up at 8pm, then went to sleep for thirteen hours. On Monday, I cycled home, and went to sleep again. It's because I didn't have it with a bun.

Gazing along the beach on our last evening at La Trinité was almost painful. Those annual partings never lose their poignancy, the scene illustrated by a sky that I imagine always saves its most delicate compositions for our departure.

Back in Bristol, and the noise. The ugly grey din of pointlessly urgent cars and their unnecessarily loud horns; drills, hammers, angle grinders and the unplaceable drone of mystery machinery at a volume quiet enough to become more and more irritating as it moves from the periphery to the centre of one's attention; I am very hungry God bless in București serif stationed throughout the city centre while the more ambulant beggars approach you with the jerky walk of the homeless; and the way that the bus company has thrown in the towel over people using mobile phones as broadcasting stations.

I was pleased then, when my eldest rang asking me if I was free to meet her in London on Friday after her visa appointment at an embassy. She had a lot of needless running about in the heat to to get various documents printed off (because embassies don't have printers) -- and then again because the official had told her to get the wrong stuff printed. I waited for her in a pub in a street where a three-bed mews house was sold three years ago for £4.85 million.

In the printers, the man serving asked if she was an artist. "Yes!" she lied. "Oh in what medium?" "Sculpture." "Oh right, what do you work in? "Clay." "Well, for a fellow artist, I'll do it for free." We had a good natter, so much that she changed her train, at some expense, to stay longer. I had some "Thai fish cakes" that were the size of draughts pieces and had the texture of a mattress.

My niece, whom I hardly know, gets married to her girlfriend in a pretty Bedfordshire village.

The train was full of Oasis fans going to Wembley. I asked some lads if they were able to open my bottle of beer, and one of them deftly clipped it off using the edge of a tin of cider. "Hey, look at that," I said, to anyone in general. "He's done that before." I smiled at the 50ish woman in the next seat, who smiled back, causing a jolt to go through me. Fuck, you're good-looking. She wore a beautiful white broderie anglaise blouse. I can't think of many other fabrics that can be as understated as they are sexy on women around that age.

Given my brother's family's somewhat austere diet, I was a bit concerned that we'd be served some sort of yogic tea made from grass and bits of twig; instead we were welcomed with Pimm's, and, as is often the case with events one's not looking forward to, I enjoyed myself. They wrote the vows themselves, and my nephew did a witty speech that had the additional merit of brevity. As I circulated in the room, I was trying to model myself on Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair -- an impossible intensity of shimmer for me, but something worth aiming at in social occasions.

Appropriately enough, I have arrived at chapter 36.

I wrote you a letter whilst I was on holiday in Brittany. I hope you can read it OK.

I'm on Eurostar, on my way to our holiday in Brittany. We've had to reverse and take a diversion to get round a fatality on the track. I also somehow managed to leave my belt in the tray that goes through the x-ray machine, so I'm wearing my trousers in a hiphop style somewhat unbecoming to a sixty-one year old.

Recently it's felt as though my sole occupation has been my appeal to go part-time. The whole process should have taken a month at the outside, but three months in, I finally know that it has been refused; and therefore, having told them that I'd rather resign than continue working under the present conditions, bcI have worked my last day with Transport that Fails.

My supervisor made an error in thinking that I was off to France a few days earlier than my actual schedule. I didn't disabuse her, and enjoyed a couple of days with Trina while Mel was on a coach holiday with her mum. We're still chaste at the moment.