To Lancaster for a couple of days. Wendy has been ill for some time and was in hospital. I was surprised to see she was in one of her close-fitting dresses. "I thought I'd make an effort for you." She's home now and has a supply of morphine for the pain, but is still badly debilitated, and it's a condition which will need lifelong management. I didn't want to come back to Bristol.

My mum was over too. Easy company, easily pleased, with charity shops and the big flea market. Lancaster was small, drab, and loveable. Settling back into my accent; the laconic enquiries after me which turn immediately into an indifference I find restful. Nothing is expected of me.

Tuesday afternoon was set aside for Fitbit. The night before, a couple of messages saying how much she's looking forward to seeing me; another similar one at 9.40 on Tuesday morning. An hour-and-a-half before we're meeting, she cancels, saying she feels rough.

I keep my enquiries after her health polite and distant, but in the evening, she asked about the people in The Shipbuilder's Arms, and I couldn't keep it up any longer. "They're fine, same as usual. I don't like how you keep on cancelling on me, Fitbit. You've done it over and over again. It's shoddy and disrespectful, and not how you treat a friend."

"I knew I would get this, you selfish prick, fuck off then." I didn't reply, but have acted on her suggestion.

At work on Wednesday, Brenda said "it's nice to have you back looby," which made me feel lovely. I'm not much good even at the simple tasks I'm allocated, but I'm friendly and hardworking.

The storage company write to say that they're auctioning off all the stuff I have in storage with them, on the flimsy excuse that I am £900 in arrears with them. Everything of mine from the past forty years, sold and gone. I won't miss the furniture, but the books, records and clothes were harder to part with. I have become sanguine about it now. Bristol's a new beginning, starting with four shirts.

Hayley rings. After the multiple hellos on the street every day in Lancaster, I had a forlorn moment looking at my phone: this is my only friend in Bristol. It's turned sour with the boyfriend. Lacking any other options, she moved into his flat, but he has started telling her to shut up, and I got a sad little text from her the other night when he'd told her that he was spending Christmas with his ex.

"I am literally, sleeping with the enemy," she said, aware that she's prostituting herself for accomodation.

Waiting on at a wedding in a country hotel. They've hired a string quartet, which in the room's laminate acoustic, becomes irritating. I tell my colleague so. "Oh. I'd have thought with your age, you'd have liked it."

A week later, another wedding, the same venue and colleague. "So how old are you, if you don't mind me asking?" "I'm fifty-six," I say, an inverted vanity adding a year to my actual age. "Oh. And you're still quite fit and healthy!" She's Welsh -- in as far as people from Newport are Welsh -- and I like working with her. I can banter with her, poking at the sensitivity of borderland people who don't have an acknowledged identity.

But the Hungarian man likes to distribute the stress he feels when it's busy, rushing and swerving around, seeing his immediate task as more important than anyone else's. Touching me all the time, little taps on my back and side to get me out of the way in a narrow bar, swatting the space I have just vacated as I stand up from fetching wine out of the fridge.

It's an attempted exercise of power, which won't succeed, because his touching me is a sign, not a symbol. (I think that's the first time I've ever found a use for my short weeks of semiology, which as its name suggests, can be a bit wanky.) In the car on the way back with my female agency worker colleagues, complaining about him released some stories.

I am early for the coach to London. I'm meeting Trina in Streatham, to see a soul singer that I introduced her to. I buy a bottle of cider and sit on the steps outside one of Bristol's pestilential student residences, hoping to offend someone whose parents pay for their tertiary education. A Somalian teenager greets me warmly with a fist pump and a "bro". He must be one of The Horn of Africa Hernia Boys, with whom I used to exercise in the park. He sits down a yard from me and gets his weed out.

A young woman walks past. "Would you grind her?" he asks. I laugh, an evasive technique I use to avoid explicit complicity in everyday sexism. He looks at me steadily, and I realise that he's asking if I have a grinder for his weed.

He starts talking about his brother. He nods towards the Tesco from which I have brought my cider, and says that he's inside. He's not referring to the Tesco Metro though. He means that he's in prison, serving a minimum of twenty-three years for a murder -- "a really bad one." I'm salaciously eager for the detail, but silence is sometimes the best way to draw someone out.

My friend says that he came down here to escape all the drug-related violence of Hulme. I tell him about a party a friend of mine went to once in Hulme. It was a tropical beach theme, so they borrowed all the electric heaters, sunlamps and other sources of heat they could find, and ordered a skipful of sand which they had poured through the flat. We swap numbers and share a joint.

On the coach I was deliciously stoned. I had no desire to drink. I started on my new book, Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. The multiverse idea is religiously seductive, a vista of limitlessness that carried me smiling halfway to London. The tired Japanese girl next to me kept jolting herself awake as her head tilted towards my shoulder, looking disgusted at herself every time her head sought a cradle. Streatham at night has an easier feel to it than I remember from twenty years ago. I wonder if it's because the Somalians are here now, diluting the per capita alcohol intake.

Jenny, my impoverished, but unselfpitying middle daughter, tells me of the times when her and her sisters were only able to go on some extra-curricular trips and overnight stays with school because of assistence they had from the school's Hardship Fund. She found out a few weeks ago that there was no Hardship Fund. The money came from the teachers having a whip round for them.

Me and Hayley went out dancing the other night. We got back at about five, whispering so as not to provoke the angry lump in the next room.

We got into bed and she plugged herself into some house music while I attempted some pre-school sleep. There was a comfort from the mdma, her body touching mine, the ticking music. A couple of hours later she was delighed to find my bottles of poppers on the table, so we sat up snorting them and drinking from some minty Bulgarian liquer thing which I bought one needy night from the nearest shop open.

Her boyfriend rang inopportunely, as the toxic fug throbbed. She told him she was at mine. "Are you in his bed?" "Yes. It's nice and warm." Are you really in his bed? Are you being sarcastic?"

She paused and made a grimace, rushing, in more ways than one, her answer. "Yes of course!" After having answered his queries about where she was going, what she was doing, she came back to me, laughing and imitating him. "He said 'what if I said I was going to spend the night at Dawn's?' I said 'I wouldn't give a shit!'"

"I'm not that bothered anyway, if he carries on like this. I can get someone else," and I felt momentarily bitter about her having that choice, her valuable currency in the economy of attractiveness.

Walking into town, Hayley still in her nightclub clothes, a man about my age, sitting in the window seat of a cafe, gave her a disgusted looking scan, finishing for too long on her miniskirt: a disgust with his own desires perhaps. I went to the window, leant towards him; give him the finger and told him to fuck off. I felt all manly and protective, safely picking on someone weaker than myself.

After what seemed an endless wait, but was in fact twenty-four hours, Cath rings to tell me I've got the room in the suburban Edwardian house, and I move in today. There were two conditions: that I don't take showers between 10.30pm and 6.30am, as the noisy old pipes will wake everyone up, and that I can give her a reference from my current landlady together with a phone number for her.

I needed someone to impersonate for me. The person I trust most to recite the story convincingly, and to improvise if thrown any unexpected questions, is a longstanding reader of this blog. He adroitly pulled off the dissembling phone call and contacted me to say it had gone well. "She seemed to like you." I was -- am -- hugely grateful and relieved. If ever you need an alibi, my friend, ring me first.

Since informing her of my departure, Unhinged Landlady has been working herself up with valedictory sallies of sniping. She asked me with whom I'll be living. "Well,", she responded, the woman won't like you." I smiled, said nothing, went to my room. None of this is really to do with me. The woman's an unhappy bully, uncivilised, not fully formed.

Yesterday I went to see a room in a house. I was on the verge of cancelling the viewing several times because of its distance from town. I like the unpredictability of living in central Bristol. I like walking home in the small hours, with all its night-time opportunities.

I got off the bus, and turned into the unfamiliar stillness of suburbia. Cath, the owner, my age -- grey cotton floor-length dress -- showed me in and apologised for leaving me with her daughter for a few minutes, but we talked easily and I didn't fancy her. She'd been to Albania, a rich topic.

The houses, Cath told me, were completed in 1929. The flat front windows have protruding rectangular windowed sections on either side. "Why do you want to live here?" was one of her questions. Amongst other things, I said that I'd forgotten how lovely English Edwardian domestic architecture can be, how it has a sense of order without being full-on Modernist plain. I meant it both objectively and as a compliment to her taste.

She showed me to the room that I hope, as I glance every minute at my stubbornly quiet phone, will be mine. Light washes from the west and I imagined writing there.

It has a garden made for boozy lunches. It's five minutes walk from Bristol's first micropub, fifteen from the county cricket club, and the main road is lined with independent shops selling things that one can use: mangoes, Allen keys, hats. There's a Lithuanian "general store" which is general in the sense that they generally sell a general range of East European beer. There's a park which I could use for sleeping, reading, drinking, and not thinking.

I sat next to an elderly, rheumy cat whose purr is more a trill. Cath wanted to know if I was "left-leaning". I got my membership for a leftwing party out of my jacket and regretted doing so. You're trying too hard. I know you're desperate to move in here but try to be subtle about it.

"Have you got a partner? Or someone who'll be staying over from time to time?" I thought with some awkwardness about Hayley. "One lives in hope Cath. No." She's going to ring me. When, she didn't say.

In the private school in which I work as a dinner lady I work with three English women, and three Jamaicans. The chef, a man, gives me simple, repetitive jobs like coring and slicing a sack full of peppers. I'm happy in my little corner, earwigging on my colleagues' chatter. I don't particularly want to learn or get better at anything.

The English women look worn out, with gappy teeth, thin hair and bony faces. I wonder about their toiling histories. They make poor but amusing jokes at the end of the shift to keep me out of the room in which we get changed. "You can come in now looby. I've just started my performance!" Inside, she was imitating a stripper's dance, swinging her hair net about her head.

The chef suggested I apply for the permanent position there; a teacher serving teachers their dinners. It's relatively good money -- £18,600 pro rata -- but I like the variety of agency work, and I'm finding it a struggle to get up at eight o'clock when I only get home at 1 or 2am from my evening work washing up in hotels. I started the application form but gave up at the stage where it asked for my complete employment history.

Knackered. No time to write. Working seven days this week, as a dinner lady in a private school from ten till half two, then at the pot wash in the bowels of a central Bristol hotel (revealing photos to follow). This weekend I will see the sky during my working day for a change, at a techno and drum n' bass festival.

Still nowhere to live in ten days' time. More later.