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..."

A pub closed after "trouble", has recently re-opened. There was a table of women who looked like they'd failed auditions for parts in Eastenders, one of whom was wearing her unhappily tolerant dog like a stole. A group of men stood about vying to be pack leader through volume, ignoring the only female in their party, whom they eventually drove to her phone.

As I got to the head of the queue at a a jungle and drum n' bass night, the bouncer said "are you sure you're at the right place?"

"I tell you young man," I replied, "I was around when this music came out first time. I just want to check that the young people here are treating it properly."

Hayley and her friend Faye turned up a couple of hours later. Hayley danced for about fifteen minutes, then left me with Faye, who was undemanding, off her head, and just wanted to dance.

A man came and sat next to me. He said he had some pills which he reckoned were comprised of mdma and meth. He wanted ten pounds, which is excessive at the current exchange rate, but I bargained him down to a fiver and some mdma crystal. Arms wrapped round my shoulders, smiles, for the oldest raver in town.

Towards the end the cloakroom started emanating one of Bristol's characteristic sounds: the hiss of nitrous oxide gas canisters. Everyone on the dancefloor waggling balloons about and grinning. We were all turned into children.

Afterwards it was back to Hayley's. A dirty futon to sit on, towels for curtains. The Fish Importer was there. Hayley was unwearing a short lacy dress with wide holes in it, designed to be layered over something, with her scoop-necked black top, and black knickers. I understood then why she'd only spent fifteen minutes in the club, what we had interrupted. She'd only come to deposit Faye.

The Fish Importer -- urbane; kind and low-key with Hayley -- generously kept cooking up more and more crack for us, which Hayley was crafty enough to get an inequitable share of. He let his original story go, telling us that whilst he did indeed work as a fish importer, he is now both addicted to, and deals, crack.

"My problem is," I said, "everyone thinks I'm gay. "You are," said Hayley. "It's not funny for me, Hayley. It holds me back."

Having spent Saturday on mdma, meth, speed, and crack at a jungle rave, I thought we could ramp it up on Sunday, so I suggested we all go to see a sea shanty group. Hayley took so long getting ready, our drug soup making tasks like finding a belt complicated -- that we caught only the last two songs. Pastel pensioners and the satisfied retired, and three crackheads.

Hayley disappeared for a long time. "It's The Abuser," said Faye. "I know. She'll be Whatsapping him. I wish...she's just feeding him, not letting go." "She's never been loved, really loved. And her mum writing her out of her will. It's all she's known." I often wonder how if on the night we first met when we had rather soft-cocked sex -- speed, erections's enemy -- if I'd been harder and a bit more ruthless, whether we might now be together. Then immediately following that thought, is an aversion to the idea, knowing how much repair work I'd get involved in.

The squalor of a commercial kitchen. What I have given up. Taking the discarded food out. Scraping. Slurry, bins, cold sausages, the unfed.

"No, no, don't do it up," I say with alarm, moving her hand away from her hem. Hayley's new black miniskirt has big silver buttons down the front, and she's noticed that the last one is unbuttoned, a V over her glossy blackly-tighted thighs. "No, leave it like that, it shows off your legs." If I had a girlfriend I'd turn her into sex. I'd spend all my money on dresses and lingerie and test how good fucking her was in all of them. Pull it up, pull her knickers aside but keep everything on. They all think I'm gay.

"Do you think she's pretty?" I say, tilting to the barmaid. "Hmm. Yeah. But not as much as me." A twinge of irritation at her. Never enough.

Sitting down the pub straight from work watching Wales v France. The two men sat next to me start clapping loudly at a French try. I'm offended. "Why you clapping at that?" "Because we're French."

A woman with false eyelashes introduces herself and asks me to to take a picture of her and her friends. "No, no, it's alright," her friend says, refusing the picture. I feel sorry for her. She's a bit fat, and the refusal of a group photo is a rejection, elided somehow with her fatness.

Trina doesn't want to go to the house music weekender that we've bought tickets for and I've turned down work for and travelled from Bristol to Liverpool for. We get pissed, and have sex. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" It's dull sex in the missionary position. I wish she could stop commentating. She doesn't want to suck my cock nor offer herself from behind. She finds sex a mixture of the comical and the disgusting. She's good company outside of bed though.

I've just been to the dentist. I arrived with a bike ride glow. All downhill (it's going to be a fuck of a ride back) along cycle paths. Past a snug, smug eco-homes development, pure, white.

I was surprised to be asked for £22 before he'd even asked me to open wide. I can't remember once paying in any of my previous infrequent visits to the dentist. I declined the transaction. "Yes, so next time, if you can remember to bring £22." Reasonable enough, but then he made an attempt at sympathy which won't work with someone on irregular hours paid at the minimum wage. "Because now, I'm not earning any money for half an hour."

Saturday. Techno night at a club I frequent. DJs from Berlin and Rome, 6am close -- none of this 2am nonsense, leaving you looking for something sensual at a bus stop.

At Hayley's scoured and unsoftened new council flat, she is concaved over her phone to her abuser. A couple of half-hearted how are yous, trailing off; turning her head towards me, her eyes pivoting on her phone. She'd said she'd blocked him, and he knows her address, which she averred she'd not reveal. I've lost you, haven't I? You're his. I'm the social worker. Even then, I knew we were not to spend the night dancing together.

I put out two small lines of mdma. She took them both. "I've left you a rock, looby," she said, pointing to a speck. I had some more so it didn't matter, but by far the greater disappointment was having to be mistrustful of her in future with something valuable I'd have been willing to share.

Hayley scrolled on and on and on, green-framed sentences. We finally got out, and so did the Hayley I like. She told me about meeting an African bloke the previous night who had her over the meagre furniture in her room. "The Abuser asks me if I look at other men. I wasn't looking at him much." It was raining, and I did this ridiculous walk on my heels, because my shoes have holes in them.

I'd told her we needed to get tickets in advance, but she was confident she'd blag it. At the door she was asked for £25. I neither had £25 nor would have given it to her if I had. I made a sympathetic but unhelping face, and went in.

It was 1am before anyone asked my age. "This bloke's fifty-six!" he exclaimed to his mates. An elderly seal still performing. But the drunk people drifted off to have a good shout by two or three, then the e'd up people could claim the space and the harder, more serious DJs could come on.

I settled in a space upstairs with a couple from Merseyside who were on the same drug wavelength. There's a particular e-smile which a drunk can't fake. We got talking about how they met and why they're here; but mainly, it was dancing, with others like us, not doing all this checking to see if everyone's having a good time. Mdma is a fucking great drug.

The weak dinnertime sun here in Wetherspoons outside Temple Meads is amplified by the privatised composite stone outside. Chatty groups of work colleagues from DEFRA and something to do with taxation will have to get back to work soon. I am eyeing a plate of half-eaten nachos which I could legerdemain to my table once they've gone back to sort out post-Brexit fishing policy.

Nope. Fucking cunt of a waitress has cleared it away.