I was asked to work at a "boxing match". It wasn't a boxing match, it was cage fighting. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

We were doing table service so you could watch a lot of the bouts. As I view women purely in terms of their moral characters and intellectual qualities, I didn't notice the young women in high heels, fishnet stockings, thongs and bustier tops who walked round the cage holding the round numbers up. It was a real family affair too with children from nine-ish upwards there. Seeing young girls seeing women dressed like that was my only qualm about the evening.

Women don't swoon any more but they do a lot of hair flicking and dancing in front of the fighters when they came out to have a drink with their friends and family. Only one female fight which was a shame as it'd be good to see women kick the fuck out of each other rather than having these inward psychological dramas.

Apart from when I went to the casino in Manchester one night, I've never seen so much cash in one room. I did a round for eight people of £177 (paid in cash) and he gave me a £13 -- the first and biggest of several tips during the night. We had to add up using pen and paper and show them our workings out, although not one of them wanted to check the amount, which made me think that next time I could tax a couple of quid from each customer and come back a ton up.

This week I am working in a grand early C19th house, which accommodates High Court circuit judges and their clerks. There are still the parallel sets of doors, corridors and staircases, to make sure the servants travel different paths through the house.

The first thing I was called upon to do was a bit of flower arranging, in old Bonne Manam jars for each sumptuous room, the blooms from two five pound bouquets from Tesco. This afternoon, I was ironing. I expected the shirts and collars, but was surprised when the judicial underwear appeared, blue cotton boxers on which even the bleaching washing powder used can't dispose of the evidence of the courtly emissions. Nevertheless, I got inside them and gave it my best.

But this will not last long. I went to my interview the other day and with a charity that provides help for women seeking an abortion, and I'll be starting my training with them to be an advisor, on 6th January. Soon I can leave the chthonic, windowless rooms underneath hotels, with only a roaring dishwasher for company, to someone else.

Me and a fellow plongeur are sitting on a step in the street on a break from washing-up. I thought we looked novelistically proletarian, in our soiled aprons, our bare arms cocked akimbo on our knees. The back of the hotel faces onto an instance of a cheap pub chain, and had I known him better I'd have suggested hiding our workwear and having a crafty pint.

He started showing me pictures of his girlfriend's Cuban auntie, who was posing with her back to the camera, turning round to check we are looking at her arse.

It was cold in the street, and as I looked at her picture, I rubbed my hands together. He rang her, mistaking my gesture for sexual attraction. "She a good woman -- you go home, she suck your cock," he said, making a gesture. A ripple of distaste in my stomach; I smiled. Stupidly, I agreed to add my colleague on Farce Book. Since then I've had a missed phone call from her, and messages saying te quiero.

Catering work is relentless. There's no wider purpose. People come in, leave the place looking like a shithole, and we spend the time round midnight making it look like no-one was there, hours of cleaning and polishing of glasses, crockery and cutlery, hoovering a room the size of a ballroom, heaving heavy furniture away, lugging yard-wide buckets of melted ice downstairs -- before another privileged group comes in to despoil it again.

Struggling with the ice I was reminded of the description in a Henry James novel (it must be Portrait of a Lady, the one James novel that I enjoyed rather than worked through), of the demanding labour required to maintain ice-houses in locations remote from the main house. The poor not only serve the rich, but create their wealth for them.

I'm in a pretty pass. In the combination of time and money I have neither. When you work long hours, at least you're supposed to be well compensated. But I've been tunnelling.

On my last day doing the dinner ladying in the private school, I left them with a card, thanking them for their kindness and patience. I told them that I was starting a new job I was offered a month ago, as a Mental Health Support worker. I joshingly trotted out the clichéd quip about how this job had been good preparation for the forthcoming one.

All bonhomie (and thankfully, this being a solidly working class place to work, no hugging), we parted on the best of terms.

The following morning, I got an email from the home in which I was to start work, saying that in the light of the information revealed by my criminal records check -- now rebranded into its tough guy successor, the "disclosure and barring" check -- they were unable to employ me. I suppose it's the Caution for possession of MDMA from 2015 that's the obstacle, not the shoplifting peccadillo from 1986.

On Saturday, I applied for a job I'd rather do. It's in a callcentre, but it'd be working for a charity which provides advice for women who might be thinking about having an abortion. I wouldn't have to fake it, for once. They emailed me today, offering me a telephone interview tomorrow morning, a hurdle to overcome before a face-to-face one.

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.