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.

Up at 5am, walking an hour to work, in the rain, without a coat, in shoes that leak, to work at the dishwasher for eight hours, with a soggy sock blotting my foot. A man prone to self-pity would be inclined to broadcast these facts in a public forum.

I stood entirely on my own for fifty minutes in a huge kitchen. I didn't know how to turn the dishwasher on, despite caressing it gently on its undercarriage and murmuring all kinds of cajoling words.

I started doing some washing-up by hand, muttering "I don't know how to turn it on" repeatedly; and Hayley filling my mind, a sour jealousy amplified in the hard, utilitarian steel of the kitchen which seemed to mock me for having emotions.

In such situations pressing random buttons sometimes helps (and it is difficult for a new person to know which buttons to press, after all). Its green eye started blinking, and a stentorian sound of rushing liquid rumbled from its innards.

My fellow KP came in at 8am, a calming Nigerian man. Good KPs are unflappable in the face of yards of washing up. We chatted about the bar he runs in Lagos. He has to go back every now and again to check up on it, "because all Nigerians are thieves. It's the way we are."

One of the chefs "asked" me to help him for a moment. "Can you clear the burn?"

For one lovely moment I hoped that my Wertherian longing for Hayley was about to be transposed, and we were away northwards to drain a stream in Scotland. What faced me was hideous: a six-feet-long, two-feet-deep bath of glossy, festering lumps of flesh. To my relief, my Nigerian senior jumped in to do it. Later, I had to lay out some trays of chicken bones. They were more chicken parts, un-neutered throats and stomachs and trailing entrails.

Half an hour before my shift was to end, I was the recipient of a welcome criticism. "There won't be enough work for me this afternoon. Work slower."

I met Hayley briefly yesterday morning. Her miniskirt, a polyestered faux-bouclé halfway between purple and cerise, stretching almost as sexily over her legs as the black vest which she lifted up for me -- once -- did over her tits. She had asked to stay with me for a couple of days, to which I agreed, but I was relieved to be told that a work colleague of hers has a spare room for a week or so.

I'm preoccupied with what will happen should my references for my new room come back as a warning to future landlords. Hayley can be a demanding presence, and I am often weakened with a mixture of imagined sex, and a generosity towards her, to go along with proposals of hers which can come with an opportunity cost to myself. I have to work; find somewhere to live; and help my daughter - who is barely surviving as the poorest member of her acting course.

But not this weekend. In another stage in the rapprochement between me and Trina, I've been invited to a joint sixtieth in Manchester with people around that age and who -- young people should sit down now, and steady themselves with a plastic jug of coloured alcohol -- like dancing to house music.

Apologies for the site being down for a week or so; this was a fault at my hosting company.

Roll on getting out of this place. I was shouted at by Unhinged Landlady -- through the door, whilst I was talking on the phone call at 9.40am yesterday.

That doesn't include all bills: I was reminded yesterday that it's my turn to buy the toilet rolls, because despite having given her several thousands of pounds over the past year or so, she's still short of a couple of quid for some bog roll.

I finished the call and noticed a text asking me to take phonecalls downstairs. With Unhinged Landlady it's either shouting, or texting. The middle ground -- the practice known as "talking" -- seems a difficult register for her.

I went to see a couple of rooms last week. Found one in the suburb named for me -- Totterdown. The estate agent was a young woman in an occupationally-demanded tight skirt, which she repeatedly smoothed as she went up the stairs, thus drawing more attention to the area of her body from which she wished to deflect it.

Single bed, lots of light, recently refurbished, quiet street, ten minutes walk to Temple Meads. I said I was interested, and she took my details. In her first phone call after my viewing she used the word "congratulations" three times, as if agreeing to make a landlord richer than he already is is a success in life. Her harassing texts and phone calls were urging me to get on with it and I felt bludgeoned into cancelling two appointments at other places for the next day.

I rang Kim, who advised me to go for the bird in the hand rather than the one in the bush. How I would love to have a bird in the bush now. It's been a while.

I had to fill in a form detailing my probity. I've had to invent a current landlord, complete with fake email, as Unhinged Landlady would take pleasure in depriving me of a future tenancy. A spare domain and a second phone number are so useful in life.

Hayley went on a date. A few hours later, "we are officially seeing each other! I fucking love you. I'm so happy xx". It set off somersaults of jealousy in my stomach, even as I know that he will unwittingly help me gain the healthier degree of distance from her that I need.

Me and Hayley got ourselves in a tangle over the room we were supposed to move into today. A skein of text messages from her about complicated lines of credit, thickened until I gave up trying to unravel it. I just assumed we were splitting everything 50/50 and paying it on the due dates. With two days to go to our moving date, I told her that I am withdrawing from the plan.

The following morning, my sangfroid lost, I asked Unhinged Landlady if I could rescind my notice. She turned bright and hot, telling me that I had been very rude when I had spoken to her on the phone a month or so ago, and refused, saying "I don't want you living here any more." She wanted a fight, so I reacted as though someone had declined me a tea bag." "No, no, that's fine, that's OK."

I went to my room, but she wasn't giving up. "And that goes for [her boyfriend] too!" she shouted up the stairs.

A few seconds later she remembers something. "Are you still alright to look after the cat this weekend or do you want me to find someone else?" I leant over the landing to dispense what I hoped would be an irritating generosity of spirit. "Of course I am! Really, it's fine, Unhinged Landlady, more than happy to do that."

I got back from work, looking forward to a weekend in the house with but a cat for company. A while ago, I had unscrewed two of the bulbs in my room and draped a red flannel over the remaining one, exploiting cotton's natural fire retardant properties. I wanted to smother the Estate Agent White of the halogen bulbs. Last night, the light being insufficient to write this, I went to replace one of the set of three bulbs set into their S-bend aluminium fitting (school of Argos, c.1988).

There was a bang and the house went dark. I had fused all the upstairs lights. I rang Trina, the most practical of my friends, who advised me to flick a switch in the fuse box. I did so and it let out a blue flash like a pilot light, and returned to its refusal position. I was stoned, and I was horrified for a moment to hear a man asleep breathing in rasps on the sofa, before I realised that it was my own amplified respiration.

Trina told me to tell Unhinged Landlady that it had blown after I'd switched the lights on. It's a common enough occurence, a plausible explanation, but something I dreaded saying, imagining the way she'd find pleasure in adding it to her ledger of my errors and omissions I have committed during our year-long co-dependency. I looked up "emergency electrician Bristol" and found a possible saviour at £75 per hour plus VAT, then went to bed with the cannabis that was meant to sail with me through a night of house music and improvised flannel-draped lighting now over-analysing the consequences of a blown fuse.

I got up at half past six, after what felt like a sleepless night. I tried switching the fuse again, and everything apart from the lights in my room came back on. I rang Trina. It was more to thank her for listening to me worry out loud in several phone calls at eleven o'clock, but her practical advice, about trying it again when the circuit was cold, proved to be the electrical and social remedy.

I texted her tonight. "You, my darling, are a rock xx."