I had a very carefully made up woman half my age stare at me the other day as I prepared to take my trousers off, as her colleague ran her hands over my body. It ended badly: I went to work in an airport.

We had to go on a training course, which started at seven fucking thirty on Saturday. It was mind-bendingly boring. What a farce of a non-industry "training" can be. Apparently, people comes from different backgrounds and I will expected to treat them all with respect.

I'm serving and washing up in the "executive" lounge, from which one literally looks down on the hoi polloi who are uninterested in such a small privilege. I'm with an international group of younger people, mainly women, and as is the wont of that sex, they spend a good bit of the working day in in-grouping covenly intrigues. The job's doing me good though. I'm eating well, and for free, the same food as airline passengers travelling first class are given.

On the bus back to town I sat with a fellow new starter, who said that he'd made up a dentist's appointment so that he could go on a Tindr date. "Are you on Tindr?" he asked. I was pleased that someone so young assumed I might have the occasional date. "Well, actually, I'm meeting this girl now. I'm not quite sure what the situation is."

Hayley was in her blue cord miniskirt. Her scalloped low black top exceeded by a small band of black bra. I had to scrape off the worst of a wayward hot chocolate dotting my trousers. She scavenged for tobacco amongst the discarded butts in the ashtray. Another complaint about her on-off boyfriend's lack of sexual interest in her, which I find incredible. "He said 'we could just have a cuddle and watch a film.' I don't want that, I want some sex!"

She was talking about the deposit we will need to gather together in order to rent our two-bed flat. She has a painting someone's interested in for which she's asking £3000, but "I've got ways of making money. I can always get money."

"He offered me £300 to spunk him." I didn't understand in what way this was a transitive verb, but kept quiet as clarity sometimes follows a mishearing. "I thought, '£300? Yes, I'll do that.'" I finally realised that in her Fenland accent she was saying "spanking." "I mean compared to what they put you through on Universal Credit? Much easier."

She was speaking about her friend and occasional flatmate. "You should see some of the things Terri's had. I look at them and think 'I'd be charging them'."

She left for Esther's. "She just wants a girlie night. She's one of the good ones though isn't she?" which I took as an apology for cancelling the plan for her to stay at mine.

Later, feeling desirous, I worked on the kind of playful, witty and subtlely worded suggestion that women appreciate. "Hayley, if you fancy a rodding tonight give me a bell xx." No reply until the following morning at 11am: "Loves you xx".

We met again last night and went out dancing in the pub-cum-club owned by the man to whom she's hoping to sell the 3K painting. Kylie went off again and got us some kind of drug which had all the effect of an aspirin. Sitting outside we met someone she knows who sold us some whippies, which are reliable, unfakeable fun, partly for the way that the sound of their inflation alarmed the Spanish people sat at our table.

Back at mine we're soon in bed spooning; in the morning, my cock hardening against her arse, and me very slowly trying to get her top up far enough to allow me an un-bra'd touch of her tits. "You've got lovely tits," I told her early on. "Yeah, they're not fat tits are they?"

In the pub after work last night, I meet a former work colleague and her two friends, once of whom might have a bedsit available in a few weeks for a little less than I'm paying now. I need to leave here. I have had Hayley back twice whilst I've lived here and it disturbs the delicate humour of the landlady. Selections from her texts include "Thanks for waking me up at 4 fucking am...Absolutely not fucking on...", and Hayley is now referred to as "that woman."

I rang Hayley to tell her about the bedsit. She assumed that she'd be moving in to it. I didn't mean that Hayley. That will be my place until we can find a flat together, although only paying £215 a month each would free up a lot of money that we could spend unwisely.

A mess of a trip to see my daughter in a play in Newbury, when I had hardly any money. I bought a local ticket to get me through the barriers at Temple Meads, and then the plan was to go into the theatre at the interval when they generally don't check the tickets, meet my daughter afterwards and hope she didn't notice my lack of comments on the first half.

I was invited to leave the train at Reading. I wandered about for a bit, and sat outside Tesco having a conversation with a couple of homeless people whilst trying to work out how to explain this dereliction of duty to my daughter. It's been rearranged for tomorrow, when I'll be able to do the trip legitimately.

I fell asleep on the train home and ended up in Weston-super-Mare. I ploughed my way through this thicket of thorny bushes at the side of a car repair place and stamped it down and tried to sleep. It got a bit cold so I got up at three, and found a kebab shop which was warm and busy with young drunk people. One girl was wearing a shirt dress and no knickers. It occasionally rode up and it was a pleasure to see that not all young women have adopted The Modern Abomination. I got the first bus back at a quarter past five and then went to work helping out with a barbeque at Lidl.

I met Hayley outside Wethers. She was wearing a colourful miniskirt in which its printed pattern didn't seem to repeat. Something prompted her to mention she's likes smack from time to time. She said it with a disarming smile of resignation, a confidence placed in me. It set off a little ripple of visceral pleasure.

We had a chat while I was on the train from my mum's birthday do in Worthing. She said she's splitting up with her boyfriend. He was supposed to be picking her up from the station but only responded to her phone calls once she revealed that she'd scored. I wondered if this, and a couple of messages she's sent -- "can't wait to get back see you" and a couple of "loves you"s -- might be a sign, but when she was discussing the plan to move in together she quoted a two-bed budget of about £900; it reminded me of Wendy saying "having sex with you would feel incestuous."

She's staying at mine this evening. How I would love to have a better look at that miniskirt. Whilst it's on my bedroom floor.

The catering agency I've joined has lots of work. Wish me luck: I've got ten days straight now, starting in an hour-and-a-half.

Esther rang, asking what I was up to; it was code for "could you come round for a bit and dilute my mother?"

We spent the afternoon watching Royal Ascot and checking for any frailties that might give Esther hope of inheriting. We only started with the second race but Esther's mum went straight the card with winners. We tortured ourselves by calculating that a £5 accumulator would have netted £7000.

At the last possible moment, I am clutched from the jaws of my mum's house in Middlesbrough.

In a hotel room designed to drained all vitality from those who enter, I joined two other people at a presentation by a catering agency. We went through some health and safety questions, before we were tested on them by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down corresponding to the veracity of the statement presented.

The following day, at another agency, I was interviewed by a woman half my age. I only realised as I was walking home that I had had a button in the central chest area undone throughout the interview. No doubt mesmerised by a glimpse of my front elevation, she rang up and offered me a gig for Saturday.

It was for a "family fun day" for people connected with a local arms manufacturer. The inside tables were all set out around Concorde. The exhibits included this huge ugly missile launcher, painted battlefield green, looming twenty feet over children being introduced by their parents to modern "defence" equipment. We were outside all day. I was helping man the salad stall; mounds of colourful, glistening vegetables and feta, which served as my delicious tea.

Apart from slicing a tiny sliver of my finger skin into the cucumber salad after an argument with a mandoline, I got through unscathed. I did try to find it to fish it out, but cucumber's a slippery customer, so whoever got that portion of salad was unknowingly induced into a bit of cannibalism. l felt like God yesterday; a living presence in another.

Down the pub with Hayley, Mick, and a little of his excellent speed which manages to be both soft and powerful. For all the eccentricity of Mick's manner, his voluble and often unidirectional talk while he see-saws on his walking stick like a Russian doll, he's bright; he also never says anything even remotely unkind, dismissive or sexual to Hayley.

Next day, I meet her in town after her job interview. "All he did was talk about himself." We sit in the park drinking Polish lager out of tins coloured Alcoholic Black. What a lovely girlfriend you'd be. "My first boyfriend Mel, he went to jail for seven years..." She's an artist with a talent in inverse proportion to the amount of remuneration it attracts, and is meeting a man who might be able to arrange some studio facilities. She doesn't like him for some reason and wants me with her.

In the street, we meet The Black Potentate -- the man who astonished me in single-handedly, wordlessly, breaking up the ruckus I was involved in a few weeks ago. He always greets me cordially, which gives me that location-less quiver that comes from meeting a person of whom one feels unworthy. I'm still learning his physical language. I've just about mastered the fist pump, but I need practice with the Opposing Shoulder Bump.

An interview at the hospital for a catering assistant job posed such challenges in the tests as "10 - ? = 6" and choosing between the spellings "thort" and "thought". They rang me up saying that I had failed at even this low hurdle, but offered me a kitchen porter job instead. I've accepted it, but only as a desperate insurance policy in case I can't get anything else. Pot wash is an unceasingly grim job. Even with it, I've no way of paying my rent on Friday.

Saturday evening I spent three hours in A&E with Esther. She has become convinced that she's got liver damage and got a referral for some tests. They came back negative, which wasn't the result she was hoping for. "I want someone to tell me I'll die unless I stop drinking." I slept over at hers, and she gave me a bottle of gin, as she wants to start clearing out her alcohol stocks. Then I had to leave; she was preparing to receive a man who wants to be pissed on.

Hayley rang asking if I fancied meeting up "for a drink," and we met in Wethers along with her on/off boyfriend. She said she'd got the sack on Thursday for being drunk at work. They were working as parking attendants at a festival, when a colleague came in with what he variously described as honey whisky or moonshine. After just a few swigs they were all incapable. Security were called, they were escorted off site and later, sacked. My immediate thought was that it had been spiked, but why would you spike yourself?

A man came and sat with us, curatorially proud of his collection of minidiscs and their player. They looked like square sweets, their plastic covers in saturated colours. He wanted to tag along, but quailed at our plan to go dancing.

As we walked up to Stokes Croft in search of music, me and Hayley got a bit ahead of On-Off Boyfriend. "He's always putting off sex as well. 'Oh I'm too tired...' Wouldn't you, if you were going out with someone, want to fuck all the time, every day?" He caught up with us quickly, perhaps reading something about us indicating a confidence from which he was excluded. "Have you been having a moan about me again Hayley?"

I spent the rest of the walk to the club wondering how to inoffensively translate "look Hayley, if you're not getting a proper seeing to from On/Off Boyfriend, would you like to meet up from time to time so that we could both get sorted out?"

A few minutes later we heard the Sirens -- young lads playing an enticing brand of house music. We were dancing in the garden till 6pm, then it went indoors till 4am. We had had the last of the e and speed, and had finished the gin mixed with our beer, which was surprisingly palatable. Hayley disappeared for half an hour and came back with some ketamine, that inexplicably popular cross-species stupefacient, but I liked having Hayley's finger in my mouth as I licked it off her nail whilst we were dancing.

Hayley filmed a minute or so of the bit in the garden.

As me and Hayley danced, On-Off Boyfriend was struggling with his jealousy, trying to do the right thing and not make a scene. Whilst Hayley was sat down, I started dancing with someone else, the two of us inching mutually closer to each other, before Hayley noticed and jumped in to wiggle between us. My dancing partner scanned her up and down with disgust. I wish Hayley hadn't interposed herself. Fucking hell, the both of them are jealous of me now.

Outside, we bought some whippies off an enterprising balloon salesman, and plodded up to a late night bar, dragging our ketamined lethargy like weights in our shoes. There was a fight going on on Park Street with all the ingredients you need for a decent punch-up, including ineffectual screaming miniskirted peacemakers, a ceasefire which is suddenly broken with another eruption of fisticuffs, and spectators regarding it curiously.

In the dive bar, the music was dire; to go from classy modern Detroit techno to Phil Collins and Shouty Metal was a let down, but it was fun in there, with everyone wandering about looking a bit fucked and it getting light outside. I walked back into town with an Algerian man, a chef who's really a singer, who was pleased I know (roughly) what raï music is. We went into a doorway and he played me some on his phone as he sang along to it in Arabic.

It was a balmy morning; thoughts of how Hayley's skirt hem stretched across her legs as she danced, turning over my proposal to her, how good the DJs were, how much I want to stay here, how on earth will I pay my rent. In Castle Park, the morning cross-cultural clash: stop-outs like me going home, while minimum wage workers rush in uniforms to pander to demands in hotels and cafes.

I sat next to a man who was halfway through a bottle of white wine. He was Mongolian, although looked more Russian. "Where do you live?" I asked, a clottish, intrusive question to push onto a man drinking wine in a park at 7am, which got the answer it deserved: "in your head."

A job interview at the airport. In the airside bar, which starts serving at 5am. I forgot to take all the documents they requested, but in that co-dependency that employers who only pay the minimum wage have with their employees, they offered it me anyway, after I'd schlepped all the way back home and out to the airport again to bring them proof that I have no taint of immigrant. I've accepted it and I have my training on Friday morning but I might have other options.

Yesterday, an interview at an insurance company. Better money and hours, although it would still colonise two weekends in every month. I was told that I'd have to give examples of how I will exemplify the company's "core values". Number six on that list is "bring all of yourself to work." I wondered if I could say that as an alcoholic I'll be bringing a couple of bottles of red to work, to demonstrate being honest to myself by getting on the sauce every day from about 10ish.

My spirit sank when I entered the black carpeted acre of call centre. A litter of headsets and computers. Company values and tweets from appreciative customers in coloured ink on the walls. I could only think of Vaneigem's adage, "work is a prison of measured time."

To my great surprise and pleasure, Hayley, she of the semi-successful Sunday sofa sex, rings. She'd lost my number but got it from Esther. At Esther's, she is there with a man she acquired the night before. Esther was as tiresome as ever, her constant demands for attention turning to infantile displays of nudity. To my relief, she'd lost the zapper with which one turns on her shouting television, so we were able to enjoy Hayley's demotic sense of humour. Esther took a phone call from the wife of a man who plays in an internationally famous Bristol band. It was one long crackhead's slur.

We all went down the pub, where we managed an hour or so of a deafening rock band. Esther, unable to cope with the attention being on a third party, stomped off home, ignored by the rest of us. All of us apart from her had had an e and some excellent speed, and none of us wanted the pacific mood to be torn up.

Last night Hayley, Acquired Man and me, went out. Hayley looked gorgeous, in a black lacy top and a blue cord miniskirt, black tights and flatties. I mentioned that I have to move out of here in the next few months. Hayley said that it's likely she'll be offered a council flat in the autumn, and suggested we could share it, an illegal but mutually beneficial sub-let. I was astonished and flattered by the suggestion. I think I've made my first real friend here.

Acquired Man wandered off, and Hayley came back to mine. She's asleep in the bed to my right. There were no consequences, despite being wrapped around her, so the semi-successful Sunday sofa sex was clearly a one-off.

When I got up an hour ago there were two messages on my phone from the landlady in the adjoining bedroom. 0012: "It's a school night. M-- has to get up early." 0029: "M-- has to get up at 7 and the walls are very thin. Weekends are for noise."

I am painstakingly quiet all of the time here, to the point where on several occasions they have been surprised to find that I am in. I thought I might have earned a little licence, a fifty-five-year-old man hopefully bringing a sexy miniskirted thirty-year-old woman home, but I'll go and apologise in a minute.

I was walking home the other night, along a section of a path which abuts some of the bleak office blocks with which central Bristol is scarred. A man and a woman were slumped in a doorway, smoking a joint. Some sort of device was playing drum and bass weakly. "You alright?" he said. "Yeah not too bad." "Do you want to join us? It's a party."