On Christmas morning, we unwrap our presents with a touch of ceremony, one by one. My youngest daughter unwraps a David Shrigley mug depicting a cow being milked. The cow is looking back at her milker saying "what the hell do you think you are doing?" But my daughter is crestfallen.

"You don't like it?" "You gave me this last year, Dad."

It felt a long time off work; I didn't expect to be granted so much annual leave, and then there were the strikes. Going back, I felt anxious, as though I'd forgotten what I was supposed to do. I applied for a job as a guard, but failed at the first hurdle.

The first stage was a test lasting forty-five sweaty minutes, where you have to click on the shape at the beginning of the line and a given shape, from long lines of shapes. I could feel myself getting more and more tense. I kept knocking a small pile of magazines and papers with my mouse and lost my temper with it, and in the angry sweep of arm to rid me of the journals, I also knocked over a pot of coffee. It splashed all over the carpet and the radiator and the wall halfway through the test. I couldn't stop the test, so it's soaked in nicely.

I'm disappointed, but perhaps a man who leaves all his clothes on a train before a foreign holiday, and similarly disposes of his presents before visiting his rellies for Christmas, isn't really up to a job where you have to remember rules and colours and what this button does and where the train is.

I had to come back to Bristol to work for a few days in between Christmas and New Year. There was a pleasantly chatty bloke on the train one day. He was going home to L---, and asking me things about myself, which men rarely do. I said "it's a OK job, bit of a doss, just the hours can be a bit demanding, starting at 5am sometimes."

"So what do you do?" "I'm a criminal mate, just got out of Cardiff [prison]. It's brilliant, you just come out and the station is just there" -- as though he were giving a tripadvisor review about its accessibility to public transport.

It was an enjoyably untypical week on the railway, free from the wordless worker bees bent over their inane spreadsheets, which are so important, they can't possibly talk to anyone other than their managers; and instead, we got crims and pissed-up sparkly-dressed women from Cwmbrân.

The honeymoon period is over with Mel. I had an involuntary half hour stay in Port Talbot the other day. I used my work phone to look at "attractions in Port Talbot". There is a Baked Bean Museum of Excellence, run by a man who changed his name by deed poll to Captain Beany, and I noticed some C19th Welsh Methodist chapels with their austere classicism and inscriptions in Welsh on the entablature.

I rang Mel to suggest a day out in a baked bean museum followed by a couple of hours in draughty Welsh chapels, but I'm not sure she saw the romance in it. There was what I took as a bemused silence, before she exclaimed "of course not!"

As I have done, on and off, since I was a teenager, I went to Uddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. I could only attend three of its ten days, but I found a place on couchsurfing for a couple of days, then for a bonus day (and a welcome warm flat with a shower), I was hosted by Leeds' Singing Organ-Grinder; and as I don't pay train fare any more, I had only to find my drink.

I was picked up from the station by my host, who sported a woolly multi-layered couture that reminded me of my student days before universities were turned into businesses. It should have alerted me to the coldness of her house, which was in inverse proportion to the warmth with which I was received into it.

The house was down a cobbled lane near a mill, built for the "middling sort" -- neither shop floor workers nor management. Had it not been so cold I'd have stared at the pugnacious hills on the other side of the Colne Valley for longer. I was shown in, and sat down with my host's dad. His daughter said she had to go somewhere; that was the last I saw of her all weekend.

On the table, there was a photocopied extract from a technical manual with diagrams of exploded parts of a tractor, and instructions for its disassembly and repair, every tiny part named, its complexity the match of anything I've ever found in my musical studies. The two systems, I thought, tractors and music, have a necessary complexity, otherwise neither work.

It was her dad who entertained me. I thought he was a bit disappointed when I said I wasn't staying for tea, and I made going to a concert I was greatly looking forward to sound like an obligation, in order to assuage his feelings. I knew he was disappointed that I was treating the place like a hotel, and his daughter hasn't put any review in response to my appreciative one for them.

Mid-concert, in the toilet at UCMF, I turn round and see an elderly man in a wide-brimmed hat. "Oh! Is it Mr S---?" It was the founder of the festival.

We chatted a bit and then he took me under his wing for the evening, getting me into a reception on the basis of my true story about coming to UCMF when I was fourteen years old, when they gave bursaries to "people of limited means", and arranged accommodation with friends of the festival who had a spare room. I felt elevated, being on terms with the festival's founder. There was free wine, some of which ended up on my trousers. He gave me his card. I must follow this up rather than my usual approach of thinking all pleasant experiences are accidental and socially inconsequential.

I was unsuccessfully on top of Mel the other morning. "Maybe you should try Viagra," she said, not knowing that I already do, and was. "Yeah, that'd be interesting. See what happens." We laughed -- her honestly, me lying. Maybe I could try drinking less.

I've just come back from an appointment at the dental hospital.

I'd been referred there because my teeth are a jumble sales of caries, fractures, gingivitis, and -- a flexible word, new to me today in this sense -- "calculus", which is a hardened, calcified form of plaque in an unattractive colour that unfairly implicates even non-smokers into the habit. I noticed "recreational drugs" in my case notes. I don't remember confessing that to anyone recently.

It started pleasurably with a young woman putting her fingers against my neck, jaw and cheeks and asking me to move my head in various ways. It's a beautiful feeling to be touched by a stranger; everywhere on your body becomes heightened, and wishing you had permission to ask things.

She was a final year student with advertisement teeth and even cleaner knickers. Later on, her supervisor came over, with that "I've read your case notes" air of the senior health professional. I was politely told off about the inadequacy of my cleaning regime and warned that there was an extensive programme of work ahead, including extractions.

I imagined them chatting together afterwards. "Hmmm... late fifties man living alone? What a surprise his teeth are a mess. Bet he's got dirty mags under his bed and his toilet's all brown. Eurgh...can you imagine the insides of his pants?"

Chastened, and glad to be out, I went to Wilko and got an electric toothbrush, as recommended. "It'll do all the work for you." It takes a bit of getting used to, this loud buzzing thing in my mouth, and it makes me salivate uncontrollably, but the effects are noticeable already, and I'll soon have a gusset as bright as that of the student dentist.

A couple of highlights from the railway.

* Not seeing my approach as I move backwards down the aisle with my trolley, a girl in her late teens lays back on the double seats and opens her mouth at my crotch level just as I pass. We all laugh, collaboratively.

* I am taking my repose with a cup of tea after working hard for several minutes, when a female guard appears. Her tits strain her buttons, the top three of which are undone. Her uniform shirt is tight enough to outline the texture of her bra.

All this information I had to capture in the first fraction of a second as she sits down facing me, before I clamp my eyes, in a moral correct position, on her face. My concentration in doing do only reveals where my real interests lie.

To Lancaster. I went up because my mum was going to be there for a few days, at Kirsty's. She's nervous about using the trains, so I escorted her back as far as Manchester.

As we were waiting for her coach at Shude Hill, we both wanted the toilet. The entrance has these tall metal revolving gates, like the ones that guard entrances into building sites. I couldn't find a 20p piece. One man, on his way out, tried to reach his arm out to some button to fool the gates into letting me for free. It didn't work. Then another man came over and gave me a 20p piece.

When I got out I said to my mum "those gates are like getting into a prison," and she told of a time when my youngest brother, who's epileptic, had a fit just as he was exiting them and was trapped, thrashing about electrically, in a casement of immovable steel. Two security guards couldn't free him. No-one had an override key. A big Scots man eventually hauled him over the barrier by main force. It made me seethe, and I'm going to make a fuss about it. They are dangerous gates.

I said to my mum about seeing her in Lancaster again, the next time. "I'm not sure if there'll be a next time."

Mel's birthday. We went to Shrewsbury for a couple of days. I was going to say, "I took her," manfully swaggering at me paying for the accommodation. Shrewsbury, if you haven't been, is a rich spread of mediaeval domestic architecture, overhanging timber-framed buildings which have been threatening to topple into the street since the fourteenth century.

In St Mary's Church the mediaeval stained glass is a glory, six-hundred-year-old glass, collected from the Low Countries and Germany by a previous vicar; it's considered, according to our informed (human) guide, to be the finest ensemble of mediaeval stained glass in Europe. The centrepiece is an enormous, wide, soaring window of glittering colour, a Jesse window, which I didn't know until last week is one which depicts the lineage of King David. You can be ignorant of all the biblical references and still feel the big massage it gives to ones visual, aesthetic sense.

There's a titteringly-named alley in Shrewsbury. As this is a family-orientated site I have had to crop the photograph a bit.

My new rail pass continues to afford first class journeys. I wanted to go to Glasgow for a house music night at which a friend was DJing. "Go and sit in Coach J," the guard said.

Stepping over bodies as though working my way through an air raid shelter, I came to rest in the expensive saloon, with the ubiquitous American tourists unashamedly displaying a full sock, lugging suitcases the size of wardrobes, and people charging it to the firm. The usual return fare is £205, so Mel couldn't come, but I enjoyed being on a dancefloor by myself a long way from home, all the well-dressed women -- a serendipitous consequence of being into house music.

I came out at half past three onto the still lively streets of Glasgow, and went to a little Lebanese place with several other chatty, drunken and drugged people. I joined a long queue for a taxi, and a driver picked me up in front of everyone else. "You made eye contact," he said, as way of explanation.

At the unlit door of my airbnb however, I couldn't see the numbers on the key safe which I had to align correctly in order to get the key. Just as I was despairingly looking down at the thin little mat outside the tenement's door, trying to imagine it as a bed, I happened by complete chance to enter the correct combination out of the ten thousand possible.

A few days later, in Wethers, I bumped into a couple of former colleagues from my previous job on the railway, from which I was dismissed under an alcoholic cloud. Several months ago, Dave had promised me that he had never said a word to anyone about the reason for my sudden exit. As I was bringing our round out to our table, I caught the tail end of a sentence: "...it's OK, he's got a second chance." Part of me was irritated that he had spilt the beans, but there are no secrets on the railway.

In a public toilet, I impress another man. An elderly man looks across at me. "I wish I could piss like you. Look at that, pouring out. I have to imagine waterfalls, and then I only get a little bit out. I'll be back here in five minutes."