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."

A month or so ago, my computer died, making a metallic death-clink as I tried to turn it on.

Buying a new (secondhand) pc was the easy bit; it was setting it up that took time. The email accounts with their imap settings and ports and what not, the custom files and shortcuts that I use on my text editor (which has never taken to Linux and may have to be ditched, as the cursor seems to be quite skittish), the settings for uploading everything -- and many other things -- had to be copied over from an older computer. Anyway, I'm back, and pissing me pants.

I am now working (again) as a trolley dolly on the trains. One day recently, I was on a train which should not have been in use, since it had no toilets working. About two hours short of my depot, I started feeling a desire, then an urge, to piss. I was standing with my trolley in one of the door entrances, a bit like the arrangement on tube trains. It's a public place where all can see you.

A well-meaning guard came over for a chat. I was in an agony of bladder-control, and as he spoke, I could hear a pitter-patter of piss passing down my trouser leg and onto the floor. Neither he nor any passenger gave any indication of noticing the urinating trolley dolly. When he left I rubbed it with my foot, to spread it out to evaporate. Despite this controlled release, I was still desperate for a full opening.

At my home station, straining still, I did a scissored walk to the lift to get my trolley over to the other platform. I was just about to close the door on the lift when a young couple came smilingly in with their suitcases, reasonably demanding conversation. My face was as strained as my voice, and the piss came down my leg again, re-soaking my trousers. I had to walk with them over to the other lift to get down onto our mutually desired platform. In there, there was, for a reason I hoped they'd blame on the lift's previous occupant, a strong smell of incontinent tramp.

I got into the depot and to my relief, no-one was around. I stripped off my sodden trousers, pants, socks, and put them under the hand dryer for many minutes. Still clinglingly wet, I put my trousers back on and went to put my trolley away and to do the admin. To my dismay, there was a fellow steward parking his. I foolishly said that I'd got caught in a shower, and tried to keep my scented lower half away from him.

On the train home to Bristol, I found a newspaper and sat on it, to minimise transmission of my piss to the seat.

The following day, without me raising the subject, nor having mentioned anything of this to anyone, a guard told me of a female trolley dolly who experienced the same pressing exigency, again on a train with no toilets. She simply said that she was getting off at the next station, and left her trolley to its fate, to be collected later. Hers is a model of confident bladder management that I will emulate in future.

A happier time on the railway was spent as the most valuable six square inch piece of plastic I own made its outstanding debut the other week, getting me up to Lancaster in order to see my youngest off to her university in Brittany, where she'll spend her year abroad as part of her degree in French. Flashing my train pass, I was told to sit in first class, escaping the problem family-cum-refugee camp conditions in second. I drank my cider in spacious, privileged peace.

On the last leg, from Manchester, I sat with two twentysomething women, and a man whom I couldn't help staring at, trying to force my brain to put some detail on our mutual recognition. Eventually we worked out that we were a couple of years apart in the same secondary school. The girls were lively in a somewhat forced way, not as drunk as they were pretending to be, and trying to make up for the missing alcohol with bodily animation. They insisted on sharing their music, wiring us up, an earbud each, into their phones.

Down my local, there were mutterings in the ranks as a pint of bitter had gone up to £2.65. A man started showing me clips of crashes from a motocross event. He told me that modern motocross jackets inflate upon a crash, which is why riders seem to bounce across the course.

Back in Bristol, there's a cheque from HMRC for six hundred pounds as a tax rebate. Unfortunately, I also received a series of letters, or rather, Notices of Enforcement, saying that I still owe six grand in Council Tax, from up to nine years ago. It's not quite that amount -- I was in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in the UK for some of the time. If they start nagging, there's the magic wand of a Debt Relief Order which should wave the bailiffs away. I've started locking my door at all times though.

On Saturday evening I spent twenty minutes with a policeman at Temple Meads station, trying to cut the lock off my scooter. Someone had tried to steal it (from the racks outside the BTP station!) by using the scooter itself to twist the lock off. They didn't succeed, but the barrel was damaged in a way that the key wouldn't go fully, preventing its unlocking.

I had gone into the BTP office after I saw my scooter upended and the lock bent, simply to report the attempted theft and to warn them that someone who looks like me will be coming down tomorrow with an angle grinder to get the lock off.

The man on the desk heard my tale and came outside. After failing to make any impression on the lock with a pair of yard-long bolt croppers, he managed to unbend the twisted shackle back enough into straightness so that he could get the key in and release the lock. The strength required to do so this was considerable. I was impressed that a policeman was helping me release a vehicle that is illegal to use on public roads.

He told me that they had two people in custody who were caught that day attempting to steal bikes from Temple Meads. The next day, I saw a lock at the other cycle park at Temple Meads twisted in a similar way to how mine had been left -- but dangling open, without a shackle nor attached to a bike. My scooter survived with only with a few scratches. I was glad that I'd got an expensive Kryptonite lock rather than the Wilko crap and crossed fingers I normally rely on.

Had a right one on the train yesterday.

Rainbow coloured straw hat, rainbow jumper, and a belt with "No Pronouns" written on its buckle. He asked me if we had any oat milk, but before I could answer he told me how he has a lactose intolerance (really? how interesting, do tell me more - and he did), and normally takes five or six sugars but today he'll only have four. "No sorry mate, I've only got ordinary milk." Would you like a smack in the face instead?

The guard came down to check tickets. Rainbow Man started pestering him, regressing into a spoilt and needy child. He was demanding a taxi, because he'd spent too much time gazing at his non-binary navel to realise that giving yourself three minutes to change at Swansea isn't enough. He exuded entitlement. Or the air of some rich cunt, in the phrase which will later be used to describe him as we retell the story to colleagues.

The guard beckoned me over into the next carriage. "I've rung Swansea," he said, "and told them he's a pain in the arse."

Later, I checked, and noted to my pleasure that the train to Llanffychym left bang on on time and so it's likely he would have had to spend two hours wandering around Swansea trying to find an oat milk vegan biodynamic understanding latte. Although I imagine he rang his mummy and got her to pay the taxi.

Current reading is Of Human Bondage. There is, suggests a character, a certain dignity in forgetting. "It is better to have learned and lost, than never to have learned at all." Pessoa also has an epigram somewhere about the value of failure, or of resignation after trying -- even half-heartedly. It must be a much older idea, but it's especially apposite in this age of striving.

Back from holiday, to the din of the suburbs on a Sunday morning. The endless angle-grinding and sawing and banging deployed on houses that will never finally satisfy their owners.

My flight was from Gatwick at 0645, so I booked an airbnb within walking distance. Leaving the airport, there are signs for public footpaths which lead you over railway tracks in caged tunnels, and into a sylvan hinterland in which I ended up completely lost. Every bit of guesswork either took me further into the woods, or lead to a wire fence with barbed wire on its top.

After a long time of wandering, lugging my bag and feeling silly -- despite me seeing no-one, on account of my airport lounge dress style -- I decided to "retrace" my steps, if only I knew them. At last I came back to the terminal. I tried one more time and headed the other way, which landed me on a curving A-road where the only signs were for KFC and McDonald's. I gave up and got a big padded taxi driven by a big padded black man who was uninterested in my account of my peregrination, shouted from behind the plastic partition.

I settled into my bed. In the middle of the night, a man unlocked the door, went for a piss, then said "oh God! Sorry! Sorry!" And left.

The walk to the terminal next morning was a mystifyingly simple ten-minute walk. At 5am, the airport's bars looked like Bristol on a Saturday night. I had a pint of ale for seven pounds.

I spent a fortnight swimming, eating, drinking, playing cards with the girls, and reading -- To The Lighthouse and a witty John le Carré novel called The Naive and Sentimental Lover, which has a repugnant, bullying and vainglorious writer as its protagonist.

I bought Mel a necklace from the market, made from small tumbled semi-precious stones by someone in the next town along, who let me stumble on in my creaky French without jumping in in English. We went to a fest-noz -- a concert of Breton dancing and music accompanied by some pricey outdoor local food and drink. The cost of drinking out in France continues to soar, whereas to get sozzled at home costs next to nothing: a 25 or 33ml beer in a bar was anything from €3.50 to €5.00, whereas decent cider can be had from the supermarket for €2 a litre.

Back to work, and an online Health and Safety course, which has been adapted from an old Albanian Internal Security Department Torture Manual to see how much boredom you can stand. But then we got on to the Anti-Discrimination course, from which I learnt a great deal.

Drugs are dangerous for men. Ibuprofen can lead to brown ale and cod liver oil.

When a gay man and a black one work together, the gay man must avoid looking at the way that the black man is fiddling with his knobs, as this can lead to a nuclear explosion.

If you are accused of racial discrimination, you will be put on a very small chair at your hearing.

Ties on men can avert a nuclear explosion in a way that requiring women to wear bikinis cannot, so the requirements are different.

One advantage of pulling a trolley backwards down a train is having a vantage point from which one can angle into women's frontages, and to see what everyone's doing on their computers and phones; so I slowed down as I passed a Fellow of the Royal College of Pharmacists who was wearing a brown v-necked dress with a scalloped black bra over-reaching the dress's seams. I come across as gay, which gives me an advantage.

She had this plastic folder of papers open, rectangular boxes and text. I was looking at her bra and stroking her tits with my eyes. I did a tilt of the head as I passed her. Smiling in a way that was probably too much of an attempt to please. "Any tea, coffee, refreshments?"

She wanted a coffee. I started doing the faff of it all. "So you're the lucky girl who's been sent to Crewe for a day out?" And she told me about a presentation she was going to for a recently deceased pioneering Welsh pharmacist. She told me about how he made outreach and inclusion efforts avant la lettre for people who wouldn't think of a chemical career. "Ah well you've got a lovely day for it," I said, to wind down the sex in my head, stroke, cock. My cock would be nice against your cheek before I pushed it into your mouth. "Right, that's two pounds forty, that's gone through fine, ok, have a good journey." I hope she understood at least some of it.

Sometimes I have quite a bit of idle time on the journeys so I read The Sea-Grape Tree by Rosamond Lehmann in one day. I get drawn into Lehmann. It's a benign addiction, to swim into someone's oeuvre.

I'm off on hols to Brittany tomorrow for a fortnight, with Kirsty, our daughters, and this increasingly large bunch of lezzer actressy girlfriends they're acquiring. It's gonna be ace.