When I went on holiday to France in July, I had abandoned any hope of getting further with a job application for trainee guard, and had forgotten about making up some bullshit about why someone residing in Bristol is applying for a job in Yorkshire.

To my surprise, my application was "progressed" (maybe in a few years it'll be "grown"), and I was invited to take a computer-based test which involves identifying particular non-geometric shapes from rows of similar ones, which the Department of Transport Logistics Delivery Resources Solutions Management at Swindon University Institute has shown to be a reliable indicator of whether you can be helpful and polite to a disabled person as you're fixing the ramp and wheeling them onto a train.

I have never passed this test, in several attempts. Fortunately our semi-adopted daughter offered to do it for me. She took the test in the bright Breton sunshine, submitted the results, and a few days later I was invited for interview. After the interview ("Why are you the outstanding candidate for this job?" I'm not outstanding, what a fucking stupid question), I prematurely started looking for flats on wrongmove.

I must have created quite an impression on them, because after an 11am interview they emailed at 4pm to tell me that I hadn't got it.

For a few days it's quite depressing; the rejection like feels like that you experience during online dating. This is the fifth time I've got that far and failed at the final hurdle. I come across better on paper than in real life. But maybe sixth time lucky: I've another interview on Friday, in Bristol this time.

I had a sporting time last weekend. My brother bought me a birthday present ticket to day two of England v Sri Lanka at Old Trafford, then the following day me and the youngest, together with Shrimpy, went to Doncaster to see Morecambe lose 1-0.

At the station on the way down I bumped into a woman I used to work with in a pizza place thirty-five years ago. She was with her husband and her daughter, who remembered going to dance classes with mine in a cold, derelict premises with some sort of old Victorian iron press thing in the corner.

The mother is round my age and still very attractive, with this underplayed, unintentionally sexy smile and physical calm, which is unaltered from when I was watching her waitressing as I was doing the washing-up.

When we got into the taxi at Donny to take us to the ground, the taxi driver said "is that the railway station?" Our goalkeeper gifted them the goal by fannying about with the ball just outside the penalty area rather than deploying a good old-fashioned Fourth Division hoof up the pitch.

On the Sunday I had a couple in my Lancaster local, where I met an eighty-eight-year-old man who told me he'd have to have his todger cut off because he got cancer in it. "They call me Stumpy now."

My bonkers stalker texts me the night before the Euros final. "I'm watching the football tomorrow at the Venturers Arms. Hope you won't be there."

As everyone in Bristol knows, there is a desperate shortage of student housing. Developers, based in Jersey, Luxembourg and elsewhere, have shown admirable alacrity in rising to this need, turning any piece of land larger than a blanket into flats reserved for this afflicted section of Bristol's population.

A street away behind me, a machine like a huge yellow insect, or one of those mechanical art installations that shithole towns get allocated, bashes and shuffles its way towards ninety flats. Two hundred and ninety-nine more are planned for another site close to me. Already, in one of the poorest parishes in the city, the bakers at the top of my road charges £4.50 for a sourdough loaf.

I quite enjoy raising objections to planning applications, and still enjoy the occasional ripple of a years old and successful contest in which we thwarted Lancaster Priory's plans to build a car park at the highest and prettiest viewpoint in the city itself. We ran them out of money. Everyone who advised us did it pro bono; they were paying specialist London barristers, before someone in a very posh form of dog collar told them to leave it.

To Southsea, with my eldest and my niece (whom I hardly know). We had some delicious nosh and then went for a dip in the sea, so gave my garish swimming shorts their English summer debut. The current was quite strong pushing us away from our clothes. We had a cuppa at niecey's flat right by the prom and on the corner of the high street.

On the train back me and the eldest got nobbled a bit by a rather over-chatty woman who told us of the various flats she's been kicked out of. We were relieved when she got off at Southampton.

Back in Bristol, I was walking home and I saw a twentysomething black man in a lime green gimp mask squatting down and saying something on the other side of the street. Then I saw the camera. "Are you making a film?" I asked him. He said it was a new video for an old single and gave me his stage name and the name of the track. I googled for him and he's one of the biggest rappers in South Africa; unfortunately, homophobic as well, so we'll delete that encounter from the records.

Our Breton holiday, more than two weeks long, flashed by, as holidays are wont to do. It's the same thing every year: a diet consisting mainly of butter and cider; swimming in the "little sea" (mor bihan in Breton); mild walking and trips to the market; reading and afternoon dozing in the little garden; coming back with resolutions to improve my French which last a couple of weeks. Walking along the headland and on the beach, especially in the liminal time around dusk, staring at the infinitely graduated colours of the sea and sky, it is so beautiful that you don't know what to do with it.

I lugged my old heavy computer all the way there and back so that we could watch the football. I hadn't paid for anything but a carry-on bag, but have developed a technique of slinging my man-bag over my back to hide it somewhat, and then waiting until the gates are about to close to go through, when they are less likely to spend time charging you for your extra bag.

We did online shopping, with everything brought to the door, which made me wonder at how we used to manage in the past, lugging it all back from the village. It also makes you realise how much you're all drinking.

I had an enforced night in Nantes on the way back, due to there being no bus from the village to get me to the railhead in time for my train to the airport. The poor public transport out there seems to be getting worse. I stayed in a book-lined room in a flat full of art, with a woman who spoke French to me throughout, for which I was grateful, despite the many times when I was saying what I could, rather than what I wanted to. I was surprised by her tutoyering me from the outset, and it took me until the next day until I could reciprocate. Brittany seems to be loosening her stays.

I was early to the flat and she wasn't in, so I found the local bar, where I was latched onto by the local loon, who wanted me to buy her a glass of wine, despite her shaking a fistful of euros. I declined her request. Later, I saw her riffling through people's wheelie bins.

The gloom of work was lightened somewhat when I found out that we are to be given European rail passes -- something I've always had in my employment with other train companies but which Transport that Fails did not provide, and aligning with other companies in another respect: we are to be put onto a rolling roster, with the occasional "long" weekend (of three days, as opposed to five elsewhere, but it's a start). At the moment we don't find out until Wednesday (at the earliest) what we're doing the following week.

I'm not celebrating yet, as TtF spout more rubbish than Thames Water, but should these changes happen, Mel will be receiving quite a few postcards. I suggested we could fake cohabitating in order to get her a pass too, but she hasn't the same willingness to lie as I have.

We (me, Kirsty, the children, and one of their girlfriends) are on our hols in the same place in southern Brittany where we've been going for twenty-one years now.

The queues to get a metro ticket at Charles de Gaulle airport were twenty minutes long; the train from Paris was two hours late, and on the bus for the final leg into the village, the driver, knowing our destination, chose to keep the information that it wouldn't be serving our stop near the village centre to herself. We trudged like donkeys in an advert for forty-five minutes to reach our asylum. All is calm now. Bees burrow into the rosemary, which is flowering in a fluorescent cerise; a fat yellow rose over there is waving to me from behind a drying bikini.

Last week, I was in Doncaster, on a residential course with a railway union, for which I am a rep now. A man told us that his short-lived career as station staff ended after an incident in which he asked a man to stop smoking inside Glasgow Central station. The passenger told him that he'd smoke wherever he fucking well liked, and exhaled a lungful of smoke into his face. Conveniently positioned at the head of an escalator, the smoker was kicked down it for a painful descent to Glasgow Central Lower Level. It was cheering to hear a rare tale of the Revenge of the Customer Service Assistant.

I got an email on Friday telling me that I've got through to the next stage for the Sheffield job. Part of it is the shapeshifting task that I seem unable to crack, but one of the Young People in our band has offered to do it for me. She's going to do the practice test today, and see how she gets on.

The bloke I mentioned in the last post, whom I consider to be my intellectual and social inferior -- I mean in the sense of lacking a social adroitness that I can put on when useful -- got the job. Perhaps he has talents he reveals exclusively in job interviews.

My dejection was exacerbated by a post-weekend chemical comedown. I wrote a carefully-worded email to my interviewers and to our HR person, asking them to make an exception from the standard company policy of not giving feedback to rejected candidates, given that this is the fourth time I've failed at the final hurdle.

A few days later I was told that I'd passed the first stage of the selection process for a job in Trina's home town, almost as if someone was feeling guilty about turning me down a couple of weeks ago.

I must now proceed to a test I've failed before, a sort of shape sorting exercise where you have to mark off a certain shape, plus every occurrence of the one at the beginning of each line. The deadline to take it is Wednesday; I've paid a tenner for some practice tests to try to get up to standard. Some of my inaccuracy comes from gripping the mouse too hard through nerves, causing a tremor in my hand.

As ever, I haven't thought this through. Where to live: I enjoy a priceless secure social tenancy here, and I'm not sure what the rules are about transferring it elsewhere, even if a flat were to become available at the right time. What to say to Mel: it's a three-hour train journey from here, so feasible, at the price of killing any spontaneity. And other difficult topics.

To Newcastle, to see our semi-adopted daughter's graduate art show.

A couple of days prior to our arrival, there had been a violent disruption on the campus as the police and "security" waded in to a protest against the actions of Israel in Gaza. The very "security" who were filmed manhandling protesters, now controlled access to the art department.

We were told that we would have to be escorted around the galleries by security guards, but the Head of School, having to negotiate access to his own department, persuaded them that he could accompany us instead. After a few minutes' of tense diplomacy, we were all allowed in. As soon as we were out of sight of the goons, the Head of School let us wander around unaccompanied. It felt sinister, the university's autonomy erased in a bullies' coup.

I had to change trains at Darlington, where a mock-up of the new concourse suggests that they are expecting to welcome a levitating man laughing at a passenger who's unknowingly shat his kecks.