I've got a start date for my cleaning job at the hospital: 3rd March. Not really what I want to do, but neither is servicing a credit card. Both are slavery. "Work is a prison of measured time," as Raoul Vaneigem put it. But on the bright side, I can cram all my week's hours into three days of twelve hours each.

There's a good pub about half an hour's walk from Mel's flat. It's along a car-dominated road, with the infernal grey noise of tyres on wet tarmac, and it's winter, so we don't often go there, but the other day she proposed a walk there "just for one or two" before we came back for our tea.

After "one or two", we were asked to move, as the DJ was setting up where we were sitting. "Well, we could just see what he's like I suppose," one of us said. We got chatting -- or were talked at, rather -- by this disabled woman on crutches who had been invalided out of the army who took delight in showing us her grotesquely malformed knee, and the foot pointing the wrong way.

A couple of hours later I was dancing under the 70s disco ball and those big bulbs of coloured mobile disco lights, which have a lovely catalytic relationship with alcohol in the brain. A woman was dancing near me in an absolutely enormous jumper. With no preamble whatsoever, she put it over me while she was in it, and we started dancing with our two heads sticking out of the neck hole, our bodies in a pleasant abutment underneath her oversize wooly.

You may remember that I said that a friend of the family was playing about with a new phone one day, whilst laying on the bed, facing the mirror, in a room which a child had always reported as having a bad feeling to it.

She accidentally pressed "burst" instead of the normal take a photo button, and in a single frame, out of scores of them, there was this figure looming over the bed in which the child felt so uncomfortable.

Middlesbrough

Us siblings (apart from the youngest, who's in a home), have a group call to discuss arrangements for my mum and my youngest brother. My mum wants to have her wake in a tiny cafe about the size of a living room in Middlesbrough. And if she has to go into a home, she wants it to be "a Christian one, where they don't play bingo."

We're also a bit worried that she has my brother to stay often, when he has bad epileptic fits that see him thrashing about on the floor. It's been happening for decades, so we're all used to it, but how much longer she'll be able to cope with it by herself I don't know. She's sanguine about it all and doesn't think there's any problem.

Newcastle

To see Kim. Even by her standards, she looked very sexy, in a blue and white dress, and her artfully unkempt hair. She said she feels invisible now she's in her mid-fifties. I can't believe that; when she takes my arm as we leave the pub, I see men look first at her, then me, then thinking you lucky bastard. If only. She said her type is quite big, rough working class lads, so I fail at the first hurdle.

I unwrapped my Christmas presents, the highlight of which was this beautiful tea-light powered lamp. She also gave me some of those name labels you can sew into clothes for children and the confused. "Someone who finds you can send you home again."

Shropshire

Trina has moved into a blank, modern house in an equally featureless village. But it's near to her son and grandchildren, has gardens front and back, and is quiet and dark at night. She was very generous, jumping in first to pay for drinks and meals; it'd be lovely to treat her one day, if I can ever attain solvency again.

When I was still working, we made some plans to go to a couple of concerts this year. I shove the mounting credit card bill to the back of my mind, where it festers and nags.

Bristol

The head nurse rings from the hospital. There's a problem with my DBS, in that I ticked a box -- in good faith -- saying that I have no convictions that are not spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. However, when the certificate came back, there's a single offence still on my record -- a Contempt of Court conviction from when I was eighteen.

I was up before the magistrates for shoplifting, and when the Court Clerk said "all rise" as the Magistrate came in, I remained seated, saying "I do not recognise this court." I was going through a fervent anarchist phase.

My solicitor requested an adjournment, took me aside and said "look, just go through with it and stand up, otherwise you'll be put on remand in Risley and to be honest, someone like you won't last five minutes in there. I nodded uncommittedly. And refused to stand up for the second time, at which point I was sent straight to jail for a fortnight.

It's not the offence itself that's bothering the hospital; it's that it looks like I have lied on my application form.

And on top of it all, my homemade beer has come out a bit disappointing: malty, sweet and flat. I'll try making some wine next time. I've had better results with fruit wine in the past.

I'm in a library in Middlesbrough. I've come up to do adult activities -- sorting out a Power of Attorney for my mum, and sorting out long-term plans for my brother, who is incapable of living independently.

Sexy Ex-Boss gets in touch; would I like to meet up? Of course! Being a woman of substance, she chose a pricey gastro place, where I had a two-bite portion of salmon, topped with an orange segments and an inch-high sprig of rocket, for a tenner. White wine and a pint, £18. I'd have been happier at the chip shop. But it had a good fire going, they made a fuss of her dogs and Sexy Ex-Boss is never less than sparkling, but I was relieved when she suggested going somewhere cheaper after my minuscule amuse-gueule advertised as a starter.

She told me about a now ejected lodger who went into her flat and cross-dressed using her clothing. She's one of those women who effortlessly draws all one's own stories out too. I told her, with a touch of sexualised wistfulness, about Donna 2, the girl from Milton Keynes (first contact on Thursday, together in a hotel room on Tuesday) who, at her rented house, used to go upstairs to slip into something less comfortable. She went off with someone in IT, who had the great merit of not living two hundred miles away.

I applied for a job at the airport with the prosaic but accurate title of "Customer Helper", which is basically a bit of mincing about helping with check-in, and pointing confused foreigners in the right direction. I've got through some tests and now I've got an "assessment" on Monday. It sounds quite varied, and less vommy than the hospital.

My minutes are dwindling, and I'm using the librarian's login, so I will bid you a good evening.

Happy New Year readers! I hope you had a merry Christmas, and that any fissures within the family didn't turn into canyons full of rancour. Apologies to anyone visiting here around the end of the year: I made a bit of a hash of transferring the site to a new hosting provider.

I am one of the possibly irritating people who consistently report a genuinely happy Christmas. We have settled on a formula now, with a timetable that hardly changes except for the inherent unpredictability of ovens, although I decided this year that I would go down the pub while they were watching Call The Midwife, which I find unbearably twee and woke. I got delightfully stuck in, so to speak, between two female strangers at the Old Shipbuilder’s Arms.

On 27th I participated in a "fun" run as a fundraiser for Women's Aid. It was a course of 2.13 miles, slightly shortened from the original plan due to frost. After ten minutes or so, I was plotting how to escape the course and go home, feeling that I didn't have enough puff in me. I also had a knicker elastic problem; jog, jog, jog, down, down, down came my pants, to the stage where underneath my joggers my bum cheeks were exposed like someone in an experimental dance company, while at the front the pants clung on by using my willy as a hook.

But I made it, about 125th out of 150, in an arrière-garde of the obese and the over-70s, and collected my little Christmas tree medal. I was almost disgusted with myself how difficult I found it, so have been out a couple of times since then, with the aim of covering two miles without having a near-death experience.

So if anyone has a bit of excess cash looking for a good home, email me by clicking here, and I'll send you the link to the site where you can divert your bothersome lucre to Women's Aid. Remember to click "custom amount" at the foot of the page to avoid getting skimmed by the site's owner.

The start date for my new job at the hospital seems to recede endlessly. I had to have a couple of blood tests and injections before they can start me, but, as the chatty nurse told me as I was about to leave, "part of this, really, is to see if you wash and look after yourself."

I am now vaccinated against diseases I have never heard of, and can have sex with a prossie, a man and a cow simultaneously without coming to harm. The information sheet they gave me told me to avoid any heavy lifting for a few hours afterwards, which is a pity as I was planning to move some annoying boulders from my vestibule that afternoon.

Instead, I was asked to pose next to seventy-two toilet rolls (they're cheaper in bulk). The manager of my block of flats looked curiously on.

It's pouring down with rain, I'm not really ready for Christmas, I had to go to four shops yesterday before I found any parsnips, I'm getting uselssly het up about lazy people twiddling some knobs on a computer to make AI-generated music, and I've been tiring myself out at night by listening to some of the commentary on the Test Match from Adelaide -- not an uplifting experience for an Englishman.

However, last week, I sucessfully transferred this site and all that sails in it, to a new host. Well almost -- I'm cursing myself for not backing up my emails, as I've lost hundreds from some past girlfriends.

A quick trip, with Mel, to Lancaster to have a look at the sheltered housing block in Lancaster I'll be moving into, as soon as someone has the decency to become deceased, or in a way less terminal, vacates a flat.

I tried taking us up a short cut up an alley known locally as the Khyber Pass, next to the railway line. It was pitch black and raining, and someone had flytipped a mattress and a sofa and some bin bags of rubbish, so me and Mel were squelching and bouncing about on this mattress while the brambles were trying to take our eyes out. Not the finest of introductions to the suburb for Mel.

We stayed in the guest flat, which was very warm and will hardly need heating. In The Old Shipbuilder's Arms, we bumped into a friend of mine, a jovial and well-educated man, a joiner who had to give it up after a near-fatal brain injury. He invited himself along to a meal we'd booked in a pub which is installed in a cosy old wine cellar, a suggestion I didn't mind at all. They tucked into hotpot while I had a sea bass / kale / shrimp bricolage which for £27 was a great waste of money, exacerbated by the £5.75 pints, nearly double what you pay in The Old Shipbuilder's Arms.

My friend then wanted us to go to a pub where another mutual friend was doing a gig. Again, I was pleased at his suggestion: it showed Mel that I do actually have friends.

And then, once we were safely bunkered down in our twin beds, there happened one of these inexplicable acts that follow from a night on the pop. Instead of walking the few short steps to the en-suite, I decided, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of pants, to wander out into the corridor, and out again onto a little garden area outside the guest flat, and piss in a planter.

I went to retrace my steps, but the door had locked fast behind me. I opened the window to the flat and tried to ease myself back in without disturbing Mel, but it wouldn't open more than a few inches, so I only succeeded in getting my head stuck in the gap and had to call for Mel to come to my rescue. But there was no way of opening the window any wider, so I had to pull my head back out again, almost leaving my ears in Lancaster, and wait until Mel could herself parade semi-clothed along a corridor in an old people's block to let me back in.

I got the housekeeping job at the hospital. Not really what I had hoped for at my advanced age, but it'll plug this credit card-shaped hole into which I've fallen lately.