Sunday, 2 January 2011
5.30am: I followed a tall thin man in a hooded top down John William Street, his hands deep in his pockets. He was obviously very drunk and on several occasions staggered the full width of the generous pavements and tripped off the kerb into the road. His attempts to maintain a respectable swagger throughout were comical.
On the bus, the man with the tidy goatee said he’d had to go straight to bed after watching The Bourne Supremacy: “I was fucked! What a film! It was even better than James Bond”.
I asked Martin whether he'd had a good Christmas. He said it had been a quiet one up until one of his neighbours had been shot dead by the police after a noisy twenty-four hour siege.
Crosland Street was covered in dog shit.
At the house with the incomplete decking and a broken television in the garden there was a sticker on the letterbox that read “If it's too loud your too old”.
Other stickers I saw on doors today: "Hello, Welcome. Now piss off!" and "My Rottweiler kills chavs".
A grey Renault Clio passed me at high speed on the wrong side of the road. It was followed by five police cars. The old man whose mail I was delivering said "Bloody Hell, Look at that!" and the old lady over the street waved her fist in the air and shouted something incomprehensible.
At a firm of engineers I delivered the mail through the door marked "Security and Fitness Centre".
Mr Smith was clearing up the mess in his driveway from where "the bloody fox has got at us turkey carcass".
Around the perimeter of Mr Mahmood's otherwise completely barren concreted-over gardens are arranged twelve four-pint plastic milk containers. They are positioned equidistant from one another and are three-quarters filled with water.
