Sunday 21 October 2012

The woman who feeds the pigeons by the open market is loaded up with three Jack Fulton bags of birdseed.



6.30am: The woman who feeds the pigeons by the open market is loaded up with three Jack Fulton bags of birdseed. She hides in the shadow of the architrave of the lap dancing club until the man on the ride-on street sweeping machine has disappeared behind the Christian fellowship building.

9am: In the big new houses, a drunk woman sings a repertoire of contemporary pop songs at high volume from an open first floor window.

10.30am: A wasp stings the back of my neck on the driveway at Shangri-La

11.30am: "Lovely morning!" the window cleaner shouts down from his ladders, “What time do you finish?”
“Twenty past one officially, half two in reality” I say.
“Aye, them at t’bottom do more and more so’s them at t’top can do less and less. It’s always been the way, lad. Lovely morning though. Keep smiling!”

11.45am: I spend five minutes searching for my van keys before I realise they're in my hand.

Friday 12 October 2012

On the estate where pretend owls outnumber the human population by two to one...


On the estate where pretend owls outnumber the human population by two to one, a woman tends her plastic window boxes. She wears gold-rimmed Reactolites, pink marigold gloves, flip-flops and a grey fleece jacket and trouser combination. Her patio of pink stone flags with electric cabling running through the joints, is decorated with an assortment of garden ornamentation: a gnome riding on a snail’s shell, a pair of disembodied hands holding a small bird with a solar panel in its back and a lamp in its chest, a hedgehog riding a tractor. A poodle startles the sparrows from the beech hedge. it makes me jump and I nearly trip over the statue of the top half of a woman with no arms.

11.45am: A man with mashed potato and lamb mince down the front of his shirt opens his window to offer me directions but I’m not lost. Next door, a woman with a Summer Wine perm and a grey cardigan answers her door. Her mouth is full and there’s quite a large piece of flaky pastry stuck to her cheek, “Hankfs Flhuff”, she says, as I hand her her parcel.

At the house that always smells of dog piss and stale cigarettes, an old man opens the window to take his mail. “You’re looking very smart in your uniform today, sir”, he says, “Good for you, sir. Good for you.”

I cross the rec’, adding another trail of footprints in the dew. A woman in a pink fleece jacket throws a blue ball with an orange launcher for her Jack Russell terrier, Muff, to fetch.

“More rubbish!” says the man at number 14 when he sees me coming, “I’m gonna put a letterbox on my dustbin so you can post it straight in”. “Oh, leave him alone, he gets paid for that”, says his wife from her plastic patio chair. She’s thumbing through a magazine and smoking a cigarette. “Aye”, says the man, “and the bin men get paid to take it away; the postman giveth and the bin man taketh away”. “Aye, it keeps the world going round though dun’t it, love”, says the woman, winking at me.

The weather turns and the short, rotund woman with the russet dyed almost grown out perm, grey roots and purple anorak is sheltering under her blown inside-out umbrella at the bus-stop. “In’t it awful weather!” she shouts across the road. I agree.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

On the post box outside the pub where Eeezi Goin’ are playing on Thursday night...



On the post box outside the pub where Eeezi Goin’ are playing on Thursday night, somebody has written ‘HYC’ in marker pen. I didn’t know the HYC were still around; they once gave me a beating in the toilets of the Most Luxurious Club In The North. I came out with two black eyes and a bust lip. It was 1988.

The proprietress of the shop was shouting into the phone in Urdu at the top of her voice when I dropped off the bags. Outside, a dope smoking, shaven headed man was showing off his new baby to his dope smoking, shaven headed friends. They were in broad agreement that she was a cutie.

Out in the sticks, where shreds of polythene stream like bunting from barbed wire along the fireweed verges, you can see around corners in the cracked convex mirrors. It’s all lavender and hydrangea, gravel paths and improvised containers, wellington boots, wooden windows, cabling suspended via a tree to a shed whose door is propped open with a lump of cement the shape of a bag of cement. The sign says “Caution, Free Range Children” and the black Lab’ is “deaf as a post”. An old man says “Thanks, Pat”, and gives me the thumbs up. I kick the ball for his dog. The first frost of the year has severed the head of the stone tortoise that stands by his door.