Sunday 25 November 2012

I set off against the weather...



I set off against the weather. The wind was thrashing the trees and, in Linfit Lane, choppy little puddles were breaching their potholes. In the road outside the house with the plastic holly wreath on the front door, the polar bears wearing Santa hats in the window and the pair of pink wellington boots with Wannabe Wag written on them on the front step, two men wearing filthy frayed jeans were in a skip, scavenging scrap. 

At the school, the headmistress came to the door to let me in. She usually buzzes me in through the intercom. “Sorry, I couldn’t see who you were; Miss Brown’s not here” she explained.

I walked around the miry puddles to the house down the track by the swollen stream. I had a shoe box sized parcel for the man with the impressive sideburns. He’d hung a new front door which didn’t have a letterbox. I assumed he must have relocated it so I asked him where it was. “It’s in your hand,” he said “in that parcel.”

I joined the queue in the shop behind the skinny white man in his twenties with the snap-back and the black tracksuit top with white trim. He was talking to the man behind the till (the Asian man with the greying bob and the pencil moustache) in a strong Jafaican accent. “Them that ring you up about PPI innit. There’s nuff jobs there! You get paid by the call. You get a headset. Even if nobody answers or they hang up, it still counts. It’s done by computer”