The blackbird I often see at the entrance to the park is perched on the gates for the second day running. It doesn’t fly away when I pass. It watches me. I walk within a couple of feet of it today and it doesn’t flinch.
The sun is out, the sky is blue. There is birdsong: sparrows, starlings, a woodpigeon. Somebody is playing a trumpet. A car pulls away from the kerb and its tyres crackle and pop on dry asphalt.
A man of about fifty, wearing double denim and a black and white bandana tied around his head, is using the phone box that I’ve never really noticed before.
on the window sills. There are plastic lawns, footballs, grit bins. There are ‘moneysavingexpert.com’ A4 print-outs Blu-Tacked to porch windows saying ‘No Cold Callers’. There are whistling Eddie Stobart collectors in t-shirts smoking Marlboro cigarettes on hardstandings. They build kit cars and boats and take things to pieces. There’s the smell of machine oil. There’s the smell of cooking oil. There are chips. There are solid homemade repairs, gates and fences, washers and hinges, ironmongery, fixings and grease. There are guinea pigs in hutches and terriers on the backs of settees. Girls play at hopscotch and boys dress as superheroes while they mend punctures with holes in their knees.
A man insists I watch as he opens a parcel. Inside it, there is a small statuette of a blackbird perched on a twig.
