The small grey pony is pulling the large brown pony’s mane and tail

The small grey pony is pulling the large brown pony’s mane and tail. Every so often, the brown one retaliates but it only puts the grey off for a few seconds before it starts again. They’ve been at it for at least twenty minutes. The butterflies are squabbling too (Are they squabbling, or are they procreating?)

Earlier, after I’d set off a chain of barking dogs by walking up Fairfield Rise, I passed the large woman in the sunglasses, vest top and tattoos. She was parked-up in a silver Astra making a loud phone call: “Gary only came out for a smidgeon, then he’s got back inside the house!” 

A man and his grandson are having a tetchy argument as they buff opposite alloys of a five year old Ford Fiesta. “Why do you keep saying that when you know it’s not true?” repeats the grandson for the third time.

In the sticks, old men in flat caps and short-sleeved khaki shirts drive immaculate ten year old saloons round the lanes, their wing mirrors thrashing through overgrown leylandii, dead flies accumulating on the plastic remembrance day poppies cable-tied to their radiator grills. There is honeysuckle everywhere.

Shadows are strong, the road is sticky and the weeds on the verges have turned to straw. Shiny men wearing nothing but shorts and trainers make busy noises. Past the derelict asylum and the road cone with the Greggs bag stuffed into the top, I knock off my hat on a washing line next to the parked milliner's van and the man at the bus stop, who is riding so low that his pubeless cock cleavage is clearly visible, laughs out loud.