Monday 26 December 2016

2016 Highlights



2016 Highlights.

Red-top news, McDonalds bags, biros and notebooks.
Being deaf and only having one leg.
Steadying yourself on the bin for a few seconds.
Disappearing in a swirling cloud of evaporating dog piss.
Silk flowers in Costa coffee mugs.
Talking to the roofer who's never had a cashcard in his life, mate.
Purple anoraks.
Chamoising your Skoda Yeti in your Crocs.
Eating a pot of Muller Rice inside a ‘bang tidy’ Vauxhall Astra.
Playing on your Playstation in the nude.
Finding some suede loafers in your hyacinth bed.
Statues of Buddha, cigarette butts and stolen top stones.
Standing in the street in your bath robe sipping from a pint glass.
Running across the piss soaked carpet in the yard.
Hoiking your sweatpants out of your arse crack.
Drinking much more wine.
Displaying your Worker Wagg Beef & Veg Worker Complete dog food on some fake grass underneath a broken awning.
Mistaking a discarded Ramones T-shirt for a dead badger.
Broken drones.
Remembering Brian London, The Blackpool Rock.
Calling noisy teenagers ‘Dickheads’ under your breath.
Wearing shorts and shades to walk your tousled grey hairpiece terrier.
Checking out the Bailey Pageant Bretagne at the caravan showroom.
Decorating the ‘PRIVATE’ carpark with Brexit bunting.
Emptying the bins wearing a cheesecloth blouse and enormous fluffy cat-shaped slippers.
Carrying an aubergine and a tin of sardines to your BMW.
Throwing a half-eaten pasty from the window of your Audi S4.
Securing the lamppost inspection cover with gaffer tape.
Buying plastic topiary to match the colour of your wheelie bin.
Not being able to believe how comfortable your trousers are.
Stardrops, stewing steak and cheap tobacco at 11.30am.
Devoting swathes of hard-standing to the display of miniature plastic fauna.
Idly clasping the handle of your vacuum cleaner while you watch Bargain Hunt.
Not having a pay rise for nine years.
Knee-high pavement weeds.
Going to Cape Verde for a couple of weeks because you’re sick of this country.
Having a quick sniff of the nib of the marker pen before replacing the lid.
Upsetting the potted orchids in the miniature galvanised buckets.
Finishing work early so you can go and buy your girlfriend a watch for a hundred pounds.
Engaging in a loud debate about lorne sausage.
Contorting your face in unadulterated rage.
Waving your arms at the woman in the Fiesta.
Seven empty White Star cider cans and a plastic bag of dog shit.
Jogging in your suit trousers.
Slipping on a patch of rock salt.
Putting your foot through the slimy and rotten noughties decking.
Fried eggs, chips, beans and milky tea in the ‘Bistro’ with Margaret.

Wednesday 7 December 2016

5.30am: it’s windy and the fallen leaves are following me down the street



5.30 a.m.: it’s windy and fallen leaves are following me down the street. The man who wears head-to-toe waterproofs whatever the weather is twenty yards in front of me on the other side of the road. He makes to cross over to my side but when he sees me he dithers briefly and turns back. He then runs the hundred yards to the traffic lights at the bottom and turns right into town.

I slip on a patch of rock salt on Victoria Street where Alan Titchmarsh’s noughties decking is slimy and rotten and the woman with the NHS lanyard is smoking on her doorstep. 

Margaret is in the ‘Bistro’ with her coat on eating fried eggs, chips, beans, and milky tea. 
The woman at the bus stop says that the sport of boxing is ‘a work of art’.

Out in the sticks, it starts to rain heavily and the last of the autumn leaves line the gutters in yellow. At one of the big houses on the ridge, I can see two photographs through the glass front door; an informal group shot of men wearing chinos, and the front end of a 1980s Porsche 924 taken from a low angle.

At the manor house golf club, the food smells like 1970s school dinners and the sign in the car park says Residence Parking [sic]. There’s a dead shrew on the drive under the enormous poplars.

Up in the village, there’s a Jaguar parked on every street corner and the air is fresh apart from the occasional whiff of a wood burning stove. 

Beech hedges rustle their parchment leaves in the wind and the starlings are swanee whistling in the tops of the trees. I stop to talk to the man who is building the septic tank. He tells me he used to be a line engineer for the National Grid. I ask him how they get the cables across ravines and valleys and he says they usually use fishing line and a bow and arrow but on one occasion he used a model aeroplane. 

Four mud-spattered men with half-a-dozen spaniels pass us, they are followed by a quad bike with three dozen dead pheasants slung over a line across the back.

Back in town, the old man in the beige anorak and matching polyester slacks with frayed hems has taken exception to the music coming from the Skoda Octavia Estate. 'Turn your music down!' he growls aggressively. The Skoda man blows cigarette smoke out of the window and ignores him and the old man skulks away with his heavy bags for life (one from the Co-op and one from Sainsbury’s).