Round About Town, book trailer

For the last eight years Kevin Boniface has been writing succinct descriptions of events and incidents that have taken place whilst out and about on his postal round, his daily route taking him from the main sorting office to the streets and outlying neighbourhoods above the town. In these commentaries and records nothing seems to be typical—engaged and disconnected conversations, the observed and the overheard—the everyday activity of life on the move.

With 58 black and white photographs.

“Round About Town is a work that can conjure fury at poverty, contempt for the poverty of mainstream popular culture and joy at its moments of poetic collapse.”
Mythogeography

“I find scratching beneath the surface of the ordinary endlessly fascinating.”
‘The way I work’, Big Issue North

“There’s no story here, in this whole book, but there are glimpses of hundreds of stories. It is funny, and unsettling, and comforting, often at the same time, and you don’t get to find out what happens next.”
Anna Wood, Caught by the River

March 2018
128 pages, 234 x 142mm Paperback with flaps Price £12.00
ISBN 978 1 910010 18 1
Buy direct from Uniformbooks or from online booksellers and independent bookshops.
uniformbooks.co.uk

kevinboniface.co.uk

6am: the overnight rain has resulted in a few small puddles

6am: the overnight rain has resulted in a few small puddles and the first beech nut fall of the year. The taxi driver is hosing down his Skoda Octavia and the jogger is wiping his bald head on the hem of his faded black t-shirt. In the park, there's not much left of the festival of tribute bands now, just a few straggler motorhomes remain. A large flock of black-headed gulls has colonised the arena that yesterday was full of grey-headed Duranies on collapsable chairs.

There's no scratch card win today for the elderly woman with the disobedient sheltie and the perhaps inadvisedly sheer leggings. “I’m low on cash so I really shouldn’t be doing this but you’ve got to have hope, haven’t you?”

Across the road from the new builds with the fake bricked up windows, the big man in the Eric Morecambe specs is calling his Yorkshire terrier a little shit-house and punting it up the arse with the toe end of his Croc because it knocked over the statue of a meerkat holding up a little sign saying ‘Welcomes’. A few doors down, A note scribbled in marker pen on lined paper from a ring bound notebook has been sellotaped to a window: "Gone to Blackpool for good. Andrew". Further along again, at the house with the statue of some pigs having sex on the doorstep, the man who looks a bit like Antony Worrall Thompson is up his step ladders chamoising the roof of his five berth Crusader Storm.

Later, back at home, I see an old fashioned seven-spot ladybird in the garden.